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Comment by eaenki | Hacker News Reader

Imo

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

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I don't think just giving the money to whoever has a prototype is a good idea. Some culturally relevant projects aren't the sort of thing you can make a prototype of, but I like where you're going. I'd amend it like so:

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.

If it is voting contest then I am afraid we will end up with reality shows like Kardashian pretending to be working on idea.

Maybe requirement should be voting on projects have to be anonymous. Public cannot know projects owner completion of funding rounds

That's a cool system. What country, if you don't mind sharing?

"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."

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.

The money is taken regardless, whether through higher prices on goods sold, higher interest rates on money borrowed, lower returns on investments, or higher taxes. The question is what will do the most good for the most people at the highest efficiency.

Is that the question? Is that written somewhere? Or is the question, what will lead me (elected representative) to achieve my personal ambitions of, for example, being re-elected or landing a high paying job in the private sector?

is it really the tax payers? and is it really being taken by force? the government also gets funding by taking on debt, or can print more currency; not everything comes from a tax payer.

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

Do you have an unspoken premise that this nation belongs to the government? If so, I would say that this nation belongs to the citizens instead.

Found the libertarian!

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.

Who controls government?

Not all money that government generates comes from tax payers.

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.

As a taxpayer I'm not interested in paying people to take a year off. If they want to do that they can save up their own money.

So you prefer to pay 10 times or 100 times the amount to subsidize debt which drives the capital appreciation of stocks to benefit rich shareholders and executives who either sit around and do nothing, or worse: they use the money to create shitty companies which waste everyone's time and energy... Then when the companies finally go bankrupt after a decade everyone loses except the executives who are actually responsible for the whole mess to begin with... Then they use the proceeds of their years of huge salary and bonuses to fund their next shitty company and repeat the process over and over again.

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 so much wrong with this post, I don't know where to begin. It scares me how quickly the US population is turning on entrepreneurs. Do you really believe starting a company is the easier route? Is it better to just complain and demand tax payers equalize all opportunities for non risk takers like yourself?

It is definitely sometimes the easier route for some people when it comes to getting rich quickly without contributing much to society

I'm pretty sure that I've taken more risks than most entrepreneurs. It's a mistake to assume that if someone is not financially successful, that they haven't taken risks. This kind of logic was never accurate and it's getting even less so over time.

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.

It doesn't matter how many risks you take. What counts is taking the right risks.

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.

Even if what you say is true, transferring money from taxpayers to other taxpayers to take a year off doesn't fix it.

I believe this is a false dichotomy. Many of us would rather not pay for either and dislike the notion that if we don't pay for one, we have to pay for the other. Why isn't 'neither' an option?

That's the sound of a door being slammed very hard with no consideration of what you may get back in return.

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.

I support government funding for basic research as long as there is proper oversight and accountability. That's a totally different situation.

That's a good point, upvoted, however in my one experience of a government funded R&D project many years ago I was involved in, a bunch of universities was asked to produce a product.

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.

We can call it the year of innovation. For one year projects get funded that otherwise never would. The output would solve many problems and create so many opportunities.

This is kind of how research at universities and public research institutes is funded by grants. You get money to do research, you publish a paper on your research and if it is deemed to have made enough impact, more grants will be funded and you get more money to continue.

Playing along with your idea, I propose that we let people sign up to withdraw early from their social security, but at the expense of having to keep working longer before they get it when they retire.

My personal opinion is that the average person is struggling not to die of obesity or become diabetic, not be massively in debt, take reasonably good care of their kids, attain a reasonable level of education, etc. So from this perspective nobody really cares about a computer programmer getting to do an interesting project for a year.

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.

> My personal opinion is that the average person is struggling not to die of obesity or become diabetic, not be massively in debt, take reasonably good care of their kids, attain a reasonable level of education, etc. So from this perspective nobody really cares about a computer programmer getting to do an interesting project for a year.

This is so poetically stated.

If I had been given $1 million when I was 22 to build something, the world would have a pretty awesome Honda Civic with a flamethrower on the front, a 40" subwoofer in the hatch, and a dial to change the camber angle of the wheels on the fly.

