It also helps make it easy for entrepreneurs to start companies and create jobs in the US and is a direct reason why we don't see the same innovation in regulation-heavy regions.
If you're talking about why we don't see more visible commercial innovation from European countries then it's more about access to the enormous amounts of capital to build a big name startup like Uber etc.
Nobody notices the legions of small bootstrapped or seed to profitable software businesses across the EU.
I would think that since innovation and growth (caused by innovative use of resources or increase in efficiency or novel products and services) in general should be relative to the population and its state to begin with, nominal GDP growth per annum would be a reasonable metric as a proxy for the wildly non-measurable "innovation in terms of GDP"; for reference, here's the data for 2018:
USA: 2.9% Canada: 1.9%
Sweden: 2.2% Norway: 1.3% Finland: 1.7% Denmark: 2.4%
Germany: 1.5% France: 1.7%
Ireland: 8.2% (not a typo, likely explained by expansion of business services from NA into EU) UK: 1.4%
Portugal: 2.4% Italy: 0.8% Greece: 1.9% Spain: 2.4%
Germany is at 3.4% of GDP spending on R&D and the USA at 2.8% France is also right up there at 2.2%
I'm going with the OECD definition here: https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm
Pivotal products are a better milestone than vague estimates of R&D spending.
Tesla sales are a fraction of any of the big three in terms of sales or revenue.
They sold 192,000 vehicles in the US in 2019. Each of the Big Three sold well over three million.
Tesla currently loses $2500 on every vehicle they sell
People always seem to compare Tesla technology of tomorrow with what its competitors are doing right now. That's why Volvo "only" has level 3 self-driving, while Tesla has a fleet of robotaxis that are earning you money on its ride-sharing app while you sleep.
I joke, but a large portion of the Tesla fan base has no clue what is going on in the autonomous driving or auto manufacturer world outside of Tesla. Tesla has been a big innovator, but they aren't leaders in everything....not even close.
The thread is about innovation, so that's what counts. And what other manufacturer matches what Tesla has driving on the roads today? The closest realistic challenger is the expensive Porsche Taycan which is still missing all the functionality and usability features.
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Little known German company ZF has almost double the revenue of Tesla. They also make the transmission for the Porsche Taycan EV that's outselling the 911.
Tesla has sub-1% market share in the global auto market and rapidly declining energy product deployment (they deployed 4x more MW 4 years ago than the did last year). Let's not pretend Tesla has taken over anything yet.
German companies with more revenue than Amazon: Volkswagen, Daimler, BMW, Allianz, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, Uniper, Bosch.
On the smaller end, Germany also has a comparable number of employer firms per capita as the U.S.
Empirically it largely is a myth that worker protection and consumer protection stiffles enterprises or innovation.
Valuation reflects market sentiment and potential but perhaps I should have left it out. The real focus is the "world-changing" aspect of the products produced.
What have been the recent global innovations produced by those German companies? Anything turned into a household name?
That's why they're called a "hidden champion".
We've had gyroscopes for a century. The iPhone is innovative because it used that to implement a new device that changed mobile computing.
I'm actually not quite sure what you mean with the "global innovations" part, though, could you expand on that? What is it that makes e.g. Microsoft innovative?
What I see is the your big four all sell consumer product/ services and thus are more visible. E.G. Bosch is developing electric powertrain components, produces radar/lidar and video sensors for autonomous driving. Bosch also produces the robots used in those mostly-automated factories.
Seriously? Should they eat cake as well?
The ability to hire and fire fast is undeniably helpful for companies, and being able to quit and move to new jobs is just as useful for personal career development. It might not be for everyone, but it's not any less valid.
Adding more regulations will bring equivalent trade-offs because that's the reality of economics. Do you disagree?
If you want to get bogged down in technicalities and anecdotes though, then sure life isn't fair. I worked manual labor before and now own multiple properties. I guess it's just magic.
There are outliers, but we’re talking about broad systemic patterns.
You evidently went to an okay UC - you probably had supportive parents. Be it emotional or financial support. Perhaps both! Perhaps your family life was reasonably stable. Perhaps you had three square meals most of your youth.
The point is that you are in a position to access capital that is markedly different from a lot of individuals born into lower socioeconomics striations in society and the statistics are weighed :heavily: against them.
This is often through no fault of their own.
Thank your lucky stars the world aligned for you as it did. Where and with whom you started that life made a far bigger difference than any perceived grit you might think you exercised.
I guess eventually owning a factory is just impossible right?
Getting loans is hard, especially if you're one of the working poor. Starting a company that doesn't die after a few years is harder. When you're one of the 40% of Americans who can't cover an unexpected $400 expense, if you company fails you're fucked. The social safety net in the US is a joke.
I was simply stating that truth, not defending it nor saying other realities can't exist. But there is always a trade-off. What part of that is so controversial?
Perhaps things have changed and the balance needs to be shifted now. That's a great discussion to have, but let's actually have a discussion then.
But yes, different places are different and life isn't fair. No need to cutoff any discussion of various economic systems and environments for the same basic retorts.
https://youtu.be/xXze8_SzW28?t=431 <---Granted he's got Youtuber money and other gun-sales related money to help, but the concept is the same....he's bootstrapping a factory after purchasing the relevant capital infrastructure using his own money.
This is the difference. Most Americans don't have access to this capital, or access to means of borrowing this capital, and if they do have the means then they might not necessarily be able to shoulder the risk.
It's not for everyone. Sure, most people have no appetite for the level of risk involved even if they can scrape together the money to buy some revenue-generating asset (I know a guy who left the Marine Corps as a truck driver...moved back to Japan, bought a truck, and then opened a moving company). Most people don't have access to capital....nor will most people ever have the intellect to write tight software code, no matter how many government-backed Code Bootcamp Initiatives there are.
To bring this back to the original point though, telling someone to bootstrap a factory, which is demonstrably doable in the American economy even today (for flexible definitions of "factory"), shouldn't ever be a "controversial" piece of advice. Especially on an pro-entrepreneurship site like YC/HN.
That the other side of the coin is misery for those, who have not the means to exercise these freedoms, that is the problem your comments ignore.
There is always theoretical freedom and practical (real) freedom. It is not evident, that the USA offers more freedom to the average person.
Whether you (can) take advantage is completely orthogonal to the original question of why the USA is "an aberration in this regard", and I would rather not devolve into yet another rehash about fairness and opportunity.
in europe at least that part is gone, you start your own company not out of necessity but out of motivation.
America just chooses more freedom than government mandated security. There's some slight trade-off but it is nowhere near as problematic as media makes it seem.
VCs might be interested in your app but not in a random bakery which is also a business of a type that is probably more common.
Also VCs take a share which makes them the owner as well but oh well.
There are 10s of millions of business owners in America. Ask any of them how they did it.
1. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217192745.h...
But really? The thing most preventing you from starting a factory today is... because you can't find the land? Alright then.
Finding and controlling land to expand your business is not a serious limiting issue. You have effectively infinite headroom before you need to worry that you can't own a factory on Earth because too many other factories already exist.