Or more to the point: how many startups never happen because the right people are unable to manage the personal risk of leaving defined employment?
IMO this the consideration -- human ability is not really allocated all that well when you're bonded to an employer without cheaper switching costs.
This tips the scales towards the largest employers for labor, how many low paid internships could be replaced by high risk startups?
Before anyone has had a chance to accumulate to many obligations, that is the perfect time to grow by taking a risk and going after something disruptive.
That also would be the time in which many have the energy and optimism to do good rather than for greed or meeting obligations such as feeding/housing a family of four.
No, it was WWII that did it.
> This didn’t stop President Truman from considering and promoting a national health care system in 1945. This idea had a fair amount of public support, but business, in the form of the Chamber of Commerce, opposed it. So did the American Hospital Association and American Medical Association. Even many unions did, having spent so much political capital fighting for insurance benefits for their members. Confronted by such opposition from all sides, national health insurance failed — for not the first or last time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/upshot/the-real-reason-th...
Eddie Gonzalez-Novoa, 44, now living in Houston, last year left a full-time job in New York making $88,000 a year plus benefits to help his nephew, a cancer survivor, start a social media and video-gaming site for other teens with the disease.
https://www.denverpost.com/2014/02/10/they-quit-their-jobs-t...
I'd argue this has more to do with the low salaries expected of startup founders more than anything. Hard to stomach them unless you've got significant savings already or no dependents.
At least this is the only concern I or anyone I’ve talked to about doing a start up has risen. I work at a not quite FAANG company and we all have decent salaries and benefits. I’d give it up in a heart beat if I didn’t have to worry about health care costs.
When I left my job for a year of relaxing health insurance was nowhere near a concern since I just paid the COBRA premiums.
edit: And if you're under 26 you can be on your parent's health plan.
edit2: Also, talking about couch surfing pretty much highlights my point about dependents. I'm guessing neither you nor the people you talked to are old enough to have kids.
Speaking only for myself, I intentionally lived in a small apartment in order to make sure I had at least a year of income saved. I did this pretty early in my career in the bay area. I believe it’s still quite possible to do this if you are willing to forgo purchases that signal wealth (i.e, live in the smallest manageable apartment, keep driving your beater for a long time, cook instead of eating out).
Governments by definition have a monopoly on force. A government is a government because people with guns say so.
You might want to argue that employees have power, but they are nothing like a government. They don't have force, they don't have jails, they can't enter your home and give you orders. The worst thing an employer can do is to stop employing you. That's hardly coercion IMO.
You now need to spend an undefined amount of time looking for a new job.
You need to find that new job soon, because your old job was tied to important things like health insurance, without which any accident could bankrupt you.
It was also tied to less important benefits like vacation time and seniority, which reset at youe new job. Previously had 3 weeks off available after working for years at the same shop? Back to 6 days. At some places it may also be tied to a car, computer, or phone plan which you have come to depend on.
Not to mention that getting fired is a black mark on your ability to get a new job in the future.
Employers like to structure things such that they can replace an employee with little impact. They have people whose job it is to manage that process. To an employee, even an unusually well prepared one with savings and a plan and a current resume, losing one's job is a catastrophic event that can only be easily withstood a handful of times in a career.
There are many other things and employer can do, such as the aforementioned non-compete "agreements", changing pension and other retirement benefits (threatening to take them away as pressure), colluding with other employers to keep your wages down (https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f578d157-2b2a...), and more.
By your way of thinking, any business is a government.
I've never heard that definition of government. Also, at least in the US (and presumably everywhere else), private citizens have the right to use force under various circumstances.
> private citizens have the right to use force under various circumstances.
Yup, as defined by the government. You can defend yourself in certain circumstances, but you are always subservient to the military and police. They are the ultimate power in the state. If there was a force stronger than the military or police, that power would then be the state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)
It is probably the most common definition. As per this definition, the citizens can use force because the state grants them that right.
Can you start a private army to compete (not meaning fight it, but to provide the same services) with the state's army ?
If you have to pay for it (you actually pay for the army to force you to pay for it...), and you can't compete with it for the services it provides, it's not only a monopoly, it's also a tyranny.
Hopefully 0 times. Major changes in your life (like changing jobs, or moving cities, or making large purchases) always require some consideration.
>human ability is not really allocated all that well when you're bonded to an employer without cheaper switching costs.
You're overstating the case especially in market economies. If anything, the issue is more prevalent if your employer is the government, as the government tends to overpay for labour and is slow to adjust if conditions change (i.e. very hard to let people go for any reason).
Having said that, there are problems with movement being too liquid. That is, you lose institutional knowledge if your company (or government department) has a too high of a turn-over rate, which leads to lower quality products/services.
>how many startups never happen because the right people are unable to manage the personal risk of leaving defined employment?
And rightly so. Startups are an incredibly risky endeavour and they always will be. This is why founders tend to be younger, rather than older. If you have dependents and responsibilities you have to think twice about making a high risk bet. I don't know if you want to actually incentivize people to make more high-risk bets.