That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.
If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off.
You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.
The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists, which results in far more people being seen as completely disposable. It also comes at the cost of worsening public education, worsening public health, crime rates beyond most first world countries, companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions. Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.
Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen. Some would kill half of them if they were promised a few % off their yearly taxes.
This is incorrect and you’re really out of touch for suggesting it.
Let’s say you have a 5 million dollar exit in the Bay Area. After tax you get roughly 2.5. That’s enough to buy a nice but modest house and now you have no money left. You now have to work a full time job to pay the property taxes, the rest of your living expenses, and try to save for retirement. Same thing applies in LA, NYC, SEA, etc.
> The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists
This is false. The US spends more on healthcare than any other nation, it just goes to a bloated system. More tax money from the 0.1% won’t change that.
> crime rates beyond most first world countries
Gonna need a citation there. This is likely a result of guns being legal if you’re talking about gun deaths or a result of the war on drugs if you’re talking about incarceration. Neither of those have anything to do with taxes.
> companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions
We’re talking about biotech exits. Drop your “muh capitalism bad” gish gallop.
> Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.
Pure cope. A broad unsubstantiated statement about ethics followed by talk of milking residents dry when those residents have more disposable income per capita than nearly anywhere else in the world.
> Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen.
If they do this by treating huge breakthroughs like you are doing, they are stepping on all of their fellow countrymen through oppressive tall poppy syndrome. Knocking anyone doing well down is not how you lift everyone up.
It's fine to want that and to attract those kind of people. What you don't want is to attract people who want to do that in order to make a lot of money.
If you want innovators, motivate them with rewards. Money is a great reward since you can turn it into mostly anything you’d like. Want to buy a mansion? Fine. Want to travel around the world? Feel free. Want to give it away to charity? Great!
The reality is that you get crap like Facebook, Instagram, Xwitter.
There are very few open source contributors that are actually really good. The nature of software means that their labor of love can scale very well.
Additionally, there is nearly zero barrier to being an open source developer. Buy a laptop and start writing code.
So open source only works well because when you get lucky and get a combination of a motivated contributor and essentially zero distribution cost, a single group can ship to billions of people.
If we want someone making an artificial heart, it’s a completely different story. The research and development is very capital intensive so you need a war chest to even start tinkering. Then once you have something you want to try to get approved, you need either to be a medical doctor or employ one, which is a huge opportunity cost for a medical school debt ridden doctor.
All of the capital needed to fund this is high risk so it needs a high upside return if private investors are involved.
Now a founder could eschew all of their equity, but after going through all of the work to do this capital raising it would be quite unusual.
In terms of expected value (which you'd hope that scientists and entrepreneurs understand at least at a surface level), that seems like the rational move.
Actually, society is much better off since the money is dispersed into the economy faster and to a much greater degree than most other windfalls.
And most other windfalls are crafted to accumulate money from the economy, so the difference in who ends up with the money is another major factor.
The bounty here, is the people on the cusp of realizing its not going to pan out but who are both very smart, and smart enough to realize they need to pivot. It would be almost a given they are consciously walking away from IPO manna. I guess if you include it in the pre-sort on applicants, you get to winnow out the people still glued to money-is-the-prize.
BTW the EU would welcome more IPR inside the EU. Some amount of bonus may have to lie in the packaging, to get to where the EU wants to be on IPR. Novo Nordisk style.
It’s not lottery mentality, it’s risk taking. And it’s something that the EU should be fostering. The US encourages risk taking where failing isn’t even seen as a bad thing.
...or don't we? I am not sure. We are definitely not seeing the runaway successes of US big tech, but is it because people are not taking measured risks, or do operations fumble at a later point in their development? I don't know. What I do know is that revenue sources in the EU come with extremely onerous strings attached, are orders of magnitude below US levels, or are only available to big corporations of the old guard.
the problem with the European thinking you describe is not lottery vs sure-thing, it's the idea that everybody within a geography should should think the same way and not all mentalities "belong".
And to those mentalities… yes we ought to remind they’re not welcome.
gee, no matter how many times Europe has told the Jews that they are not welcome, they've kept coming back, bringing ses penchants for assessing capital risk in middleman trade, and hedging financial risks!
You're the one incorrectly using the concept of gambling replying talking to someone taking about risk versus reward (investing).
It is hard for somebody who believes in gambling to win at investing.
The US has both monetary and social incentives to create new businesses. I live in NZ where founders are discouraged by financial incentives and by social incentives.
Gambling and investing are very close together. You're only able to make rational decisions on perfect information which is not available.
So investing seems to be a sort of gambling to me, it's just part of a different societal institution.
Except that it’s the opposite of a lottery.
It’s almost entirely based on your skills and the decisions you make.
There are right-place right-time effects, but it’s still your decision to be in the right place for the current time.
Europe’s economy is badly lagging the US economy, and it’s because culturally they hold these types of incorrect, fatalistic, zero-sum views towards success and innovation.
You're just not going to get past the first few rounds of the entrepreneur game if you're not a certain kind of person.
The US has terrible social mobility. Objectively, by any measure. This isn't up for debate.
Guess which state is #1 for social mobility?
Wrong. It's Utah, which is a low bar because it's 28th by GDP.
How about CA? 38th for mobility. TX? 45th.
It's a mythology of meritocracy excusing inherited privilege.
https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/social-mobility-in-the-5...
Four Pillars of Social Mobility: To rank each state, we measured a series of indicators related to social mobility across four pillars: Entrepreneurship and Growth, Institutions and the Rule of Law, Education and Skills Development, and Social Capital. Scores for each pillar were combined and weighted equally to create a state’s overall social mobility score.
I would think a measure of social mobility would include income percentile vs parents' income percentile.
The US is full of billionaires who came from underprivileged positions.
Infact, your advice is worse than wrong, it is actively harmful, because you're discouraging people from trying by (falsely) telling them that their efforts don't matter and they were destined to fail from birth.
Going from $15k a year to $150k is a lot more common in Europe,, but doing from $150k to $150m is a lot more common in the US, and it's the latter that creates most of the value.
