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# I haven’t changed my values. I am changing my mind
- URL: https://hoeijmakers.net/i-havent-changed-my-values-i-am-changing-my-mind/
- Published: 2026-10-01T12:45:37.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T12:48:43.000Z
- Description: As the foundations of European prosperity become less secure, growth takes on a different meaning. My priorities are moving because the things I value still matter.
- Author: Rob Hoeijmakers
- Tags: Europe

In conversations with friends and family, I sometimes hear myself making arguments that would have surprised me ten or twenty years ago. I talk about productivity, industrial capacity, technological dependence and defence. I find myself arguing for growth, or wondering whether Europe can still make the things it depends on.

I recognise the person saying these things, but I also notice the movement. Some of the words feel as though they used to belong to somebody else’s argument.

That is a slightly uncomfortable experience. Political views become familiar, both to yourself and to the people around you. They come with associations, and after a while you know roughly which positions are supposed to travel together. When those positions start moving apart, it can feel as though you owe an explanation.

I have been trying to work out what that explanation is. Part of it will be age and experience. But I increasingly think it also has to do with a change in the conditions beneath my views. Things we could reasonably rely on have become less reliable. That changes what needs our attention, even when the things we ultimately care about remain much the same.

## When the foundations worked

For much of my adult life, I experienced European security and prosperity as fairly dependable background conditions. Energy arrived. Goods could be bought. Digital services became better and more accessible. There were wars, crises and plenty of reasons for concern, but the basic arrangements underneath my daily life generally continued to function.

Against that background, it made sense to concentrate on the consequences of prosperity: environmental damage, inequality, corporate power, the pressure to consume and the place of work in a good life. Those were important questions, and they still are. I have no desire to measure progress by how much more we manage to buy.

We had room to ask what prosperity was for because a great deal of the capacity to produce it was already in place. It did not need to occupy the foreground of every discussion. We could argue about working less, distributing wealth more fairly and limiting harmful forms of production while relying on an economy that would continue to support those choices.

I do not think that was a mistaken set of priorities. It reflected conditions in which many of us were able to live. The difficulty begins when those conditions change and our way of organising the argument does not change with them.

## When the ground starts shrinking

The image that comes to mind is an island of ice that is slowly getting smaller. While it is large and stable, you can concentrate on how to live on it. As it shrinks, deciding how to share the remaining space becomes more difficult. You also become interested in what might stop the loss and allow the ground beneath you to grow again.

That is increasingly how I experience the discussion about Europe. There are still choices to make about the resources we have. But I am less confident that the capabilities supporting those resources will remain available without much more deliberate effort.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made energy dependence harder to regard as a technical or commercial matter. In digital technology, I have become more aware of the distance between being able to use a system and having any influence over the conditions on which it remains available. Industrial knowledge, infrastructure and security seem much less like permanent background features than they once did.

There is an order of dependence here. A society needs enough productive capacity to sustain the services, protections and freedoms it wants to offer. Above a certain level, there is room to debate many different arrangements. As that capacity weakens, the range of workable choices begins to narrow. We can continue to express the same ambitions while becoming less able to realise them.

That is the awkward turn in my thinking about growth. I have often associated it with more consumption, greater convenience and luxuries we could probably do without. But growth also matters when the capacity to support more fundamental choices is under pressure. Restoring that capacity starts to feel like a condition for keeping those choices open.

[Europe's Productivity Gap with US Costs €35,000 to €40,000 per Family | Oliver Coste posted on the topic | LinkedInIf Europe had not missed the tech revolution, you would earn about 20% more. For the average family of four in Germany or France, that is €35,000 to €40,000 missing every year. In 1995, an hour of work in Germany, France, Italy or Spain produced as much as an hour did in America. Today it produces about 20% less. The data comes from the European Central Bank. Europe’s productivity had collapsed in the two world wars. By 1945, a European hour of work produced barely a quarter of an American one. Over the next fifty years Europe caught up brilliantly by mastering the technologies of the second industrial revolution, many of which it had invented: the engine, electricity, chemistry. BMW, Fiat, Airbus and France’s nuclear programme were the result. After 1995 the gap opened again. American firms used computers and the internet, then smartphones and the cloud, to raise the output of every hour worked. They are now doing the same with AI. European firms invested far less in these technologies. Isabel Schnabel, of the ECB’s Executive Board, identified this underinvestment as the main cause of Europe’s decline, and Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness reached the same conclusion. I saw it first-hand: three times I built a technology company in Europe, and three times I found no European customers, only American ones. Why does this matter? Because what a country produces per hour is, in the end, what it earns. That is where the €35,000 to €40,000 in the first line comes from, partly in wages and partly in taxes that pay for public services. If the gap were closed, the German state would collect about €350 billion more each year, the French state about €260 billion. That is enough to fund the pensions, schools and hospitals that governments now struggle to pay for. Instead, wages have stagnated and budgets are squeezed. Voters feel it, and more of them turn to extreme parties. Countries that miss an industrial revolution usually pay for it for a long time. China, the world’s largest economy around 1800, missed the first industrial revolution and fell behind for nearly two centuries, with tragic consequences for its population. Europe’s trend is deeply worrying. But it can be reversed, within the European social model. My next posts will explain how, and the answer may surprise you: it is not what the consensus says. P.S.: Oliver Coste, former industrial advisor to PM Jospin, former executive at Alcatel and Atos, tech entrepreneur, in New York since 2014\. Numbers, facts, solutions: FESDI | 103 comments on LinkedIn![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/27/2027934d-fd7f-4725-bcbf-86fe1f55dd12/content/images/icon/al2o9zrvru7aqj8e1x2rzsrca-3ace6c4e-59b1-40e3-876a-524553f1c41b.ico)LinkedInOliver Coste![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/27/2027934d-fd7f-4725-bcbf-86fe1f55dd12/content/images/thumbnail/1790544634869-d5206731-ba13-4058-a5ea-29a24e805567.jpg)](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7510292714702270464/)

