Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
Very few.
Educating more kids and having more "ideas" won't change that.
We're not lacking ideas. We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen.
All those things arguably exist for good reasons, but it's a huge hurdle to doing anything useful.
I can't have a 20 foot radio tower in town, I can't subdivide smaller than 10 acres outside of town, I can't build any facility out there to operate the experimental tower without building permits, radio licenses, compliance with tracking (for the police) any radio customer I might get if I qualify as a "communication service provider", etc.
There are (major) hurdles in just about every conceivable industry, and hardly any provision for "hey I'm a guy who wants to experiment, perhaps even noncommercially".
You can overcome the hurdles, but how many people will just stay at their 9 to 5 and not bother because its a huge pain in the ass with no guaranteed benefit?
I wonder how much this holds us back, it's hard to say.
I strongly suspect we're in a "barriers too high" regime rather than an "incentives are too low" regime, and that our money would be better spent reducing barriers than increasing incentives.
It's like the "one mans trash is another mans treasure" cliche, something that you see as an impediment I see as a social good. Finding the right balance is tricky and unfortunately in a polarized political environment it's easy for people to fall into the far sides of the argument.
I don’t think we need to offer more incentives or reduce barriers per se, but I think we really ought to be talking about refactoring our laws. The amount of legislative “technical debt” is intense and problematic.
For each and every one, someone suffered terribly or died.
We place too high a value on human life, and it's no wonder that we can't accomplish anything when a non-zero level of risk is unacceptable.
This is too close to another formulation of the same thought: "we should allow corporations to kill people for profit, with impunity" for comfort.
You could start by telling us why the statements aren't the same, using examples and facts.
You seem to want to have an abstract, bloodless, clinical discussion of when it is acceptable to kill people in the name of "efficiency" (I will interpret this as "profit").
I can tell you that is a dishonest discussion, if that's what is intended. If you want to have it honestly you will have to first indicate an understanding of exactly, in detail, the most evil things that will happen as a result. Also the most devastating things that will happen and be protected from proportionate legal recourse under your proposed or imagined regime.
It won't be a bloodless conversation.
Policies and regulations aren't made in some Platonic ideal universe, they are made in specific, factual circumstances.
Come back to us when you can talk about how a specific "acceptable" level of risk does not involve enabling evil actors, and indemnified doers for a specific policy area.
Then we'll talk about the specific things you find acceptable, and just whose death and suffering you will trade for profit.
It's like the idea of the FDA setting limits to the amount of insect contaminates allowed in food. At first, it seems disturbing until you realize that if they put a zero tolerance policy in place, there would be near-endless grounds to sue every food manufacturer out of business.
Not only is it unattainable, it's actively counterproductive to try and achieve because of unexamined and unintended consequences.
I don't think this is quite right. More accurately, I think we need to the risk assumer and risk accepter may need to be making the informed decisions.
Too often there is someone making a decision that someone else pays for. You want to strap yourself to a rocket and go into space and you have been communicated the risks and accepted them, that's one thing. It's entirely another when you get into a car running on software that you have no clue about. In the latter case, you aren't making a risk informed decision because the person/corporation determining that the risk is acceptable doesn't flow that information down to you (or, there's limited bandwidth that any one person can make an informed decision about). That's where regulation levels to playing field somewhat to ensure perverse incentives don't cause risks to be accepted by those who don't have to bear them. I or [insert relevant company name here] shouldn't be the decider on what risk you should be (perhaps unwittingly) accepting.
Not only are hurdles a pain, they’re not easily understood.
Edit: beetle juice, not goosebumps
Humans are good at coming up at ideas, the problem is, not all ideas are good ideas. But humans are especially good at ideas to maximize their profit resulting in permits and compliance are written in resulting blood along with the engineering standards enforced.
Unfortunately the threat of jail does not deter those ideas, but putting enough barriers that everyone working under them have to jump through does a really good job at reducing the amount that follow through with them.
The other aspect, it doesn't take much to kill a human. The rules may seem overkill, but a human is a soft squishy fleshbag where tripping on a pencil could kill you.
Tesla's politically-connected Shanghai Gigafactory 3 looks to be going from bare field to production in around a year. Part of that was apparently government inspection being done in parallel with construction, to minimize sign-off delays.
In reality, most important inventions, are efforts of large groups of people(that may be distributed across organizations), and most of it is work - not coming up with a "great" "vision".
// Everyone wants to be a founder
Well, you know the song "asiti":
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ezbFpkGlw
It's on Hebrew, but it basically talks about the Israeli tendency to always say "I did this, I did that"
Not what @aripicker claimed: "... being a founder, which inherently involves inventing ..." No mention of uniqueness.
Even at large R&D companies which have the investment, people are still hesitant to invest in new ideas since they simply don't have the money. It works the same way with the government, just at a larger scale.
Many people don't care about any of this though. They just want to live their lives, find something to be passionate about, and die peacefully. You'll always have to fight these people, politically.
We also have to consider the legal ramifications of such things. It is difficult to do ethical R&D.
But so much talent is wasted on insignificant things.
Perhaps it's also not what our industrial policy is tuned for? In California, if a company kills a project, the staff might go elsewhere to pursue it, but that can be harder in states which enforce non-competes. Similarly, in China, if a supplier drops a product, you might go elsewhere for it, which can be harder in the US which has patent law tuned for exclusivity. A great deal of VR/AR tech has vanished into FAMG, and become unavailable for anyone else in the US to "make ideas happen". Part of why China accepted trade war as the lesser of evils.
You pull out a bottleneck, only to reach another bottleneck. Puts the problem squarely in the realm of myth. Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill. Someone blew my mind one day when they suggested that Sisyphus didn't keep rolling the boulder up the hill because of compulsion, he does it because he finds exquisite meaning in it. He knows every crack, every crevice, how to move most efficiently up that hill. This idea moves the problem from mythological to religious. What is heaven and what is hell?