That doesn’t sound far fetched tho, which would be the main requirement

What is far fetched in your opinion?

Anything that’s meant to bring a x10 improvement in how fast or far humans move, how fast humans can learn and communicate, how long humans live, any creature’s freedom, environment cleanliness

That's an impressive list and it's entirely different than what mine would look like.

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).

I'm going to be a bit bolshy here. Every time I see or hear the word Art, my back goes up. I'd never say that art is worthless, it might be one of the few valuable things in life, but a lot of Art that gets done seems to have no value, even aesthetic.

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.

Writing? I think that's the basic human creative act, putting thoughts to paper - words, music, whatever

Any human that is driven to solve these problems will not need the government to fund them to do so. They will solve these problems with the very gumption necessary to bring their solutions to market (which $1M wouldn't help them do anyway, if they didn't have it).

What about the wing, though?

Of course there would be a wing. I didn't think I needed specify that.

The Honda Sivickk

Where can I buy one?

Dynamic alignment. I like it.

If I had that amount of money I would try to build an army of humanoid robots. However I think the end result won't be much more useful than an animatronic manequin. AGI doesn't exist so even a simple feature like "bring out the trash" would be a million dollar project by itself.

I really wish you could build a robot that could "bring out the trash" with just $1 MM, but robotics is not so forgiving. Anki, which raised around $200 MM, started with advanced toy robots and were shifting towards a home chore robot and ran out of money before they had a prototype. The only company I know with a viable solution in this space, and honestly I am stretching 'viable' in terms of what it can do for what it costs, is Boston Dynamics. It'll be interesting when someone finally leaks a price for SpotMini - I'd guess something like $60k.

Just like Casey Neistad spent budget for Nike commercial on doing stupid shit around the world. There was also a band of musicians that got loads of cash from music company and they wasted it on drugs in Berlin instead of production of an album (someone on Joe Rogan, don't remember name).

So those things happen in some people reality.

Instantly made me think of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7hhDINyBP0

You'd have been highly motivated to complete the project, and would almost certainly have learned things.

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.

That's cool. If I'd gotten that money at 22, the world would have a reddit-like that weighted the clout points that you could give to someone else's post inversely to how similar you were to the other poster (based on the style and content of your previous posts), thereby helping to alleviate the echo chamber effect found on other discussion forums. Not that I could have actually gotten it off the ground even with funding.

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.

This sounds similar enough to the SBIR/STTR program that many federal agencies already have from the NIH and Department of Agriculture too DARPA. Basically a company pitches an idea to a federal agency which if accepted will give you something like 100k (phase 1) to explore the initial idea and place in you in a pipeline that can lead to much more money if the idea seems valuable and doable (phase 2 and phase 3). This program has led to the development of all types of cool technology and has supported a bunch of small businesses. However it is not the silver bullet you are suggesting it is.

Primarily not a silver bullet in this case because it takes like 6 months and it’s a pretty involved submission. A VC firm just writes you a check. I have personal experience with this. The issue comes down to speed and decision making. The government can’t ever let a single person be responsible for something like this, so there is a lot of CYA.

Phase 1's are really not that hard to get, and the process is not nearly as stifling as you are alluding too. Most people without prior funding or reputation don't just get instant money from VCs. Convincing them to give you money can take a decent amount of time too. Especially if you are trying to do something actually out of the box not just something like "Its like UBER but for ..." Just speculating, but I would bet if you are a just starting out and are not well connected getting a phase 1 would be easier than getting VC funding.

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.

Well, I don’t think it’s a given that a mild potential product or a x100 investment product add anything. I feel like only far fetched products do,

which usually resolve in a x100 ROI, but that’s a random byproduct

I can only speak from my experience, which is watching a good friend go through the process. It's been very lengthy for them.

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.

Yes. Just like that. And Google and Boston Dynamics came out of it. That’s amazing. Now what if the budget could be $30B a year, $1-3MM instead of $100K (which might have been suitable in 1997, certainly not today) and take 2 months instead of a year (or whatever it takes)? :)

You don’t need $1m to see if an idea is feasible. Budget isn’t the issue for those programs, it’s getting enough applicants with ideas that are even reasonable in the first place.

