Why the focus on IT? Automobiles, trains, embedded controllers, space and commercial flight, weapon systems, high-tech manufacturing. All those are areas where Europe has at least one industry leader.
There are so many companies you never hear about because you aren't in the industry they operate in.
Because the question was about outcompeting. Automobiles, etc., there are many competitors, including some American. And weapon systems, there is a national security reason to maintain regional leaders, no matter how inefficient.
In IT, I find it funny that Google has a higher market share in Europe than in the US.
Why outcompete? Why the need for a quasi-monopoly? Why can't half a dozen companies work a market in competition and create better products for everyone? Many problems with Facebook and Google come from not it outcompeting other companies and making things worse for society as a whole.
About 1/4 of Norway's GDP is oil and gas (US is about 7%). Ireland is a particularly ironic choice given their recent GDP growth and subsequent dip were mostly from being a tax haven for wealthy US companies.
I wouldn't personally attribute either of these to better educational or societal systems.
Are we going to ignore the effects of immigration and the comparative policies of both nations here, or just pretend that a mostly-homogenous nation like Norway (or other Scandi countries) should be equally compared to the United States?
Comparing the USA as a whole to Ireland or Norway is ludicrous. Compare it to the EU, China, India, Indonesia, Brazil. If you want to compare Ireland to the US you should be looking at individual states. If you insist on comparing to individual countries at least look at ones that are at least a tenth of the population of the US, like France, Gernany, the U.K., Russia, Turkey, Italy, Ukraine.
Ireland’s gdp per capita overstates its wealth substantially as large parts of the economy by value is subsidiaries of US companies which repatriate profits back to the US. For economies like Ireland and Luxembourg better to use gross national product than gross domestic product.
Better again to use average individual consumption but statistics on that have only just begun to be gathered. Average household consumption makes the US look pretty great. The only country higher is the UAE and the top 5 is rounded out by Hong Kong, Switzerland and Luxembourg. Petrostates, city states and the US.
You can't value economic success solely on the size and influence of companies. In Germany (Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg especially) there are literally thousands of very successful small-middle tier engineering firms doing highly specialized work in very specific areas. It might not be Facebook or Google or even BMW in terms of size and influence, but they are the very core of the economic success in these states.
In EU we didn't have the same amount of military government spending that you folks had. Most of the technological base for the ICT revolution was paid by the US taxpayer on the grounds of beating - or at least keeping in check - the Russians in a war. But yeah, even Ayn Rand got her assistance from government, why not her followers?