Some wind up burning out, and reverting to a simpler, more primitive form of life. Yours truly has a hard time seeing that as anything more than a rest stop. As humanity connects and we learn more about ourselves, our minds, and our bodies, we'll start unlocking dizzying heights of human achievement. These things will look like self-inflicted torture.
But at the end of the day, humans yearn for one thing, greatness, elevation, perfection. So they'll keep pushing themselves to that next level.
"Oh no! Think about all the potential geniuses we are missing out on! We must be doing something wrong!"
Ok, thought about it.
My conclusion is:
"Wow, the rate of genius production has never been higher, we must really be doing something right."
Could it be better? Sure. Is it getting better? According to Factfulness: sure.
I just don't understand the ridiculous in-built assumption that we are somehow wronging society and the potential geniuses themselves by them not being in a time and a place that makes use of the quality of the substrate of those particular individuals.
Well, sorry but nature doesn't optimize for the individual, it optimizes for the whole.
You may as well get equally mad at something silly like "why doesn't everyone always roll a 6?"
I think you missed my point. Because you state:
>Basically there are ways how to fix it
My point is it's not actually broken. It's working. It's working very well.
Although it doesn't tend to, opportunity _could_ arise anywhere. So, potential geniuses are peppered everywhere such that if opportunity were to arise there there are people who can take advantage of it.
The assumption that it should work the other way around is ridiculous.
Opportunity isn't for geniuses. Geniuses are for opportunity.
Give your children education. Make sure they grow up in a full family. Move to a better place. All these small things add up. You won't become a millionaire this way, but your grandkids may.
Opportunity is at least, largely changeable. Ability isn't.
Being average is the worst thing imaginable in today's society because nobody cares about average people.
I would give up anything to have the brain of an inventor. But it's something that has constantly haunted my mind knowing that I will always be sub-par.
It's even worse when you go through school and you're a top performer in your school work. You're given a false sense of being one of the best, only to be exposed in the real world as a complete fraud.
More like when preservation or a positive return is intended in a businesslike situation, even though negative returns are often encountered.
Other people's money can be used to leverage some amazing outcomes.
When capitalism is dominated by greedy capitalists, basic needs are not intended to be taken care of, since no return on that type investment can be recognized.
When capitalism is dominated by benevolent capitalists, basic needs are intended to be taken care of, since huge return on that type investment can be recognized.
Good point, that's a tough one. Sometimes there will obviously be a devastating shortage, or none available at all.
Maybe the only benevolence some cultures will be able to muster is an incomplete removal of opportunity.
I would estimate real benevolence should be obvious to the widest of consensus, and easily distinguishable almost universally from situations where there is some doubt.
Not saying it's easy or possible to ensure anything, especially an anti-greed approach during a greed-power consolidation trend lasting longer than a lifetime.
Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated,
And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other)
My solution is: take a piece of the federal budget and give $1-3MM to anyone with a far fetched idea that has a prototype to back it up. No long processes. If 30K -mostly students- a year get a mill to develop their thing, I suspect we would find ourselves way into the future in just a decade. And that’s just $30-90B/y
I find it frustrating that anything remotelt consistent with the scientific method is effectively shunned in economic policy and politics.
I'm also uncomfortable of this suggested idea about American exceptionalism. We have been bested by foreign competition despite our superior economic resources and liberty. I mean, we had to completely begin shifting gears away from public, politicized development in the launch market when our best option became hitching rides with one of our worst enemies.
So I’d answer: all of them
Likewise for the entire computer industry, which would never have existed without government funding for Whirlwind, TX-0, SAGE, and other critical seed projects.
The US could have done the same, but chose to use cheap money to skim profits from its economy instead of investing in real invention and innovation.
And US "liberty" is a self-serving myth.
Try hawking a truly revolutionary invention around potential funding sources and see how far you get if you don't have the "right" social background.
Conversely, try hawking a terrible non-working idea around and see how far you get if come from that background.
That’s been a solved issue since at least the 17th century with joint stock companies. What else is an IPO but asking strangers for money so you can do business?
Also, the only reason early IPOs aren’t popular anymore is because capital is so easy to get from VCs, despite what you’re suggesting. The difference is that you want money without a business plan or a plan to grow, which is not how private, nor public, money should be squandered.
And no, this is simply an idea that would offer funds to the vast majority, who don’t have access to VCs.
99.9% of VC funded companies are not world changing ideas (even if they worked at scale as intended). And 99% of that came thru an intro. So yeah.
Heck, this is the thesis of YC, except they also fund petty companies, because they’re optimizing for returns, not far fetching ideas.
And, even so, exactly zero of those, AFAIK, were so early as to have raised their first million that way, underlining the grandparent’s point.
Terms and conditions may apply though...
You only have to look at the industrialised corruption of public tenders for legitimate needs in Africa for a glimpse of human nature.
It does seem like it's getting worse, or maybe media coverage about it is getting better.
Has any country in the world successfully fought corruption in a peaceful way? (ie. no revolutions, no guillotines)
The solution is not throwing more free money in public coffers. It definitively exacerbated corruption in greece for example
Also, how do you measure and compare corruption?
The US has gone to war killing millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of their own, motivated by (oil/industrial-military) money and justified with lies.
The US political system is controlled mostly by corporations and rich people that pay for lobbying.
So are you saying the west is not corrupt because it is more publicly/"legally" corrupt?
Here's a source that estimates total deaths, post-9/11 so far (by November 2018) at hundreds of thousands: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...
That doesn't take into account the previous war with Iraq.
