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Comment by mustafa_pasi | Hacker News Reader

But that is a good! Contrast that with other countries where the financial landscape is super conservative when it comes to investment and innovation, like in many EU countries. Economic growth is lower, jobs are fewer, and salaries are lower, and there are less exciting jobs where you can truly build the future. Americans do not appreciate what they have. You do not want the alternative! Appreciate your overly optimistic dumb money. It is a good thing for everyone.

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I don't want to build the future I just want dental care for my children.

Universal health care is important, necessary, cheaper than our current system, and I support it. But it's a completely orthogonal concern to the state of the tech economy.

I see an argument in this thread for laissez faire capitalism; its political ramifications are entirely relevant to the state of universal health care in the United States. The economy is interconnected -- the mathematical concept of orthogonality is rarely appropriate when describing broad economic complexities. But perhaps you should simply suggest that a health care discussion here is off-topic?

Culture might be a link between risk taking venture capitalists and less publicly financed social security. However I do not think there is an economic lock that forces a society to be either or. I can easily imagine a society that provides both a good safety net and where capitalists are willing to invest and innovate.

I guess what is missing is the right mentality and attitude, so like, our cultures have not evolved to that level yet.

I grew up in (western, to be clear) Europe and never received adequate dental care either.

And yet, despite having less jobs and lower salaries, many countries of europe tend to have less signs of poverty: women are less likely to die in childbirth, there's less gun violence, less homeless and child hunger...

The US has half the homelessness rate of the UK or France. Childbirth is due to lack of universal health care and gun violence is due to the massive number of guns – not the tech economy.

That might be right, but bear in mind the UK counts temporarily housed people (e.g. people couch surfing) as homeless, not just people literally on the streets. These stats may not be directly comparable.

As someone who wanders around the US and UK a bit, they're definitely not comparable.

Those are orthogonal, or are you implying lack of VCs create those conditions?

> women are less likely to die in childbirth

This one has been debunked many times. US healthcare attempts riskier births that would otherwise be aborted.

What I see is that the underclass in Europe is better taken care off than the underclass in the US. But the working and middle classes in America are richer and have more opportunities than their counterparts in Europe.

All of this, is completely orthogonal to whether or not private capital is willing to invest in risky ventures rather than hoard their capital in very secure incremental investments.

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