Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesnt stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints In God We Trust on the dollar; the ECB might as well print Kick the Can Down the Road on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things dont get worse. Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

Zero to One by Peter Thiel