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Comment by pasabagi | Hacker News Reader

Reading between the lines of his quote, my guess is he's angling for some cash from the government, by securitizing the tech sector. It won't work, because the treasury feels that spending money, like eating people, is always wrong. It won't cost any politicians anything when the bits and pieces of the UK tech sector go down the pipes, because their fortunes rest entirely on house prices, and the opinions of the fine people at Sky News. So expect another ten years of meaningless and toothless 'initiatives', sound and fury, signifying nothing, while the UK continues into another decade of death spiral.

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This is the same Treasury that just had its top civil servant and minister replaced, specifically in order to allow a massive splurge of borrowing and money printing on an ahistoric scale? That Treasury?

The UK's problem is not government unwillingness to spend money. The US tech sector was primed and bootstrapped almost entirely without government money after the wall fell, and even before that it was largely independent of government funding. And there just isn't the same culture there of people expecting grants or handouts from the government - even in the cases where the US tech industry was helped by USG spending it was all via military/intelligence research projects.

> The US tech sector was primed and bootstrapped almost entirely without government money

This is mostly wrong, if you read the enterpreneurial state.

origin_path is correct. US government money (i.e., defense spending) postwar largely went into directly military-applicable areas like aircraft and missiles. Bell Labs didn't create the transistor using defense money. TI and Intel didn't create the microprocessor using defense money. In turn, the major postwar defense advances—hydrogen bomb, nuclear submarine, ICBMs, satellite recon—were all developed pre-microprocessor; only stealth technology is a post-1970 development that would probably not be possible without massive computing power. ARPANET was one of many separate networking projects being designed around the US, and the others were corporate and/or academic.

That's not to say that US tech companies did not benefit from government spending; they did. But government was a big customer, and not the magic sugar daddy without which Silicon Valley and Route 128 and the Texas Triangle would not exist.

I think the US is probably the worst model for any state to follow, because it's just so different to every other state on the planet. The UK's historical position as global hegemon pushes the UK towards maintaining institutional attitudes and policies that only make sense if you are the global superpower, and the success of the US compounds this tendency, but the problem is, the UK is a middle-size state that just has none of the inherent positional or material resources the US has, so it results in lackluster economic growth. Which is what we've seen in the post-war era.

Trying to repeat the Silicon valley, when you have none of the massive geographic and historical advantages Silicon valley had, makes no sense, and I wish the UK would stop trying to copy what it cannot be (the massive global empire) and started trying to copy what it can be (all of the dynamic middle-size economies, like SK, Germany, or even Finland).

You are missing the foreat for the trees. Everyone is always taling about companies - guess what, they are made up of individual people with skills.

All the people who built wonderfull military technology were trained on the government payroll and after the war they were avaliable for employment by corporations. Loom at how microwave was invented

>Everyone is always taling about companies

The usual claim is "Silicon Valley was created by the US military", or "Silicon Valley was created by US government contracts". That just isn't true.

Again,

>Loom at how microwave was invented

That has nothing to do with Silicon Valley. Microwave ovens were

* accidentally created during work on military microwave communications, yes, but

* it was commercialized by existing industrial and appliance companies, as opposed to new Silicon Valley startups

> the treasury feels that spending money [] is always wrong

Governments virtually always make poor tech investment decisions. It is depressing watching my New Zealand government throw away serious coin on poor technology investment decisions.

Business friendly infrastructure is fertiliser which would cause businesses to grow like weeds. Simplify government mandated interactions, and lower risks caused by unnecessary government regulations. Create simple rules for businesses to be founded. Reduce red tape in areas like payroll, insurance, tax, employment law, etcetera.

In New Zealand, government red tape is not too bad, as compared to many other countries. But it is still a heavy burden for a founder, with a lot of unnecessary requirements. The barriers need to be lowered because creating a business is hard enough without the extra burden of a bunch of government regulated crap.

I’m not saying delete all rules, I am saying prioritise rules and provide default systems that make it easy to follow necessary rules correctly. Remove needless rules and make it easy to conform to the rules; by providing good resources, providing good default software, and by having some rules staggered so that they are only applied after relevant targets are exceeded (a few years, number of employees, total revenue, whatever).

Keep the important rules, provide necessary protections for employees, provide social fallback for failure (ACC, welfare, health systems). The limited liability company was an amazing innovation a long time ago, because it removed a bunch of risks.

> It won't cost any politicians anything when the bits and pieces of the UK tech sector go down the pipes, because their fortunes rest entirely on house prices,

People want to live (and buy housing) where there are good jobs.

> People want to live (and buy housing) where there are good jobs.

That sentence is fundamental.

If demand is what is driving prices, sure. Except the government has shown time and time again there are mechanisms (e.g reducing stamp duty) that can prop up prices while demand is weak. If you look at the last few years of housing policy, you see a picture of increasingly dramatic measures to artificially inflate house prices, independent of the actual value of the houses to the people who live in them.

> the treasury feels that spending money, like eating people, is always wrong

I feel the Treasury would be more likely to hand out free soylent green than start spending money

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