By the way, I never said US citizens. Do you think US citizens' lives are somehow more important than people from other parts of the world?
Also, oil/greed seems to be the most apparent motivation (you might want to watch the movie Vice, or just revise non-US media coverage from the time).
It would be great if you could provide a source that has a clear (real) cause/effect of whatever motivated the US to start a war with Iraq and Afghanistan, and please don't say weapons of mass destruction.
No, I don't think US citizen's lives are more important defacto, but I don't see all lives as equal either, for the record.
Oil/greed fit the leftist narrative, but I'm not convinced, and since you made the claim that it's about oil and greed, the onus is on you to prove it! I don't have to provide motivation of my own, though I suspect two planes crashing into a building might have something to do with it.
The first war with Iraq was pre-9/11, so nothing to do with two planes.
Now, about 9/11, what did Iraq or Afghanistan had to do with those planes? If anything, the US should have gone to war with Saudi Arabia, whose citizens piloted those planes.
So how do those planes justify going to war with two totally different countries, that potentially had nothing to do with 9/11? Or how do those planes justify going to war at all?
Has killing thousands more people somehow redeemed or justified the deaths of people during 9/11?
?!
On the off chance of you having some plausible explanation for this outrageous statement I invite you to expand on this.
That's laughable.
I suspect giving people with no life experience, exposure to failure or real life dynamics will end badly. The single digit number of success stories in limited domains aren't representative of any real meaning
If some people can't accumulate something they can't do bigger things as creators or create bigger markets as consumers.
It's just another form of seed funding for ambitious start-ups.
And $30bn/yr is absolutely trivial compared to the opportunity costs of an economy geared more to financialisation and regressive wealth extraction than to productive engineering and invention.
This silly proposal is nothing more than socialized venture capital. We have real venture capital who invest in “far fetched” ideas already — and they have willing participants who know what they are getting into — not people being forced, literally at the point of a gun, through taxes.
Yes you will (according the basic theory of the idea).
Unfortunately, even though you will get a return, when you get it you will believe that you haven't had the return because it will take the form of $100k of life improvements that you will believe you "would have had anyway" without the investment.
You might even get $100k of cash, in the form of your salary increasing by much more than that, and costs of quality of life things increasing by less (enough to make the difference >$20k). But when it happens you will almost certainly attribute it to other causes.
And so, today, you will argue against the investment, it won't happen, and you will end up poorer than you would have been.
While believing you are richer, because $20k cash in the hand today feels more real than $100k quality of life cost differential improvements in future whose attribution is difficult or impossible to verify.
That's the theory anyway.
I think a plausible factor in the failures of trickle down economics to enrich the masses as much as hoped by those who advocate it, is wealthy groups of people acting so as to keep what wealth they have in their own control, away from others. And, over generations, perhaps ceasing to be wealth generators (e.g. inventors and industrialists) and becoming wealth controllers (e.g. "old money" families).
Widespread investing in lots of people isn't subject to the same problem, by definition. (Assuming those people are paid decently, rather than indentured servants to some capital controller).
Maybe trickle down actually works. Maybe we all got a return on it in invisible ways. Maybe things would be a lot worse for the median taxpayer than they are after the policy was enacted. How would we know for sure?
Just like when a VC or government grant agency gives you money, you can't simply invest it and live off the proceeds in those cases either.
With that ruled out, the $1-3MM is not really the recipient's money, and they are not really wealthy in the way you are comparing to other households.
Of course it will. Basic income is so expensive that the wealth don’t have enough to take to fund it. It’s going to require massive taxes in the middle class that result in a quality of life loss.
Any cash given to the poorer classes and taken from the middle classes likely has greater quality of life value to the poorer classes - because it would be used for things that are more essential to life.
This means the quality of life loss to the middle classes is more than offset by quality of life gain to the poorer classes. And the poorer classes have many more people.
By some ethical standards, this makes it unequivocally beneficial to redistribute.
(I don't actually agree with that approach, because money in some hands is more potent for creating benefit to others, than in other hands. But I think the parent's argument, that it's bad because the middle class would suffer, is essentially a "poor people don't matter" argument.)
Many voters in the middle class feel like they've worked (and continue to work) very hard to get where they are and object to the meager spoils of their work being taken for redistribution. Right or wrong, it's a very real feeling. (Obviously, I'm not saying dollars are kidneys, but they will cause a similar reaction in people.)
I think that type of reasoning is fallacious because every policy leaves a subset of people worse off (you can just choose your preferred subset to make the point). Including the status quo.
I like your kidney analogy, and I think it makes a strong counter point that is worth considering when weighing up policy ideas.
Though, the status quo in that analogy looks to me like the majority of people in the world currently are having one kidney removed during childhood, mostly to feed the middle classes and build toys for them. Some unlucky ones have two; they are sick and dying. But we couldn't take a kidney from the healthy middle class folks to give back to those, could we, because voters in the middle class feel like they've worked (and continue to work) very hard to get their kidney from some unspecified source we don't like to think about, and they object to the meager spoils of their hard-earned spare kidney being taken for redistribution back to the people they came from.
Refuting dumb ideas to help the poor doesn’t mean I don’t care about helping them.
By that measure no one could ever become an adult.
Exposure to failure and real life dynamics is exactly what people with no life experience need. At least that's the only way they will gain life experience.
> millennial fantasy
At least millenials are dreaming about a better society and trying to fight for it.
What are you doing besides spitting out unprovoked hate towards a whole generation of people?
> spitting out unprovoked hate towards a whole generation of people?
Care to cite the basis of your assertion?
What was surprising to me was how uncorrelated other factors of economic health were. We found examples of countries with pretty poor indicators but very low corruption, and they had a lot of opportunity, future, and growth.
