A Strong Welfare State Produces More Entrepreneurs
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Maybe the US has more startups on the ultra-successful end but that doesn't say much about the chances of the average person starting an average, unremarkable business.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/2015...
I could see a lack of social safety nets, increased costs/risks of safely running a compliant business and corporate consolidation being behind this trend...
The article mentions student debt. I'm part of that cohort, and did start a business. I'm Canadian. If I had had the average US student debt, I never would have got started.
If they didn't do their pizza shop, no one would notice, but if we didn't have high growth startups, I think we'd feel that impact far far more.
This is not to imply that high growth = high impact, because there's of course a ton of rent-seeking bullshit out there to be condemned.
I completely fail to notice most "high-growth" startups. I do like my neighborhood pizza joints and ethnic food stores.
But hey, maybe that's because I share Peter Thiel's taste in startups.
If you don't start that pizza business, I'll buy my pizza somewhere else.
Startups create new markets through innovation. A Facebook-like is like the pizza business. Facebook (or its ancestors) was the market creator.
Uber has similarities with the pizza business, but it's all about transforming a business (taxi service) into something else. So it's between pizzas and Facebook.
So I guess there are various levels of disruption or creation of the market. But the pizza business is probably at level 0 of disruption/creation.
Think of Starbucks vs. your coffee shop...
There are no pizza restaurant in my town, but plenty of Indian and Chinese take-aways and one each of the big three fast-food chains.
So if a pizza business arrived it could be disruptive to the status quo, particularly if it offered something that the others didn't e.g. delivery beyond two miles or first-class vegetarian options.
Another example of simple disruption is a shop which opened offering walk-in printing. You just pop your memory stick into the machine and hit 'print'. This completely undermined the library which previously had a monopoly on printing and which took > 15 minutes by the time you waited for a librarian to authorize the printing.
Neither are particularly exciting, but both offer a disruptive service.
First, my health care was covered. So I didn't have to worry about that downside risk. In fact I even had a major health problem two years in when money was tight. My medical care was a non issue financially.
I had some extended health insurance through my parents in the early years. Covered wisdom tooth extraction, and rehab to fix an arm injury. (I needed this to type). Not government safety net, but similar effect. Some countries would cover this sort of thing.
Tuition is lower in Canada. Low student debt. And repayment is very lenient for entrepreneurs and low income people. Never had to make payments or interest while starting up.
There are tax credits for low income earners. I received about $1000 a year in cash payments for sales tax credits. Tuition credits prevented my paying income tax starting out.
I would have gone bankrupt several times over without the above. Or maybe not even started. Instead, this year I'll be sending the government a large amount of income and sales tax payments, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to do it.
On the other hand, there was almost no red tape for starting up. This was crucial. I didn't have to ask permission, I didn't need to pass a capital threshold, I could easily open accounts for my business and I didn't even need to register my company. And I didn't have to bother with sales tax until I passed a revenue threshold.
Keeping that sort of bureaucratic regulation low is also crucial for encouraging business creation.
If we combined the American culture of entrepreneurialism and free enterprise with Denmark's level of safety nets and free higher education, we could probably do a lot more amazing things than we are now. There are likely plenty of people who could make brilliant contributions (to business, technology, art, science, etc.), but are forced to take what they perceive to be the least risky path in their lives, and so never even attempt to get off the ground with their ideas. That's just sad.
http://angrybearblog.com/2012/01/peltzman-effect-why-economi...
"Headline Claiming That Anything About Welfare is Positive, with Supporting Evidence"
Top comment: "Sorry, but the evidence doesn't support that." Evidence provided to substantiate claim: none.
However I could be wrong, I haven't been around on HN for long time.
Also I personally value skepticism, but I come from a semi scientific-engineering background.
It was pretty hammered hard into us lab techs, we need to be skeptical of our bioinformatics results, you never knew what hidden confounding factor could be affecting the experiment. We even tried to use markov models to help find hidden confounding variables.