Oh yes, you do, in the current envoirement. You compete for the same attention from retail consumers and enterprises. The price to reach said consumer gets ever higher + the usual monetary inflation. That's why every company is raising $1MM+ in seed nowdays while decent ones are raising $3MM+.

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.

> Oh yes, you do, in the current envoirement. You compete for the same attention from retail consumers and enterprises. The price to reach said consumer gets ever higher + the usual monetary inflation. That's why every company is raising $1MM+ in seed nowdays while decent ones are raising $3MM+.

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.

If you’re already trying to reach customers it sounds like you’ve already built a product. Make up your mind.

>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

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.

Well, the twist is those are far fetched and they have a prototype. e.g If you want to build a reusable rocket and you already have something 100 times smaller, kind of working but not really and one contract to be paid upon delivery, that's good enough, most likely, when there are 30 companies building reusable rockets and 29970 more a year doing other far fetched things, in theory

Many of those Kickstarters also had or claimed to have prototypes.

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.

Well, that would function as a seed round. And having a breakthrough would mean it’s proprietary. Aka you didn’t buy it at the hobby store. If you have a prototype demonstrating a breakthrough that’s enough imo. I can only recall Oculus from kickstarter and it has been fairly successful

>And having a breakthrough would mean it’s proprietary. Aka you didn’t buy it at the hobby store.

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.

Yes, but in the prior comment you just said you could present what you just bought off the shelf

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.

Education as a whole is not and cannot be overvalued enough given the trajectory of technology, society, and the nature of work.

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.

Capital is not underappreciated - it is hidden by owners. Because their power and wealth comes from control of a scarce, hidden resource. If everyone had access to capital, nobody would be “on top”, and that’s unacceptable to the owning classes.

Mhh, I simply suspect that a family would rather fund their son’s projects and their friends because of human’s nature, and since one can’t ask a stranger to fund him, and not everyone can be bff with rich dudes, this is probably a problem better solved by the gov

“...and since one can’t ask a stranger to fund him...”

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?

Sometimes it's a substance-free scammy marketing exercise.

Name one company that raised its first million with an IPO in the last few decades. Let alone one that did so while producing something like Google

Last few decades? You do know that includes the dot com boom that was filled with tech companies doing early IPOs with basically nothing to show?

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.

Again, name one company that has been world changing and raised the seed round in an IPO. None.

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.

> You do know that includes the dot com boom that was filled with tech companies doing early IPOs with basically nothing to show?

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.

I believe they meant underappreciated by the general public when assessing differing outcomes or new policy ideas. Clearly capital owners don't underappreciate capital.

Yes that’s what I meant

But if you ask them about it they'll tell you they're practically giving it away!

Terms and conditions may apply though...

Everyone can’t have access to capital. It’s a scarce resource. The study of economics is literally the study of the allocation of resources. If you distributed wealth completely equally across the world. It would take long before the world looks exactly as it does now. Some people make bad decisions and would lose it. Others would have it stolen. Others would be frugal and accumulate, and other would be bold and become extremely rich. Once that happens, do we strip it all away again and start over? Life isn’t a Monopoly game where we get to reset the board each time someone loses.

And that's why we should have an aggressive tax scheme that covers income, capital gains, and estates and a process that is able to rapidly respond to loopholes.

OP meant the importance of it compared to ability.

Perhaps worth noting that the U.S. government already has a grant program with approximately this budget range. Pell grants give money to students who need money.

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.

Pell grants force the spending to be allocated to universities.

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 go directly to students, so what do you mean about the universities spending it wastefully?

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 find most universities to be borderline scams. The ones I deem not a scam, don't draw any benefit from that.

I explained in another reply what I mean by far fetched products, which can be valued mathematically

> I find most universities to be borderline scams. The ones I deem not a scam, don't draw any benefit from that.

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.