In today's world in which capital appears to assume an autonomous form itself, in which every goal of civil society gradually becomes subsumed under it, this statement must be read ironically - there is no other possibility. Capital can only appear underappreciated in a world truly dominated by capital.
So I would deem it to be under appreciated by the general public
Crazy ideas a lot harder to evaluate, and a lot riskier, but they’re definitely not less valuable.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Early_career_a...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Early_life
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Poto%C4%8Dnik
I'll back up my claim with a little bit of data...
"Beyond R&D spending, a crucial input into producing patents is education. Contrary to the stereotype of the college-dropout entrepreneur, innovation—at least as measured by high-quality patent activity—is almost exclusively accomplished by people with advanced degrees. Most often, this entails some amount of education beyond an undergraduate degree: 45 percent of triadic patent holders hold a PhD, MD, or equivalent degree, and 70 percent have at least a master’s degree. Only 23 percent completed only a bachelor’s degree, and 7 percent have not completed a four-year degree.
"Patent holders are substantially more educated than the rest of the population. Only 3 percent of the adult U.S. population has a professional or doctoral degree, but 45 percent of patent holders hold a degree at that level. And, while more than 90 percent of patent holders have at least a bachelor’s degree, just 27 percent of the overall population does. The importance of education in innovative activity highlights some of the broader spillovers to the economy from an educated workforce." [1]
(emphasis mine)
[1] https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/most_inventors_have_g...
https://voxeu.org/article/does-education-lead-more-innovatio...
My list would be entirely focused around quality of life and happiness which would mean significant funding for artistic endeavors. It also might lead to slowing the rate we communicate, living healthier (not necessarily longer) lives, building stable communities which might lead to less long distance movement (which would likely be better for the environment - so on that we agree).
What art would you say is a valuable artistic endeavour? To note, I can quite consider science to be largely artistic (as well as applied philosophy), so it's not a clear area.
So those things happen in some people reality.
How wheel camber changes handling. How to re-camber wheels without losing stability or structural integrity of the car. Government regulations regarding the deployment and use of flamethrowers on highways. The consequences of being a Car that Goes Boom.
Much useful innovation does come from people pursuing apparently frivilous or non-utilitarian projects, and acquiring skills, experience, and maturity. As well as rubbing elbows with other inventors, a principle message of TFA.
I think the point is less that every recipient will have good ideas than it is that you're increasing the chances of idea + execution + funding falling into place once or twice for transformative initiatives.
Another major plus is that SBIR's don't have to be the next google. You can get funded for a product with fairly mild potential. VCs only seem to care about the 100x investment.
which usually resolve in a x100 ROI, but that’s a random byproduct
You're right that it takes time in many or most cases to get funding from a VC - but they can write a check the same day - that was my point. And there are a lot of them to go pitch your idea to as well.
Also, most of the times far fetched things require a lot of time and money by it's own virtue because they're hardware and require long basic research. See for example as of recently: BOOM.
We're not talking about seeing if there's demand for a piece of software.
Why do you have to reach consumers at the ideation stage if
> We're not talking about seeing if there's demand for a piece of software.
?
Is this HN satire?
I do like your idea. And I'm not some starry eyed millennial or whatever. I'm a crusty gen-Xer who has seen what our parents and peers have wrought and can't help but think we need to do something drastically different.
If you're just blowing it all on holidays and fun, you're going to find it difficult to pass an audit for long. Maybe you'll have some fun for a while, but the grant tap will slow and eventually stop if you do that. Fraud charges maybe, if you push it.
Don't you think trusting code to transmit and trade assets is a x10 improvement over trusting people? I'd rather trust code I can audit than people.
Even if you don't call it an x10, I would definitely call it a success.
Bitconnect, mtgox and every other imploded bitcoin service illustrates the point to the tune of billions.
So giving millions to people who are already privileged enough to have access to the tools/resources/education to make to a prototype?
Your time in Starbucks costs, at least, the sum of your home's rent or mortgage, food, and the laptop and phone you are using (and their occasional replacements when they break).
That can easily reach $10k by the time you've made a convincing prototype.
Ideas require good execution to be off any value and money doesn't buy that. Look at all the Kickstarters which over-funded and failed because the people running them had no ideas about manufacturing, finances, physics, engineering, etc.
Let's use your example. I can buy a small reusable toy rocket at a hobby store. It will fly up a few hundred feet and come down by parachute in one piece. I can build a somewhat bigger one from pieces as well, there's college competitions around such things. That provides about 0.0001% of the work, skills, etc. needed to build one that can reach orbit and carry an actual payload. In other words, there is basically no relation between the small scale prototype and the actual useful product. A million is also a uselessly small amount of money for such a thing. SpaceX probably went through at least $200 million before it's first Falcon 1 flight.
edit: Btw, parachute approach doesn't scale but it works in a small scale prototype. So you gain little knowledge of full scale re-usability from such prototype. However, you've said minimal bureaucracy so no system for doing such in-depth due diligence.
Now define a system that will verify that the technology is proprietary and not just assembled off the shelf components. Keep in mind that you can also have a breakthrough system that is made of existing components. And do it with minimal bureaucracy. Keep in mind that the person applying may honestly believe they have a breakthrough technology made from existing parts even if it's not.
If it’s outlandish enough anyway, everybody will know there’s nothing like it.
Take re usable rockets. In 2005 everyone agreed it was an outlandish idea that didn’t exist. And yes, obviously you have to glue stuff in a prototype.
Is it possible that Pell grants already provide more economic return than is possible with a far-fetched-idea plan for a small number of people? Pell grants do help enable education for millions, and as we see in the article & study, education is absolutely correlated with innovation.