Edit: On why skepticism is important, its because propaganda is everywhere https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269760
It seems like blindly questioning is far better than blindly without questioning.
There is here too. Not from The Atlantic but in the form of right wing ideological sock-puppets. If you are skeptical of this claim then read the article and its evidence and the comments and their lack of evidence and consider which is which.
Just because there are some smart people here doesn’t mean there aren't kooks.
After reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269760, I suspect there are not only "right" or "left" wing sockpuppets but corporate pr puppets too. I suspect some sockpuppets could drive up controversy to increase ad revenue or product awareness(viral marketing?) as well.
disclaimer:I have no opinion on this Atlantic article nor am I familiar with site. I just didn't think the original criticism of "conservatism" on HN was accurate.
Also I don't think I understand why an article(I don't feel the Atlantic piece is propaganda) can't be propaganda, and the comments section can't be propaganda in another direction.
I'm still looking at evidence,but a big and bold claim should have some fairly bullet proof evidence. I'd also hold something like Crispr https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171039 to the same standard.
Game changing gene therapy ? I would like some good fairly bullet proof evidence.
Otherwise I think its reasonable to fall to a skeptical position.
But to dismiss quality evidence because of crackpot comments is irrational.
I know nothing about gene therapy. But if you find a venue where peer reviewed papers on global warming are greeted by a flood of comments who deny it yet don't explain why then saying they are equally valid or equally likely to be propaganda is not being rational, it is failing to see a dangerous anti scientific social movement.
>corporate pr puppets too
To whit, post an article about Facebook's appalling privacy policy and watch what happens.
Americans are much, MUCH more entrepreneurial than anyone in Europe. I'm American, I live in Europe, I know this very, very well. (Yes, anecdotally speaking, of course!)
Americans simply embrace risk, and embrace potential failure, far better than anyone else in the world, taken as a whole. Europeans meanwhile are a more gloomy bunch, more risk-averse, and far less likely to strike out on their own. Notable slight exceptions being the Dutch to some degree.
America is so far from a "welfare state" - it is about as far away as you can get. America is a "if you're going to fall, you are going to fall all the way down, and no one is going to save you, no matter what". And somehow, a huge part of the world's entrepreneurs and innovation come from there. I don't know why.
And don't take me as some kind of patriotic jingoist champion of the US of A - I am just about as far as you can get from the "Yeah Murica" kind of ultra patriots - heck, I live in Europe because I prefer the slower pace, the old world, the semblance of an actual culture, the environment that has not eaten itself from capitalism taken to the extreme.
Nice linkbait headline though. :)
All these are "Europe" - but in terms of culture, finance, social welfare, educational systems and much else beside they are very different.
Some more than others, but no one in europe comes close to the entrepreneurial energy of the USA.
So I can go anywhere in the USA and find the exact same amount of entrepreneurial energy as everywhere else? Good to know.
Where did you think "entrepreneur" came from?
Americans in a few cities and regions are very entrepreneurial. These are not necessarily the cities and regions with the lowest taxes, most "business friendly" policies, or anything else that right wingers would consider likely to produce entrepreneurship. California is incredibly entrepreneurial, but it never shows up on those top ten lists of most business friendly states.
I think that strongly argues for this being cultural.
Notice, all three of the above do not require a state sponsored safety net, and it is that need for a safety net against destitution that creates an entrepreneurial mindset.
Without that safety net you don't get many risk takers.
High-ish taxes are okay as long as they are not punitively high. Regulations are okay as long as they are easy to follow and simple to understand, and as long as they aren't over the top ideologically-driven stop-everything sorts of things. Keep fear mongers, authoritarians, and ideologues away from the regulatory pen.
Complexity is death. Regulations that categorically stop you from acting are death. Things that encumber agility are death. Anything that saps your time is death, since time is often worth more than money. As a founder I'd rather pay more in taxes on profit as long as the government stays the F out of the way of my time and my executive decisions.