No, because we’re not optimizing for ROI like VCs. You’d lose a ton of money funding 500 space Xs because they’ll all fail most likely, without even returning a percentage point

If you offer millions of dollars to anyone with a far fetched idea and a prototype, everyone will have a far fetched idea and a prototype, and you'll need some way to filter millions of applicants down to the 30k you can afford to give the money. It would be extremely competitive, just like VC is now, and picking the winners smartly/fairly would be just as difficult.

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.

I don’t know. According to personal experience and to Chamath and Peter Thiel, a lot of great people doing great things can’t raise anything beyond friends and family.

Yeah, I don't dispute that. I just don't know that your plan would help with that much beyond simply injecting more money into the system. Instead of money going to the top < 1% of founders who figure out how to effectively pitch investors, it would go to the top < 1% who figure out how to effectively pitch a government agency. Determining who is and isn't "great" is extremely difficult and I don't see any reason why the government would be any better at it than investors are currently, so you'll still have truly great people getting passed over and others who don't deserve it getting the money.

>It would be extremely competitive, just like VC is now, and picking the winners smartly/fairly would be just as difficult.

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.

That's basically the thought process behind Tyler Cowen's 'Emergent Ventures' program. He secured a few million dollars that he can unilaterally give out to moonshot innovators, mainly to prove that traditional grant-making bureaucracies are inefficient.

Site here: https://www.mercatus.org/emergentventures

Info about cohorts here: https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=emergent+ventures

Unbelievably childish idea which would be trivial to gamify.

You only have to look at the industrialised corruption of public tenders for legitimate needs in Africa for a glimpse of human nature.

While this is just a very basic idea I put out, still, corruption is rampant everywhere anyway. I suspect it would be a net positive to have a ton of Brilliant students getting money for their projects even if half of the money are corrupted away.

You can't satisfy corruption by throwing money at it and hoping it only takes its share. It won't. It will take it all, and then it will find a way to take more besides.

Well, a lot of the budget of any given government is corrupted away, regardless of what you put that into. But some inevitably goes to what it was meant to address. It won’t take it all, or no one would have any access to healthcare facilities and public transport. But we do.

So what is the solution to corruption?

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)

Most of the west is not corrupt. You have to visit eastern europe, latin america, middle east and east asia to experience it

The solution is not throwing more free money in public coffers. It definitively exacerbated corruption in greece for example

So you are saying that free money is not a solution. Ok, then what is a solution?

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?

I do agree with the sentiment that via political donations the U.S. political system is corrupted, but I hope you can offer a citation for the millions killed and hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens, and a clear cause and effect of the stated motivation, please. I think most of what you said is an overstatement, not to belittle those that suffered because of greed.

You are right, millions might be an exaggeration, I was going off of numbers read elsewhere online.

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.

I'm limiting it to U.S. citizens (soldiers) because I can with some confidence say that U.S. policy at least can be traced as a cause of their death.

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.

> 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?

> I don't see all lives as equal

> but I don't see all lives as equal either, for the record.

On the off chance of you having some plausible explanation for this outrageous statement I invite you to expand on this.

Which west? The one that has legal corruption under name of lobbying? Or the west which has internally, without the need of pescy public's say, elected chair of governance?

>Most of the west is not corrupt.

That's laughable.

I suspect it another millenial fantasy much like basic income et al

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

Giving people money at minimum redistributes wealth, so it cannot possibly be any worse, than letting wealth concentrate.

It's a slippery slope as to whom you disenfranchised to redistributed that cash: but it will inevitably be a large group of people in the middle, not the minority elite you sold the policy on.

If some people can't accumulate something they can't do bigger things as creators or create bigger markets as consumers.

You won't disenfranchise anyone, because the investment will more than pay for itself. That's the point.

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.

Is great that a random made up number justifies your argument.

To put $30bn a year in perspective, that buys you a basic income of about $10.12 a month in the US for all adults.

If you take an extra $20k from me per year in the form of taxes, how does some kid’s invention actually pay me back? Am I a shareholder in this project? Will I get a return on that $20k? Will the government give me my $20k back plus a profit?

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.

> Will I get a return on that $20k?

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.

From where I stand, I seems not very far from that argument to arguing in favor of trickle down economics being a success by the same mechanism.

