Europe must find greater autonomy in the somewhat crazy world that is emerging. China is no longer such a strong market, Russia is no longer a cheap source of energy, and America no longer has the same capacity to protect Europe and carry it along in its economic cycle.
Faced with a form of verticalization of the world, Europe must first rely on itself if it wants to continue to count against China and the United States.

Europe must have the capacity to innovate, enabling significant productivity gains capable of driving sustainable increases in income. This is because a large part of the per capita income gap with the United States stems from productivity growth that is too slow in Europe. This is the observation of the Draghi report. We must therefore be able to work at the technological frontier and no longer just below it, as we tend to do in Europe.

Two counterpoints:
Innovation requires people, and a major observation is that Europe is unable to retain high-level researchers and engineers. They are attracted by technical resources, a research environment, and remuneration that Europe has never been able to offer them. This is a first counterpoint.

The second counterpoint is the rapid aging of the population. The number of people over 65 will exceed the number of people under 20 in France by 2030. The dependency rate is rising rapidly throughout Europe. In Italy, those over 65 could represent more than 70% of the number of working people aged 15 to 64 in the coming years.

Two comments:
We need to revalue the remuneration of active workers to encourage them to work for themselves and for the growing proportion of retirees who need to be financed.
But, and this is the second observation, an aging population is a population that innovates less. A recent study published by the CEPR indicates that qualified people continue to enrich their knowledge until their forties before seeing their capacity to learn reduce with age. For those with few qualifications, the shift is more rapid and the difficulties in learning become a handicap.
An aging society no longer has the capacity to accumulate knowledge, which is the necessary path to innovation. Training must take a different form to reduce this risk to knowledge accumulation.

Europe’s dilemma is therefore that it must invest massively to innovate, but with a rapidly aging population whose capacity to accumulate knowledge is diminishing.
The choice is therefore political, because the rejuvenation of the population can only come from political decisions on migration flows in particular. Without this, it will not be possible to maintain a high income for all.