The ideal setup for maximum entrepreneurship would probably be some kind of libertarian socialism: moderate and moderately progressive taxation, health coverage, guaranteed minimum income or negative income tax, and a simple regulatory structure that makes it easy to form new ventures, hire and fire, etc. Other than that the governments gets out of the way and lets people try new things.
One caveat on progressive income taxes: they should not be too progressive and there probably should be lower taxes on capital gains. Investing in long-sighted things should be a form of tax shelter. That's a good thing.
The best would probably be a progressive tax curve but where the curve doesn't start to increase until you get really, really up there. Another rationale here is diminishing marginal utility of money-- eventually you get to the point where more money does not materially alter your circumstance in any perceptible way. That's the point at which taxation should become more progressive. At that point you are as rich -- as subjectively experienced -- as a human being can possibly be, and the rest is "savings beyond planned investment" as Keynes would say.
Yes, but your libertarian socialism is neither libertarian nor socialist.
Socialism is the central control and planning of the means of production while libertarianism is the limitation of central power to maintenance of peace and property. Your proposal involves essentially no central planning and plenty of state activity beyond the night watchman libertarian limits.
In fact, you propose the welfare state. The government provides or funds basic social insurance for everyone by taxing mildly progressively everyone with income and property. Health care, education, basic income in case of misfortune, and pensions are arranged for everyone, but the economy is not tightly regulated, monopolized, planned, or centrally administrated.
Welfare statism works very well in practice if socialism can be kept out of it. Note that socialism actually does not require any redistribution of income and the implicit redistribution from social insurance actually accomplishes more redistribution than mid-twentieth century socialism did in practice.
> And somehow, a huge part of the world's entrepreneurs and innovation come from there
I would say that's for historic reasons and the egregious amount of money you possess as a country rather than some in built ability to take risks?
Indeed. The US is very young, and throughout history, we had many temporary centers of innovation - from various parts of Europe to Middle East to deep Asia to Africa.
According to this list[1] with data from the World Bank, Netherlands is 35th has 45.05 small businesses per 1000 people. Do you have a stationary shop on your corner or in your neighborhood? I certainly had access to many small businesses in Rotterdam, that would have folded 25 years again the States, replaced by mega corps and big box retailers.
The United States on the other hand is 69th on the list with 19.98 small businesses per 1000 people
[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micro...
On that metric, is Europe still ahead of the US?
From recent statistics I understand we have approximately 800.000 ZZP-ers in the Netherlands or 1 per every 21 citizens.
http://www.econ.brown.edu/students/Gareth_Olds/assets/olds_f...
I don't think it makes much sense to compare it to US, because there are other factors contributing greatly to the success of US entrepreneurs and it has nothing to do with "being more risk-averse or not".
It has to do with the fact that the US is actually a huge single market. EU really isn't right now. It's not easy to just launch a company in a country and easily have success in another. Certainly nowhere as easy as it is to launch an online business in one state in US and have success in other states.
There are other factors, such as concentrating many entrepreneurs in one place, which also leads to a concentration of investors in one place (talking about Silicon Valley here).
There's also a huge concentration of media in the US that is followed by other countries as well. How many European media sites or blogs do you know? I bet you can count them on one hand. It's much harder for a company in Europe to get promoted across all European countries, let alone to have Americans hear about it.
I'm sure there are many other factors as well that make the US a much easier startup environment than Europe.
People in America love taking risk and pushing the envelope experimenting with new stuff and technologies and that's one of the major strengths of this nation but I wouldn't go too far to express something like this far better than anyone else in the world. That's just absurd patriotism and there's no doubt about it.
Likewise, I'm no fan of the Department of Defense in this country (the US), but the research they're currently funding in robotics has similar potential.