I see parallels too, but trickle down economics is about sending capital "up" in the hope that what's produced trickles back down from wealthy people, whereas the idea of investing in lots of people is more like sending capital "down", or at least sideways.

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).

The minute you give a bunch of people $1-3MM as upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21034871), you're sending $30-90BB "up", by definition, from the perspective of the typical American (median household wealth of $97,300). It's perhaps just not as far up, so not as far that it needs to trickle down, but it seems more or less the same on a zoomed out level and puts the recipients at 10-30x the median wealth. Simply investing that sum in index equity funds would typically provide a income to place a household around the median household income over a four decade period without working.

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?

I think the proposed idea is not supposed to allow people to simply invest the money and live off the proceeds.

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.

>Giving people money at minimum redistributes wealth, so it cannot possibly be any worse

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.

I think the parent is a variation on the "poor should stay poor, rich should stay rich" argument. With the poor not mentioned, and implicitly not counted.

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.)

Shall we take a kidney from the healthy to transplant into those with need? If we don't, are we essentially saying "people with kidney failure don't matter"?

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 disagree only with the grandparent post's argument that an administrative approach would be bad because a subset of people would be worse off under it.

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.

This is only if you outright ignore the second+ order effects of doing such and the incentives created.

I agree with you; that's what I meant when I said I don't agree personally with simplistic redistribution.

Making the middle class poor by taking away their ability to own a home, etc is absolutely not a “poor people don’t matter” argument. It’s a “let’s not destroy a stable part of society in a ham-fisted attempt to help the poor”.

Refuting dumb ideas to help the poor doesn’t mean I don’t care about helping them.

> giving people with no life experience, exposure to failure or real life dynamics will end badly

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?

Apprently I'm a millenial so I'm more than happy to use the moniker .

> spitting out unprovoked hate towards a whole generation of people?

Care to cite the basis of your assertion?

Very concerning reply. While you’re at it, don’t ever step outside or use a knife. You might injure yourself

Corruption is not rampant everywhere. And perhaps that gets at the root of why some places have functioning modern economies and others do not.

Switzerland, Norway and who else exactly? Out of 100+ countries

Full list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

It would have been faster if you just replied with “CA and NZ”, since those are the only other countries on that list, which btw, I’m skeptical of.

In your quest to rattle of glib retorts, you have failed to bother even reading the list. There are about a dozen countries with similar levels of corruption as Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, and New Zealand. And then there’s a whole bunch of other countries that are pretty close.

Yes I barely checked the index because the index I consider good from the UN doesn’t list them as the least corrupted ones. This is a perceived index. I’m pretty skeptical of Sweden, NZ and CA being corruption free. They don’t have anything exceptional to back it up anyway.

You still haven’t actually provided any evidence for your position. At this point, you’re just some person on the Internet with strong opinions. Most people on this site won’t take you seriously because our lived experience is in the first world and corruption is not a thing most of us have ever encountered.

NZ is surprisingly corrupt, especially at the regional and district health board (DHB) level. Not in an absolute sense, just compared to expectations.

I'd say it does. During a modeling project I worked on back when I was in school, my team found that beyond any other social or economic factor the value of the corruption index was the best correlated to how f'd up a country was. The next best was, I think, women's literacy or some other equality measure.

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.

Cortuption is one of the biggest differentiating factors between successful/unsuccessful countries

I agree. A lot of people would just secretly buy real estate or some other investment instead of actually doing the work.

Are you We CEO?

Balkanization of the real estate market into the hands of less savvy, more competitive operators might be a good thing, actually?

The problem with pitching an idea is that person should have exposure to a particular field if the field is already developed. In my opinion the low hanging fruits are mostly taken. To have exposure it falls in the same trap where the person should be given an opportunity which is simply not there. Personally I have the same problem where it is difficult to get opportunity because people already present are simply blocking it.

>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.

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.

Thats how biomedical research funding works. Its not pretty, thousands of unambitious tiny studies , tons of overlap, millions dead mice , but progress is slow

Unfortunately your suggestion will lead to a flood of scam phony prototypes to scoop up grant money. It'll be like the worst of Kickstarter on a larger scale.