I am curious how you propose to vet far fetched ideas in a short amount of time? 30K startups is a lot to review, even if the cycle was continuous and spread out over the year. And far-fetched ideas are difficult to rank and fund. Whether this program works, I imagine, would depend on lot on whether the vetting process reliably allowed in far fetched ideas with real potential and kept out far fetched ideas that have no potential, as well as people who aren’t likely to bring the far fetched idea to fruition.
Leaving aside how laughably wastefully the universities spend that money, disconnecting the borrower from the spender of funds is a massive anti-pattern.
Awareness of and discretion over spending is an extraordinary effective forcing function.
Pell grants are for education, it makes at least some sense they go universities. I’m not sure if you’re implying they should go to 2 year or vocational schools? Private, for-profit non-university schools are a large problem in the U.S. in that they have much lower financial returns for the students who attend them, and much lower quality educations. There’s an entertaining piece by John Oliver about this, among other sources.
I explained in another reply what I mean by far fetched products, which can be valued mathematically
I don’t know what you mean. Have you attended most universities? The paper & article you are commenting on demonstrate that education level determines innovation, statistically speaking. That can be for a wide variety of reasons, but it would be good to understand what they are any why before tossing the whole system out the window and spending billions, wouldn’t it?
> I explained in another reply what I mean by far fetched products, which can be valued mathematically
If that were true and it worked reliably, then all great ideas would already be funded. Can you link to said comment? I don’t see it.
Once I've been a citizen long enough (i.e. paid enough taxes) I get to invoke my free year, which is a year where the government pays me enough to cover my bills and maybe a bit extra for projects and stuff.
During this year, I am encouraged to make some kind of contribution: maybe I start a business, maybe I do an art project, maybe I try to overthrow the government, it's up to me.
At the end of the year, I can provide a presentation about what society gained by funding my free year. If I do, it goes into an archive and part of the voting process means having citizens review these and decide whether I deserve another free year to persue similar endeavors. Maybe voted on free years are actually two years long so you can be more ambitious once proven viable.
So if society likes what you do when left to your own devices, they have the opportunity to keep funding it. If not, well you had your shot and nothing stops you from carrying on the old fashioned way.
As for yourself, you get to decide when to invoke your free year. Is the idea really ready? Do you have the skills? Should you put a bit more work into it on the weekends before you try to do it full time? These things ought to ensure sufficient seriousness from the participant. You can have a video game year on the government's dime, but unless people really want their tax money funding your gaming, your only going to get one.
Maybe requirement should be voting on projects have to be anonymous. Public cannot know projects owner completion of funding rounds
I really wish people would stop saying "the government" in these scenarios. It's the taxpayers. Actual humans whose money is taken by force. Not saying it's a bad idea, just saying that we need to be thinking a lot more responsibly about the fact that this is money being taken from people who themselves would rather spend it on their own needs/dreams/business ideas etc.
you're not exactly forced to be taxed either. it's an agreement in exchange for citizenship. if you don't want to be taxed, go make and spend your money somewhere that doesn't have taxes
I kid, but I think most people do have the view that the government really owns everything. In practice, control means ownership, so it's not an unreasonable view.
From selling stamps, casino taxes, parking/speeding tickets, lotteries (where out of state purchases are allowed) to charging fees for applications or rent/selling land or charging fees to camp in parks.
I don't have to be a taxpayer for the government to make money from me.
Thinking the govermment is the taxpayer is wrong. The government must represent all citizens very young and old and many are not taxpayers.
The situation is so bad now that if you're reading this as an employee, your current boss probably fits the description above perfectly. Your boss right now is probably a serial entrepreneur who created 10 different companies which made him a ton of money but which for some reason are all dead now and either added no value to society or created negative value.
There is a lot of talent and there are many really great projects which go unnoticed these days. Our entire economy is founded on hype and misinformation. It's no longer possible to compete based on merit; the only way to win is through cheating and deception (e.g. the focus is not on value creation for customers, it's all about social scheming). Maybe that is why people are increasingly turning on entrepreneurs.
Social schemes which allow entrepreneurs to make money don't add value to society, they take away value. The VC funnel, corporate acquisitions, IPOs, social media advertising, etc... All these schemes don't create any value and yet that's where most of society's money seems to be going.
I think the financial system has failed. TBH I still can't believe that cryptocurrencies are worth so much money after so many years. The ongoing success of Bitcoin is proof that fiat money and the entire economy is completely speculative.
In a proper functioning economy in which money has real value, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies wouldn't have been able to last a single year.
Fiat currency works fine. Bitcoin only has value for money laundering and drug deals; its value doesn't tell us anything positive or negative about fiat currency.
The whole model of giving people tax money to do work is called research and is quite a large area and has produced some amazingly valuable things that you benefit from.
BTW I do see what you mean, but I have been trying to start a company for ages and getting the money together is just incredibly hard. It's also hard IT, not pet grooming or similar. It's difficult.
There was no proper oversight. We produced nothing of value (and I'd like a post-mortem of why, but never got one). That was UK £2 million wasted.
I've no reason to suppose that company funded R&D is any better than govt. funded though.
As for government funding for interesting projects, the way you get these is submitting research proposals to the NSF or something. Unfortunately I think it’s rare for them to give you money if you’re not a university professor or something.
As I understand it there are similar public and private grants for artists but you probably have to be pretty good already to get one.
This is so poetically stated.
You might as well've said "The patent office should grant 1M alongside every patent it grants"
Site here: https://www.mercatus.org/emergentventures
Info about cohorts here: https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=emergent+ventures
If someone is working at a job most hours, most the remaining hours caring for family, constantly having to chase more work because they are on the breadline, mentally stressed all the time, never getting enough rest and sleep because of the demands on them, cognitively impaired by stress and malnourishment, they may have lots of creative and innovative thoughts, they can be stuck for decades unable to build a prototype due to lack of time, energy, and a place to build it.