"Americans embrace risk," as you say, partly because our government creates incredible opportunities through public research which can easily be transformed into private profit. Also, the article repeatedly demonstrated that Americans embrace risk more when they have a social safety net.
You can't hand-wave away research with a generalization, especially not when the research you're hand-waving away has gone into great depth examining the detailed workings of the underlying truth which made your generalization possible in the first place.
If the government hadn't invested, there would certainly be analogous technologies and initiatives built on top of scientific developments. It's just too hard to say how it'd be like
There are quite a few non-Americans working in the American technology sector. I've worked on teams with 30% American content, the rest coming from around the world. Talking to those people, it's clear that they are taking advantage of the best of both worlds: the large capital accumulations that are available for investment in the US, but with the backup plan of going back home to a sensible social welfare structure if things don't work out.
I've been in the same boat: a Canadian who has lived and worked in both the US and Canada. I've taken risks--particularly as a husband and father--that my American colleagues could only take because they were childless and had spouses who worked. Knowing that no matter what happened, my kids would have access to a health-care system that produces significantly better outcomes at significantly lower cost to the public purse than the American mess, was without question an enabler for me. I was very conscious of this in making business decisions, including the decision to go into business (while broke and unemployed in the wake of the dot-com crash, as it happens.)
Had I been in the US at the time I would have been scrambling to find a job so my kids would be covered by decent health insurance.
Maybe my case is atypical, but some kind of comparison between foreigners living/have lived in the US vs natives might shed some light on this question.
It's not that bad. People do look out for each other. They try to save each other from themselves. America is risky in that if you don't take steps to protect yourself from the broader market, eventually that exposure will over time erode your social position.
There are ways to protect yourself, most of them involve mobility. You get out of crappy markets, crappy jobs, crappy situations. You move towards hot spots, hot markets, hot ideas. So long as you keep moving with capital and wealth, that wealth will protect you because America is a place where there's always a shortage of good people available to do things.
If you don't want to be mobile, then you have to make up for that with planning. There are retirement vehicles that take time and skill and planning to execute on. Insurance products that take the sting out of all kinds of horrible risk. Health plans that will give you a baseline of care that you can then start planning your own health on.
To gain access to this world you need a certain amount of means, but you can generally trade time for capital. For example, you can shop around for insurance, health plans, and such. You can usually find something that will work at a very basic level that's relatively affordable. There's always someone out there that's recognized the market segment you are searching in and has a service tailored for you.
America's social services are also typically pretty good. It's certainly a point of contention, but people aren't starving, your dignity will take a hit if you end up homeless but Americans are compassionate enough so that, for instance, homeless people in San Francisco can find someone to loan them their garage. We don't like to see people suffer, and there are numerous church groups, social services, even the cops will take pity on you if they see you're really struggling.
America really takes its economy seriously, and everybody's expected to contribute to it, so we will not respect someone if they choose not to participate, but we won't let them starve, either. People who stay on the streets long-term are generally people who simply cannot contribute for whatever reason. Plenty of people become homeless for economic reasons, but the economy is fluid enough that they'll find a berth eventually, if they want one.
Well, you can thank American capitalism and ingenuity for that even existing, given WWI and WWII and the Cold War.
And don't pretend you don't know why entrepreneurs come to the US... we all know why, that's where the money is. Investors and consumers with spending money. It's as simple as that.
>NO STATISTICS AT ALL
>Nice linkbait headline though. :)
Nice complete lack of statistical evidence, though.
ie: if you know your kids wont starve (food stamps), you wont end up in permanent debt (bankruptcy laws), you wont be killed by your creditors (social order) etc etc. then you can do things (start a business) that would otherwise risk those consequences.
I would argue that a welfare state COULD be helping entrepreneurs, but that depends where all the taxation for the welfare state comes from. In Sweden it is very expensive to hire people for example, and it is also very hard to fire people (besides the point, taxation-wise, but still), The companies that hire people pay a large part of the welfare state. This makes it very hard to grow a company since it is so very expensive to hire.