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.

>Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated,

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.

There’s way more people complaining about expensive or poor education around the world than lack of growth capital for their far fetched science research / companies

So I would deem it to be under appreciated by the general public

Wouldn't that follow from the fact that there are way more people concerned with the state of education (because everyone must be educated) than there are people who have ideas for far fetched science research and companies? Education is viewed (rightly in my opinion) as an intrinsic good. Somebody's far fetched idea for a company isn't.

Well, it could be equally appreciated if all those humans longing for better/cheaper education realized how much better their life because they can learn literally anything for free with a tap/click because someone runs Google/YT, which to take off required some growth capital (an ironic example in this context, yes)

They don't underappreciate capital in that case, they underappreciate the value of online education for various reasons (doubts about quality being one), the weight of tradition on higher education, and the fact that many (perhaps even most) people who go into higher education want a degree to show prospective employers (this is of course itself showing the appreciation and necessity of playing the capital game in their lives).

A handful of far-fetched ideas have added more economic value to the world than every diploma combined. I’m not sure we could even assign a dollar value to crazy ideas like satellites or the internet because the positive externalities they’ve created are so far-reaching.

Crazy ideas a lot harder to evaluate, and a lot riskier, but they’re definitely not less valuable.

The crazy ideas you cite as examples came from people with diplomas.

Can substitute airplanes[0] and computer games/graphics[1], though if we have to be that pedantic I found a couple names[2] in the history of satellites section of wikipedia that don't seem to have formal education beyond a military technical school.

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

Of course you can find examples of people who didn't get a diploma and had significant inventions, there are a few truly smart and totally self-motivated people in the world! Using Carmack & the Wright Brothers doesn't actually support what @elliekelly claimed above, nor contradict my comment. The claim made above that inventions outweigh education economically is a false proposition for starters, but it's also a claim that is going to be extremely tough to back up because (my claim is) inventions are statistically correlated with education, and not just a little. I think if you stack up all the important inventions, you'll find a vast, vast majority of the inventors have diplomas, and that major inventions by people with little to no formal education beyond childhood are relatively rare.

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...

http://www2.itif.org/2016-demographics-of-innovation.pdf

Actually I think creativity and innovation is best stimulated under limitations and constraints, not with blank checks

I think it depends on the constraints, and what kind of innovation you hope for.

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.

In the age of multibillionaires it’s a good reminder that universal no strings attached basic income leads to entrepreneurship, better education, better health, better parenting, and better economic outcomes for the locales applying it. It saves money.

See Rutger Bregman’s Talks and research as well as his book Utopia for realists.

I don't know that I agree that capital is "under appreciated".

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.

The US does not "[print] an unlimited supply of dollars" for if we did, they would cease to be the world reserve currency and be valueless.

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.)

They sure do.

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.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m1

> 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

So giving millions to people who are already privileged enough to have access to the tools/resources/education to make to a prototype?

You usually can make a prototype of literally anything with less than $10K. Education on the internet is free. And the internet itself is free at any Starbucks.

The cost of your unpaid time is often the most expensive thing.

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.

$10k is an unthinkable amount of money to spend on a prototype for the vast majority of Americans.

How ? $10K doesn't go very far in most areas of deep tech, where most significant inventions are usually created.

Just give everyone enough to cover food, rent and health. So that you can work forever on something, or maybe not work at all. With less people working employment wages would go up alot especially in sectors no one wants to work in.

More money for the rich people. Groundbreaking.

> 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

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?

> producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier.

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?

Most products are either chemical addiction (FB, Coca Cola, tobacco), vaporware (Most B2B), non world changing utility (intuit, JPM)

Nothing that you've bought you actually wanted?

A Mac and the iPhone 3G. A Tesla X would also be great. But I already mentioned those companies

Often, getting a prototype is the costly part.

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.

I also like the idea of free money from government. There seems to be a lot of like minded people who like free money, maybe we should develop a political party around that?

This isn’t free money for personal use, this is money that you legally have to spend developing that far fetched idea.