(Little web-based things may be a relative exception, because people can do those at home, on the side, and while looking after others. Maybe that's why we have so many of them, and so many people trying to make more.)
Aside from personal circumstances, at the business level, there is a reason investment is done in business growth, and why many businesses try to borrow, rather than waiting to save up the cash for new investments.
For some things, development just stalls without resources and breathing room.
Even when successful, it can be greatly slowed.
The problem is that people are smart. This kind of policy would be gamed in no time.
>If 30K -mostly students- a year get a mill to develop their thing
Today there may be 30k smart, ambitious students with a great idea. With your policy there would be 30k smart, ambitious students and 10 million others pretending to be.
Capital is infinite. The US just prints an unlimited supply of dollars, and that has no effect on the value of the dollar. Governments around the world are now offering negative interest rate bonds and investors are buying them. The stock market will keep going up and never crash. Money just churns. There's no way to stop it.
Basically, there is too much money looking to invest around the world. Billions in hedge funds, pension funds, retirement accounts... Just billions and billions looking for a home.
And there's not really a good reason it will ever go away. Investors can't stop investing. They can't just sit there with a pile of cash. So investment will never end. We've entered a time of infinite capital.
Borrow $15 billion and we'll pay you to take it from us.
Dollars are basically a claim on labor or natural resources. That we print slightly (in relative terms) more each year is what causes the slow devaluing of existing dollars in circulation. This is also known as inflation. (The linkage isn't quite that direct, but it's fairly close to it.)
The M1 money supply has gone from 1.5 trillion in 2009 to 3.8 trillion today. That's 2.5X more money in circulation in 10 years. A graph of that is a hockey stick - basically a 45 degree angle.
The dollar remains strong. Inflation remains low. Unemployment at record lows. Stock market at record highs. There is no sign that printing $20 billion per month for the last 10 years has had any negative effects.
The printing machines don't stop. Won't stop. Can't stop.
This doesn't mean that having some public subsidies for entrepreneurs is necessarily a bad idea, but it's not going to be a dramatic cure-all like you describe. The students in the top < 1% that would be getting funded from this system could most likely already raise that money from private investors. I think something like UBI would have a far wider and more equitable impact.
Except that it would likely become corrupted like much of government contracting already is. At least VC are tossing their own money and don't have the same perverse incentive for corruption when you have government employees handing out bids to taxpayer money.
See Rutger Bregman’s Talks and research as well as his book Utopia for realists.
Business Capital goes towards products that people are willing to pay for. People buy products that make them better, healthier, smarter, or happier. Or at least they believe so. Are you sure you know what's better for them to buy?
What can be overvalued is the character of our present educational institutions. Because the system of education that produced many of us was designed for another time. This is reflected in both the character and the quality of education.
Education in the U.S. is also unevenly distributed due to a funding model that relies on municipality taxes, creating a multi-generational disadvantage.
Capital may be under-appreciated and you're correct that it's "trapped in networks" - but I believe that the solution is to legally tie that capital to real economic purposes. Companies floating billions in cash reserves waste the productive potential of those resources. Same could be said for the stock market, speculation has it's purposes but modern financial markets just churn money to make money. Wall-street was intended to fund the productive agenda of society, not tie up capital in the hands of an isolated few.
We already do this with grants at all levels of government. And guess what: it's a highly political activity, and prone to corruption. What's a remotely good idea?
Deploying capital with discernment is extremely hard. VCs put a lot of effort into it and often fail pretty badly, and VCs are probably better at it than the government bureaucrats who would administer the program you're suggesting.
Part of what makes it really hard is that there's often an inverse relationship between appearance and reality. Fakes, delusional nuts, and con artists usually appear more polished than the real innovators. The real innovators are spending all their time and energy innovating while the phonies are spending all their energy on flash and self-promotion.
Capitalists downplay the importance of capital and highlight stories that distract from it because recognition of the importance of capital would lead to intolerance of the concentration of capital.
but subsequent included nothing vis-a-vis the expensive, industrial lifestyle we have these days. It is unfortunate that cultural innovation doesn't make the list, since it would go a long way toward address some pertinent problems
Only better culture can deliver peace and a modicum of justice. In particular, a social culture in which neighbors do not seek to rob or enslave each other.
Self-driving cars, or even a cure for cancer, will not advance this central goal. Better schools on the other hand, just might.
Unfortunately said encumbents know how important schools are in this.
But that's not how this world works. Most of the early discoveries were by affluent people or had benefactors and didn't need jobs and thus actually had time.
Yes and no. What we need is better problem identification and more appropriate priorities.
For example, we don't need "better crops." We need to stop wasting so much of that we do have. Less waste means less wasted resources.
For example, less wasted food also means less chemicals and pesticides, which likely means less disease and medical issues.
If we solved for root problem (i.e., apply The Five Whys) we'd waste less time and resources solving for symptoms.
As for the supply of innovation being limit. IDK, I've heard that scarcity breeds innovation. So perhaps we are innovating, but in the wrong places, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.
Imagine if people had just reduced food waste instead of inventing fertilizer? We probably wouldn't have western civilization.
The solution of "make more" doesn't actaully address the problems
Assuming talent seeks opportunity to express itself, places looking for success (=talent*opportunity) should to make it easy for talent to move there.
For the US, let students who earn masters/doctorates at American schools stay.
The popular media in the US also violently opposes opportunity or skills-based immigration even though that's what the majority of the world does. The liberal fantasy of immigration is a variation of the white man's burden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden) where it is the US's role to save the oppressed and the downtrodden by welcoming them to the US. Allowing immigration to be determined by talent or education is "racist".