Unfortunately a strong welfare state often goes hand in hand with a stronger bureaucracy in general including many regulations, red tape, unfavorable tax codes, and other obstructions to entrepreneurship. This is where the US trumps the strong welfare states.
Often... in general... - too many maybes. I know for a fact that the UK and Ireland make it very simple and painless to start up.
"This is where the US trumps the strong welfare states."
Does it? Most regulations are set at the state level as well, so you're saying that, say, Massachusetts is more bureaucratic than North Dakota?
As much as your average 20-something cynical know-it-all likes to bag on our education system and its spew of "you're special", "believe in your dreams", "don't be afraid to do something if you truly believe in it", etc., I should think it's that very sort of indoctrination starting at a young age that is ultimately responsible for so many Americans casting caution to the wind and pursuing their "American Dream", and for so many other Americans to sympathize with and be willing to support such folk on their trek.
But I will admit that the one government innovation that definitely helps entrepreneurship is the creation of the corporation. The fact that I can create this entity that's owned by me and the family, friends, and fools who believe in me, and that if things go South, the corporation can die without dragging me down with it, is extremely helpful in encouraging folks to venture. If I was a builder and the law was that if a house collapses and kills its residents, the builder will be found and killed in an eye-for-an-eye manor, I'd seriously think twice about building a house for anyone other than myself.
So what encourages entrepreneurship? Telling people since the founding of your nation that entrepreneurship is good and providing a means of separating the entrepreneur from his corporation.
Living in a welfare state, it took me 7 months to incorporate and ~$50000 on licenses+fees to start a simple exporting business. Maybe America and certain EU countries just haven't gotten there yet.
Edit: Do people genuinely believe that the average sub-Saharan African state, or even growing economies like Vietnam or Indonesia are either easier to legally form a trading company in or more generous with welfare (relative to incomes) than say, the UK, Sweden or even the USA? If there's evidence rather than blindly partisan "he said welfare states weren't bad for business" knee-jerk reactions behind the downvotes, I'd really like to see it.
Why instead are we seeing massive amounts of unemployment?
There seems to be a delicate balance to strike to get this right. The fact of the matter is that in many European countries someone who is not working can enjoy the same standard of life as someone who is, except they don't have to get up in the morning to earn it.
Those benefiting from these states likely have very little incentive to rock their own boat of comfort by stepping out and taking on debt/risk for more of a reward. Especially when you throw high taxation into the mix, where that risk/reward ratio is further skewed because even if you do very well you'll end up paying the state a huge amount of tax, to then support the same welfare system.
In the US, on the other hand, you've a significantly less generous safety net and I would imagine the vast majority of those who fall into it from a more grand place - such as being securely in the middle class - would fight more to get out of it.
That's intuitive anyway.
Where the argument starts to fall apart is when you look at all the young tech entrepreneurs, whether it's hardware or software, or those starting up new media companies, or whatever, very few seem to come from the type of background where if they failed they'd end up on food stamps.
Are they better risk takers because they have a better, non-government provided safety net, perhaps? Which then goes on to conflict with the enhanced safety net available in Europe and the comparatively low level of innovation and entrepreneurship.
My conclusion would be that the government provided welfare is likely not a factor in determining innovation and entrepreneurship and that there's other, less obvious, factors at play.
Because enterpreneurialism is not the sole factor affecting economic growth, and European countries are currently dealing with various other issues.
And the amount of culture and technology that comes out of Sweden alone is extraordinary for their population size.
Music: Tove Lo, Robyn, The Knife, Miike Snow, Those Dancing Days, Icona Pop, Lykke Li.
In fact, pop music around the world has been shaped and written by Swedish producers and writers, everything from Brittany Spears to Katy Perry.
And look at all the Swedish films that America loves to remake. Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Let The Right One In, etc.