## Looking again at the world I grew up in

This has made me look differently at the Philips region in the Netherlands where I grew up. Philips was an employer, but its presence extended into schools, sports clubs, technical education, research and the suppliers around it. Making things was part of the organisation of everyday life.

There is plenty about that world I would not want to recover. Yet I have developed a different appreciation for something that was fairly ordinary within it: the accumulated ability to understand a difficult problem and make something that worked.

That ability was visible in products, but it also lived in people, institutions and relationships. There were people who knew how to do things, people who could teach them, and places where that knowledge could develop over time.

For years, there were good reasons to focus on the costs of technological progress. Pollution and waste demanded attention. Later, the internet gave us its own reasons for criticism, as possibilities for communication and freedom became entangled with surveillance, advertising and extraordinary concentrations of power.

Those concerns remain valid. What has changed for me is the urgency of another concern alongside them: whether we can maintain and develop the ability to make things ourselves.

[ASML](https://hoeijmakers.net/zeiss-and-asml/) gives me a concrete way to think about that. The company draws on engineering knowledge, specialised suppliers and relationships developed over decades. Its success makes visible a much wider capacity to do difficult work.

That capacity cannot simply be ordered when circumstances make it urgent. Once you start thinking about how it is built, sustained or lost, growth becomes a more substantial subject than an annual percentage. It becomes a question of what a society is learning to do, and whether it will still be able to do it a generation from now.

## Having a say in the technology we use

AI brings this close to my own daily practice. I spend a great deal of time working with it, and my curiosity has only grown. At the same time, much of the technology I rely on is developed and controlled outside Europe.

I can find a tool extraordinarily useful and still be concerned about the dependence that grows around it. Its usefulness makes that dependence more consequential. The more work we organise around these systems, the more their availability, direction and terms matter.

Europe’s concern with rights, privacy and democratic control is important to me. I would not want us to abandon it in pursuit of technological success. But I increasingly want the ability to build to sit alongside the ability to scrutinise.

Regulation can establish conditions for the use of technology. Building it creates another kind of influence: over its design, its development and the problems it is intended to solve. Both matter if we want our preferences to have practical consequences.

I do not imagine that Europe should make everything itself. I am more interested in whether we have enough knowledge and capacity to make meaningful choices within our dependencies. That includes understanding the systems we use, contributing things others need, and having credible alternatives when an arrangement stops serving us.

Seen that way, technological capability is part of the ground on which political choices become possible. We may have strong views about the society we want, but we also need some ability to shape the systems through which it functions.

## What I now hear in the word growth

When I hear an argument for growth now, I am more inclined to ask what capacity it would create. Would it help us provide care, maintain infrastructure, develop cleaner energy or give people more freedom over their time? Would it leave us better able to respond to circumstances we cannot yet anticipate?

Those questions give growth a purpose I can recognise. They also keep the older concerns involved. More output does not automatically create a fairer society. Some production causes damage that its price fails to reflect. The benefits of productivity can be distributed in very different ways.

But these are arguments about the kind of growth worth pursuing and the arrangements through which people benefit from it. They do not remove the need for a productive foundation.

This is where I feel my own position moving. If that foundation is deteriorating, concentrating only on how to divide what remains becomes an increasingly constrained exercise. I also want to understand what would make it stronger, what we could become better at, and where new possibilities might come from.

The ambition to work less, for example, still makes sense to me. It becomes more attainable when we can produce what we need with less effort. Good healthcare still matters. So does the knowledge and productive capacity that allow us to provide it. My interest in the means has become more urgent because the ends continue to matter.

## Recognising the change

In conversations with friends and family, this does not always fit the familiar political shorthand. An argument for industry can be heard as a position on capitalism. A concern about defence can seem to imply a whole set of other allegiances. Words carry histories, including our own histories of using or resisting them.

I understand that reaction because I sometimes have it myself. I hear myself arguing for growth and briefly wonder how I arrived there.

The explanation is becoming clearer. We had room to concentrate on certain questions because other conditions were sufficiently secure. As those conditions weaken, attention has to move towards sustaining and rebuilding them. That does not make the earlier questions foolish or the values behind them obsolete.

I have not arrived at a complete political position through all of this. I am still working out what follows in practice, and which arguments for growth deserve support. But I can see why the subject has acquired a different weight for me.

The next time I find myself arguing for growth, I want to be clearer about what I hope will grow: our ability to care for people, to make difficult things, to choose how we work and to influence the technologies through which we live. Those are possibilities I have valued for a long time. I am becoming more concerned with whether we will still have the ground beneath us to sustain them.