This article is specifically about kids who score above average in math in 3rd grade. As a society, we have chosen (or someone has) to provide extra teaching staff to help kids that are below the median, not the ones who are exceptional.
South Africa has not produced a thriving industrial or technological sector, though there have been individual advances in certain areas, notably medicine (heart transplants, yellow fever vaccine), and Mark Shuttleworth's Thawte, which left the country.
Musk would have been 23 at the time of the election of Nelson Mandella. Musk's youth certainly was under an Apartheid regime and would reflect the benefits of being a white male under that system. He'd already left for Canada some five years earlier, which might itself speak to your parent's observations.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2017/01/15/steve-jobs-...
I can't work in academia (no Ph.D), find capital (no connections), and the software job market is a crazy stupid PITA (no thanks).
I know it's me, that I can have what I want if I really go for it, and that is what I do by living simply and continuing my work.
But it would be swell if it was easier to be seen, at such a high level. I would gladly teach, if offered the role.
Basically, it should made way-too-easy for obviously talented, experienced, people to find some kind of work in teaching or civic developments.
The only "obvious" proof of talent that will convince anyone is having impressive accomplishments in a given field. Do you have any?
A naturally unfair advantage at the type of research that involves experimentation and/or discovery is a characteristic that most PhD's do not actually have. Plenty still do, but most do not.
But without a PhD you will need to work your way up to outperforming those with credentials by a factor of 10x to 20x.
Forget working in academia, but you will be expected to hang with them and make progress that they can obviously recognize, without intimidation difficulties either way.
It's doable, and can be quite rewarding in itself.
If nothing else you could end up like it says in the article. You could have a thousand wonderful ideas just like everyone else, but you've got breakthroughs that could grow phenomenally where 99 percent of them would require capital. This doesn't make capital any more accessible to you than the average person on the street. If your breakthroughs are really good you should be able to make opportunity from the 1 percent that can be pursued without other people's money anyway, while using the resources already at hand.
Like it says, you could be the best innovator in the world but without undue good fortune it is extemely unlikely that ANY of your efforts will ever be leveraged towards the masses regardless of how beneficial or not.
In the hypothetical 99 to 1 scenario, IF you can implement the full 1 percent of your technical ability, then your odds are excellent by comparison since only 99 percent of your life's work will be lost.
PhD's don't have as much opportunity as there was in the past either, everybody's got to work around it.
And it's probably even more important to be careful against bad fortune, which is a LOT worse than a simple lack of good fortune.
Living off your own technology is not for everyone. Most innovation is not ground-breaking or is so marginal that it actually needs to be highly leveraged to achieve the benefits of scale. Without a large research group to support it is possible to get by on the lesser advances, and if momentum can be built from that it can allow the time and space to gravitate to more potentially impactful approaches compared to modern or established institutional trends.
In many situations it can be a lot easier and less costly & time-consuming to invent another sure-fire energy-saving device for instance, than it would be to risk the resources seeking eminence. You can end up with an unfair advantage at the inventing itself compared to those who divert any effort away from the task, simply because you can not afford to take that kind of risk.
You also have the unfair disadvantage relative to those who basically just toot their own horn, but everybody has that.
I've published over 100 open source modules and projects across the "full stack". I have "live-coded" dozens of musical compositions (mathy algo music).
I haven't published any proofs or arxiv papers (yet), but I can both engineer data pipes and code deep learning models from scratch. That is to say, I'm a good programmer, I learned the math, grokked the principles, and can actively stay on top of the latest research and implementations. Who knows, maybe I have good ideas in this wide open field, too.
Publishing writing and video lessons on a personal website or YouTube can also help a lot.
Likewise, the public sector would love to find talented people willing to do the tech work required, for the salaries they can afford. There are always opportunities to be found.
If you aren't doing those things, it isn't due to lack of opportunity in our society.
The biggest proof is the current China-USA standoff.
USA is on the paper the biggest nation on earth by manufacturing output, but what was the last time you saw made in USA household goods in supermarket without having to specifically look for them?
Why China has industrial base and USA doesn't?
Wages difference? No, not by a chance. In some places in China, the cost of trained blue collar labour begins to exceed that of US.
An hourly rate for an experienced pick and place machine operator in South China certainly exceeds $15 per hour, and may be closing on $20. This is what I can tell from my own experience.
On an another hand, it is $16 in USA. https://www.indeed.com/salaries/SMT-Operator-Salaries
Even plain assembly line workers now get close to $15, and trained ones above that. For any manufacturing automation specialist in China, wages are better than in USA...
You don't see Chinese industrialists racing to setup factories in USA. Think why now?
I was telling my own story on HN few times already. I was trying to setup an electric scooter factory in Vancouver, Canada, and then in US northwest on behalf of my employer.
I had to hire university grads to do plain assembly, as anybody else had hard time to just wire a battery, throttle, BMS board, and a motor. And that with colour coded wire harness with mechanical keys to prevent miswiring... We spent 6 months looking for an operator for our model of pick and place machine.
In China, those are the jobs I can hire a highschooler for.
America wastes its talent not any much less than, say, most countries Americans call "the third world."
A very good story about that https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-...
And even if they are comparable now, its true that it no longer matters. The work moved to China because of low wages, and its going to stay there now because all of the labor force and supply chain infrastructure are much better developed. You are quite right those things no longer exist in the US, they have atrophied.
At ~23.5% Chinese social insurance (medical, trauma and serious illness, pension, housing fund, maternity, unemployment) costs more to employer than in US, at least in Guangdong province.