And remember, this is just Sweden, a small country of 9 million people in the middle of nowhere.
Most studies show European countries having far higher rates of small business and family business ownership than in the US.
" The fact of the matter is that in many European countries someone who is not working can enjoy the same standard of life as someone who is, except they don't have to get up in the morning to earn it."
This is entirely false, and spoken from someone who has no idea what they're talking about.
In 2010 the unemployment rate in the Eurozone and the US was about the same. Since then in the US it reduced by 2.5% while it grew by 2.5% in the Eurozone.
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-us-and-eurozone-unemplo...
The reason for this is the austerity policies forced upon the Eurozone by adherents of a particular economic ideology, whereas the USA had fiscal stimulus, as well as regular fiscal transfers from the richer states on the coasts to the poorer ones in the center and south via the federal budget.
> The fact of the matter is that in many European countries someone who is not working can enjoy the same standard of life as someone who is
The fact of the matter is that in Spain unemployed citizens are looking for food in garbage bins. How many working people do you know who do that?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/world/europe/hunger-on-the...
I'm not saying you can't have the best of both worlds. You could have a good social program and low taxes, if you cut things like defense spending (I believe in a strong defense, but I also believe that in the US we let contractors bill excessively and do little to curb it). But I think you give the consumer more freedom when you just cut taxes - it gives them the choice of what they want to buy, without government imposed restrictions (i.e. certain things not being covered in healthcare, having to live in low income housing, etc). If you want to encourage startups, you can always provide government grants (most countries already do in many areas), or tax breaks for small businesses.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france-drops-75...
I mean, perhaps indirectly, but it's not like new orleans or quebec are either tech hubs or paragons of french culture.
You'll be told to get a job. You'll be told that working for the government, like 25% of the people, is the way to go. You'll be told that you must choose welfare (France) or business freedom (USA).
You'll be told that the only good business is a non-profit association. etc...
We're all humans, but we're made different by the society. And it takes efforts to fight what "culture" has put in your mind.
In french, we use the same work for "company" and "society"...
Frances problems in this area are more to do with the technocratic elite from ena running the show
94% for 1944 and 1945. Above 90% until 1964. Above 70% until 1982.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States...
"When France lowered the barriers to receiving unemployment insurance, it actually increased the rate of entrepreneurship.. Until 2001, citizens on unemployment insurance had little incentive to start businesses, since doing so would terminate their benefits. Instead of gutting the program, the state simply decided to let anyone who founded a business keep drawing benefits for a limited period, and guaranteed that they would be eligible again if that business failed. The result: a 25 percent increase in the rate of new-firm creation."
HN is fast becoming Slashdot, where people only read headlines before diving into commenting.
And your bit about simply cutting taxes is just not true. It has not shown to be true in any of the areas of the country where taxes were aggressively cut. In fact, in some of those places, like Kansas, things are worse than before, because the gains you claim would come never did, and they didn't have the income to be able to continue aid for things like education or food stamps.
Entrepreneurship is directly correlated to easy access to capital and the legal environment surrounding both starting and maintaining a small business... this has been proven ad nauseam.
I can't directly critique the papers linked in the article (especially because one of them 404's) right now, but I'd be willing to be a lot of money they cherry pick policies that (either directly or indirectly) created greater access to capital or made it legally easier to start and run a small business. That, or they've found some correlation between the two and are trying to gloss over the actual economics of the deal and support their political opinions.
Strong "social good" (read: welfare), strong laissez faire, totalitarian, anarchic, doesn't matter your political leanings as long you increase capital and ease of legal machinations you will experience an increase in entrepreneurship (comparatively, of course).
I live in Amsterdam (cited elsewhere in this thread as being entrepreneurial): I appreciate having small independent shops and see the Dutch entrepreneurial attitude relative to other European countries in which I've lived. But I also understand why Hacker News readers would not believe the article is reflective: the majority of these businesses are not going to risk everything, change the world, or be worth millions/billions. Perhaps the count alone is not a useful metric.
edit: I'm European. Lots of neutral comments treated to downvote-disagree in this thread.