And how is that enforced? Are we going to arrest people that choose to spend the money developing some far fetched idea at a cantina in Cabo?

You enforce the law on your citizens just like with any other citizen for any other financial crime. Usually one shows up at your door, then you go to court, etc.

Grant agencies are able to enforce it (to some extent) when giving grants to R&D businesses. Through auditing and reporting.

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.

Who will decide what projects to fund? Officials with good networking you mentioned?

It should come down to a measurable function

There has recently been a similar thread to spread research funds much more uniformly, rather than concentrated among “successful” researchers and “hot topics.” It was pretty convincing to me, and I wish I had the references.

I'm no fan of parts of what the evil empire google does, but it's super spying network has the potential to massively accelerate medical research. For better or worse I guess.

Isn't Peter Thiel doing that with the Thiel Grants? Pretty successful so far (projects Ethereum, Aragorn... founded by grantees).

I once regarded Ethereum as the the only successful project out of it. But is it? Did it create anything meaningfully better? Not really. Anyway, yes. And Peter Thiel’s fellowship is great. It’s just that he doesn’t have $30B a year to spare on that

Decentralized scripting that large numbers of developers know how to use is powerful. Entire parts of the internet could shift to that in the long term. Obviously, it's a long way away... but that's a given. Even if you choose another crypto and say it has a better approach because of x, y and z mining or other infra, you can't argue with the fact that Ethereum has increased the competition in the space.

It’s nice as I said, but it didn’t impact anything, and most likely never will. Even if the whole internet switched to that, there’s no x10 improvement in anything interesting. Unless you think airplanes are as good as owning your data and not having a few big entities owning the major services (which btw, you’d still have, because the oracle problem is basically impossible to efficiently solve).

>there’s no x10 improvement in anything interesting

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.

You can't choose between tech and people. You have to trust both.

Not with crypto. It's trustless. That statement is a blanket statement that might seem correct at first but technically is completely wrong when it comes to crypto and well implemented smart contracts. See "The Byzantine Generals Problem": https://decryptionary.com/dictionary/byzantine-generals-prob....

This model ignores the areas where you need trust and focuses instead on making an impenetrable black box for communications. That might be useful, but you can still be backstabbed by the other generals, or your soldiers or the programmer who put something fun in the implementation.

Bitconnect, mtgox and every other imploded bitcoin service illustrates the point to the tune of billions.

I’m not sure this applies if you’re 5, or if you’re ten. Quality education during formative years seems invaluable.

Think your solution ends up being a lot more exploitable/costly than basic income

I see no relation between them and at $30B a year, that’s $10/m per American or smth, so... no?

Your 30B number is assuming perfect efficiency. You're not accounting for having to go through thousands of prototypes of perpetual motion machines

You might as well've said "The patent office should grant 1M alongside every patent it grants"

It should be pretty close to a math function. It must be 10x something great. If it’s supposed to 10x the speed of human travel, and there’s some plausible reason to believe there’s a chance it’ll work (TBD what exactly that is) then it gets funded.

This is basically the pitch for YC

> Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated,

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.

Why should the federal government do this? 'The founding fathers intended the states to be social and economic experiments.'

I find it frustrating that anything remotelt consistent with the scientific method is effectively shunned in economic policy and politics.

Well the US is the major superpower in good part because of Cisco, Bell Labs, Fairchild, Intel, Apple, Lockheed, Google etc.

Are we speaking military expenditure, basic research, or entrepreneurialism?

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.

Even Lockheed (or some other aerospace company) at some point was a risky venture developing far fetched tech, doing basic research

So I’d answer: all of them

That's because we suck at politics, not space. America is not just exceptional, it is unique.

It’s odd that you use a government-funded program as an example of US liberty and poor economic resources failing. Isn’t SpaceX a shining counter example in the fact that it is successful without involuntary taxation as its entire operating budget?

SpaceX is built on the original state-funded R&D that allowed NASA to create a space program in the first place.

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 has been bested by foreign competition which has flooded innovation markets with cheap money.

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.

>Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated

Is this HN satire?

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