This is why I was saying that guessing purely on numbers, lower cost of capital, external risks, taxes, social payments, and somewhat lower wages, USA should be a better place for manufacturing than China
> late 13c., "inclination, disposition, will, desire," from Old French talent (12c.), from Medieval Latin talenta, plural of talentum "inclination, leaning, will, desire" (11c.), in classical Latin "balance, weight; sum of money," from Greek talanton "a balance, pair of scales," hence "weight, definite weight, anything weighed," and in later times sum of money," from PIE *tele- "to lift, support, weigh," "with derivatives referring to measured weights and thence money and payment" [Watkins]; see extol.
So, no. But it's a neat folk etymology even if it isn't quite true.
>The Homeric talent "as money" was probably the gold equivalent of the value of an ox or a cow.[2] Based on a statement from a later Greek source that "the talent of Homer was equal in amount to the later Daric [... i.e.] two Attic drachmas" and analysis of finds from a Mycenaean grave-shaft, a weight of about 8.4 gm can be established for this money talent.[2] The talent of gold was known to Homer, who described how Achilles gave a half-talent of gold to Antilochus as a prize.
A Homeric talent was a unit of weight, hence the half-talent "of gold" as a prize. A talent of silver would weigh the same but have less value.
The Hebrew "talent" (kikar) was also a unit of weight.
The later Latin talentum borrowed the existing weight measure and the Greek word τάλαντον and by the time of the parable of the talents, this word already carried the rather heavy meaning of "58.9 kg." (from your link above).
So a talent in the modern metaphorical sense of "talented person" means a person carrying a heavy weight, and a heavy responsibility. If a single talent is almost 60 kg, imagine the unlucky person with five talents placed on them! Perhaps it would be better to have a genius than to be talented, though neither one makes you rich.
> For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.
The only thing we can say with confidence about these "goods" is that they were heavy, and not necessarily something you want... especially if they are to be repaid "with usury" at some future undisclosed time of reckoning, as in the story!
But having talents, isn't that essence of being human? Having talents and using them? Who are we if we fear having talents?
They make the case that the world has a lot of issues, that a lot of people have bad lives and that those people should have better lives, and that "we need to do what is possible to allow everyone to live a life free of poverty, free of hunger, and free of premature death".
But from there, the path they lay out, and advocate for, is one of continued oligarchy. After saying that we need to eliminate poverty, hunger, and premature death, they advocate for "[continuing] the positive developments of the last decades with more children surviving, more children growing up free of the worst poverty, and more children being better educated than ever before. If I am optimistic about the future of the world and progress against the world’s problems it is because of this."
But what if you don't agree? And how could you? While some thing seem to be getting better (by some indicators only) global inequality continues to increase, and the inequality in developed economies is obscene. The climate and environment are destroyed more rapidly than ever in a continual quest for infinite growth. The solution proposed to the horrors of our present world, of improvement by creating more capitalism, is absurd. Capitalism is functioning as it must. It's not capitalism's fault as an ideology - it was designed to be this way.
The world being advocated by these altruistic technocrats is no better than our own: if we lived in their utopia, we'd be at the mercy of our 'betters' who would still form a separate class above the rest of society. The suggestions for how to give back are also laughable. Donating your time or money individually while doing nothing to challenge the system won't change anything. It is through radical societal change, radical democracy, that a new and better world can be achieved.
Neoliberals like this often feel the need to impress upon everyone that at least the floor is being raised - the amount of people in extreme poverty has gone down (by some metric) or the amount of people dying of disease has been reduced. But the real path to liberation isn't the gradual improvement of the bottom while the top gets fatter and richer and more powerful. The real solution is revolution. Take the table, take the world, break free from this failed system.
What can you do, then, if you're not going to nobly work at a hedge-fund and selflessly donate some of your salary to cure malaria? Advocate for the real change you want to see in the world. If you want to end climate change, start going to the climate strikes. If you want a better life you workers at low incomes, show them solidarity when they strike. If your boss uses your open source library for an ICE contract, delete the code. When the world begins to shift, and everyone looks around and wonders why everything is so wrong, don't use data to insist that everything is good, actually. Embrace the knowledge that something is wrong! Something is wrong! And the world is fucked if it doesn't change. Don't let incrementalists like Max fool you into thinking otherwise.
Ah yes, violent revolution, where the lower class gets killed en masse (a "noble sacrifice") and autocracy takes even greater hold as a result. The wheels of the revolution larpers are always greased with the blood of the downtrodden.
Revolution is not always violent and in fact is often not violent. Your reading of my comment as advocating violence is just your own projection.
Have fun storming the castle!
.. then what?
Advocate for the real change you want to see in the world.
Who am I to think I know what’s good for the world?
Something is wrong!
“It feels that X is true, therefore X is true” is a logical fallacy.
Ok everything is terrible but I quite like bread and circuses, at least compared to rationing and curfew.
Breaking everything is the easy bit, what would be a better replacement and how do you propose we build it?
I'd say it's too simplistic to imply people don't seek opportunity because it requires work, it's more to do with the fact the success rates are so low and the magnitude of work is so high now compared historically that most would rather seek other ways to add enjoyment to their lives and abandon the system.
That's not sustainable for our society to continue to be successful and it has to change back to more sane thresholds. Implying people are lazy is a copout to the real problem.
Measured how?
Man that is 180 degrees from my perception. Opportunity is often declined because a failed inventor (and most inventors fail) looks like someone who got nothing done. It looks like non-work.
Upper-middle class westerners can get away with this, because they've got enough capital to weather the period of speculative effort, and when it fails, they've got enough connections to get paid employment afterward.
A poorly capitalized, poorly connected person who messes around in a shed for two years and produces a pile of non-functional junk has a much harder time getting back into the game afterward, and they know this going in.
Not everyone can afford to be seen failing.
Perhaps. There are also a lot of people who think they cannot be seen failing and very well could.