Comment by ecopoesis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ecopoesis | Hacker News Reader

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What an incredibly naive view of the world.

As others have pointed out, reducing education to "moar money!" is simplistic.

Reforming immigration only seems good at lowering employer costs. Are there any studies that show it would help growth? Maybe we should instead focus our efforts on helping the unemployed and underemployed already in the US get training and jobs.

Cheaper Bay Area housing only helps people in the Bay Area. There's a whole lot more to the United States. Wouldn't a better policy be to try to make it so businesses in Detroit, or Buffalo or any other dying city can be as successful as those in Silicon Valley?

Reducing regulation: the old cry of business owners everywhere. Regulation can be good. Sam uses the example of drug companies, and yes, bringing new drugs to market is expensive. But the consequences of screwing up or literally deadly. See the example of Vioxx. Isn't one of the rallying cry of hackers right now Net Neutrality? How do we think that's going to be accomplished outside of regulation? Isn't the lack of regulation (not calling broadband Title II) what got us into this mess?

And to not be only critical, here's what my policy for growth and innovation would be:

1) Decrease the income gap between the rich and the poor. This isn't just about raising wages for the poor, but also decreasing wages (via taxes or maybe just straight up regulation). I'm not suggesting that we pay everyone the same: it should still be possible to become rich. But the current difference of ~4000x between a full-time minimum wage job and the top earners is obscene. Decreasing the income of the super rich will not really hurt them, and businesses would be better off reinvesting that money in making improving the business, or the whole country would be better off spending that money on social services. Increasing the wages of the poor and middle classes will help them immensely. Too many people live paycheck to paycheck, where a single illness can destroy their lives by forcing them into payday loans or credit card debt that becomes impossible to get out of. These debts are a drain on the economy, and forces a large portion of the US population into wage-slavery. Our goal should be to have no one living paycheck to paycheck, giving folks the ease of mind and comfort so they have an opportunity to innovate a=instead of just struggling to survive.

2) Increase the social safety net. This includes everything from improving and expanding government sponsored health care, to improving government sponsored retirement, to expanding government cash payments to individuals (either through welfare expansion or some sort of basic income). The theory behind this is that innovating (doing a startup) is giant risk most people aren't willing to take. And unless you're independently wealthy, it's a risk most people shouldn't take. Found a startup, get a cancer: you're bankrupt. Work for a startup that that doesn't have a retirement plan and doesn't pay market wages in hope of the IPO payoff, and they go bust: there goes a big portion of your retirement, hope you like working till you're 80. Increasing the safety net means people will be more willing to take risks, and some of those ricks will pay off, driving innovation and growing the economy.

A lot of the article reads like some SV industry lobbyists' talking points (seriously lacking in clarity of perspective), but this particular quote make me really balk:

"Though it would take a lot of careful thought, it might produce good results if regulators were compensated with some version of equity in what they regulate."

Oh, yes, let's institutionalize some conflicts of interest that are in your personal favor, Sam.

I do somewhat agree with what he said about education and pure research though: those are indeed investments and should be treated as such.

Also, @ecopoesis: I don't think immigration reform and getting current residents jobs are at odds the way you're implying they are (I somewhat agree with Sam Altman's view on this issue).

>Are there any studies that show [immigration] would help growth?

Immigration increases wages for domestic workers in the long-run[1-3].

"None of these studies is decisive, but taken together they suggest that immigration, in the long run, has had only a small negative effect on the pay of America's least skilled and even that is arguable. If Congress wants to reduce wage inequality, building border walls is a bad way of going about it." http://www.economist.com/node/6771382 and here http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/immigrat....

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w12497 [2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w14188 [3] http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/what_immigration_means

> Reforming immigration only seems good at lowering employer costs. Are there any studies that show it would help growth?

I don't have a source handy, but I believe studies have shown that immigration does indeed help economic growth with the vast majority of that growth benefiting the immigrants themselves.

How much of the economic growth is simply due to adding more participant the the economy vs innovating new markets?

When you start normalizing for factors such as inflation and population growth, US economic growth in the past couple of decades ends up being very low.

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