Changing the world and being worth billions is just the Silicon Valley mythology, but that is not the only 'real' form of entrepreneurship there is.
Dare I say, a small business owner is more of an entrepreneur in my opinion than some wealthy dude who made an app, raised 5 mil, and ran the company into the ground in 12 months.
Now startups are great, but I really don't get the contempt the startup-types hold for small businesses. Maybe that's just a form of class contempt.
I guess my hypotheses are: a) HN will mostly lean this way too; b) America will mostly lean this way (but I have not lived there); c) if you accept this definition, European business are on average less of this style than American ones (due to government mitigating their risk or them being in established segments) in some - but definitely not all - cases.
You are of course free not to accept the definition ;) and I could be wrong about what the majority of HN readers/Americans think. If I'm not, the Atlantic - an American magazine with mostly American readership - is being a bit unrepresentative. As others have said, even if I'm wrong the conclusions seem a little strong for the evidence.
The closes it comes is showing that the already-abysmal rates of entrepreneurship for people around CHIP eligibility levels, it's 30% higher for people just below the bracket.
Then there's idle theorizing about how food stamps "must" embolden entrepreneurs because they know they can fall back on it if their venture fails. While it sounds superficially plausible, can anyone give a concrete example of the kind of hypercompetent person who launched a successful startup and who would also have needed food stamps if it didn't succeed? Bezos? Musk? Kalanick? Even Brin or Page?
Here you go: http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micro...
The US is pretty low on that list.
"Then there's idle theorizing about how food stamps "must" embolden entrepreneurs because they know they can fall back on it if their venture fails. While it sounds superficially plausible, can anyone give a concrete example of the kind of hypercompetent person who launched a successful startup and who would also have needed food stamps if it didn't succeed? Bezos? Musk? Kalanick? Even Brin or Page?"
All of those people were already rich.
“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling argues that there’s magic in government benefits. She stopped by “The Daily Show” to chat with Jon Stewart about her new book “The Casual Vacancy,” and delved into how government assistance helped her survive in her early years. “I couldn’t have written this book if I hadn’t had a few years where I’ d been really as poor as it’s possible to go in the U.K. without being homeless,” Rowling told Stewart. She added that “We were on welfare, what you we call welfare, I would call benefits, for a couple years.”[0]
[0] http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/10/16/j-k-rowling-on-how... (search Google for "rowling welfare" and it's the fourth result; there are others)
Without getting into the various hairballs on here about the truth of the research, -if- this were true it might imply that the core conjecture of a basic income promoting innovation holds up.
Everyone is discussing conceptually, here are concrete numbers... When I was striking out on my own a few years ago health insurance was "the big one" everyone brought up, so I went on Kaiser's website and got a quote from ~$250 - $450/month (varies with copay, benefits, out of pocket max). It's a bit of a cost though not nearly as scary as everyone makes it out to be and not enough to plunge you into the depths of debt if things don't work out (it's also tax deductible).
I'm solving this and am announcing my findings Sunday at the Texas bitcoin conference.
The fix is really pretty simple.
I don't see how this is even remotely true. There are 42million people on food stamps, costing $82bn a year. This is a mere fraction of the spending that goes towards catching falling people. There is no capitalism. Open your eyes.
Assuming a perfectly efficient system, that's slightly under $2,000 per person per year.
Divided by 52 weeks, that works out to $38.00 per week in food aid. (In a perfectly efficient system; so, let's say a bit less).
Federal, State and Local governments had combined revenue of around 6 TRILLION dollars last year, 3.2 trillion of which was for the Federal government.
Does it seem unreasonable to you that the richest country on earth would spend 1/39th of its Federal revenue to give impoverished citizens $30/week of food aid?