Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others?

#31

Post by Zeitgeschehen » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 10:14 AM UTC

short_sells_poo wrote: post #29

armada651 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your perception that Germany is a lot less entrepreneurial is incorrect. It's probably due to the fact Germany focuses a lot more on industry technology rather than consumer-facing tech.

Personal anecdote time (please correct me if I got it wrong): go to almost any backwater German village and there'll be small/mid sized industry on the outskirts. From semi-high tech (e.g. manufacturing precision instruments) to "simpler" stuff like carpentry shops or metalworkers. In Germany, the small-mid sized business that actually builds stuff (as opposed to just services) is still pretty big. Sure, most of it i…

>Sure, most of it is invisible on the international scale, but it's there and underpins an economy of specialists.

Actually a not insignificant part of these backwater businesses are so called Hidden Champions[1]. Basically, small companies who are still leader in the world market for their very specialised product.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Champion

Re: Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others?

#32

Post by amelius » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 10:18 AM UTC

ido wrote: post #24

kayaeb wrote: post #14

There's a good book on this called "Why Nations Fail," [1] they posit that extractive economic policies (corrupted governments) essentially de-incentivize entrepreneurial businesses, while inclusive policies cause them to thrive. They use this argument to counter "Guns, Germs, and Steel" [2] to explain dramatic economic differences across country borders in similar environments. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/sho…

Interesting! Anecdotally I'm an Israeli who moved to Europe (first Austria then Germany) and at least from my layman's perspective both of these countries seem both a lot less entrepreneurial than Israel and a lot less corrupt... So I wonder if something unusual is going on or if one or more of my perceptions are wrong.

Investment climate is also important.

Perhaps in Europe, people are less inclined to borrow large sums of money?

Re: Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others?

#33

Post by bakuninsbart » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 10:39 AM UTC

zhdc1 wrote: post #7

zhdc1 wrote: post #6

Hot take, but the data for this study comes from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM https://www.gemconsortium.org/ ), which has been repeatedly beaten to death in the literature (that is, used as a primary data source). I'm not saying that she doesn't add anything that hasn't already been published, I don't know if I see it though.

Just to add a little context, one issue she ignores entirely is the relationship between needs based entrepreneurship and the total entrepreneurial activity (TEA) rate. So, one of the effects you're going to run into are that the countries with the highest TEA rate are going to be 1.) developing economies (which have higher needs based entrepreneurship) that 2.) have reached a high enough development level to have fu…

3.) are in the process of adopting western-culture norms.

Could you expand on this point? What does it include outside of gender equality. The idea that this is a "western-culture norm" seems slightly misleading in the sense that gender equality in the workplace was much earlier and better developed in communist countries that would usually be contrasted with "western culture" albeit of course also originating in Europe.

Re: Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others?

#34

Post by thepangolino » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 10:40 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #32

ido wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! Anecdotally I'm an Israeli who moved to Europe (first Austria then Germany) and at least from my layman's perspective both of these countries seem both a lot less entrepreneurial than Israel and a lot less corrupt... So I wonder if something unusual is going on or if one or more of my perceptions are wrong.

Investment climate is also important. Perhaps in Europe, people are less inclined to borrow large sums of money?

That’s also conditioned by how hard it is to escape debt. In my country if you can’t pay back what you owe you turn into an indentured servant for life. No matter where you hide and what job you pick, the state will come and take most of your pay leaving you with just enough to get by.

Re: Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others?

#35

Post by filleduchaos » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 10:45 AM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #25

filleduchaos wrote: post #20

This is a topic that's particularly interesting to me because there's an ethnic group in my country - the Igbo - that are so pervasively, aggressively[0] entrepreneurial that it's become a meme. I can't really think of another culture that has business woven as tightly into its very bones - I haven't read the entire paper yet, but I'm curious to see if it mentions them at all. [0] In a good way. Several people have n…

The Igbo are an example of a merchant minority, like both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, Armenians, Parsis and the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Lebanese in West Africa, Latin America and elsewhere and Yankees in the US South. There’s always hostility to merchant minorities from the majority population but the degree of difference modulates the hostility. No Yankee enclave was ever burned in a pogrom in the South whereas…

Wikipedia articles *do very little to accurately convey cultures/situations one doesn't actually have experience with. The clear majority of Igbo people live in their homeland in Southeastern Nigeria. Even with the quarter to a third of Igbos that live in other parts of Nigeria I find the Western arrogance in calling people living in their own country a "merchant minority" rather dull.

(For more context, there are three dominant ethnic groups in Nigeria, and none of them form a majority. The largest group - the Hausa - doesn't make up even 30% of the population, and the Igbo make up over 20% in current estimates)

> The Igbo tried to secede from Nigeria after independence and it was an utter bloodbath.

This was far, far more complicated than is being made out here.

Re: Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others?

#36

Post by bakuninsbart » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 10:49 AM UTC

Zeitgeschehen wrote: post #31

short_sells_poo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal anecdote time (please correct me if I got it wrong): go to almost any backwater German village and there'll be small/mid sized industry on the outskirts. From semi-high tech (e.g. manufacturing precision instruments) to "simpler" stuff like carpentry shops or metalworkers. In Germany, the small-mid sized business that actually builds stuff (as opposed to just services) is still pretty big. Sure, most of it i…

>Sure, most of it is invisible on the international scale, but it's there and underpins an economy of specialists. Actually a not insignificant part of these backwater businesses are so called Hidden Champions[1]. Basically, small companies who are still leader in the world market for their very specialised product. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Champion

Yep, stuff like Nordischer Maschinenbau Rud. Baader. In the 1920s they were the first to produce a machine to automatically decapitate and debone fish, and they've been the world leader on this and related tech ever since,

Re: Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others?

#37

Post by breadandcrumbel » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 10:49 AM UTC

In the last few years I had the chance to live in Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Perth, Sofia and Tel Aviv

From all of those cities Amsterdam and Tel Aviv a lot more innovative and the number of entrepreneurs was high (at least felt like it)

I think that there are few criterions that a city need to have to become a tech hub

- Relatively small city - Society who worship startups and entrepreneurs - Many Programmers and engineers (In Israel every 4 months few hundred talented programmers are releasing from the top units in the Israel Defence Forces, bringing high quality manpower to the ecosystem)

There are probably more criterions, those are just few I thought about now

Re: Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others?

#38

Post by shadowprofile77 » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 10:52 AM UTC

thepangolino wrote: post #34

amelius wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investment climate is also important. Perhaps in Europe, people are less inclined to borrow large sums of money?

That’s also conditioned by how hard it is to escape debt. In my country if you can’t pay back what you owe you turn into an indentured servant for life. No matter where you hide and what job you pick, the state will come and take most of your pay leaving you with just enough to get by.

Damn.. What country is this? Have you no bankruptcy protection laws?

Re: Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others?

#39

Post by coldtea » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 10:57 AM UTC

repolfx wrote: post #23

paganel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I visited Amsterdam and was interested in their history and how it took off after the invention of the corporation. I wonder if anyone has written a history of the Dutch economy that can be also accessible to non-Dutch readers (i.e. translated to either English or French or Spanish). From a very outside view (i.e. mine) the Dutch used to be a very entrepreneurial society/people in the 1600s going into the 1700s, bu…

Watch out for a scaling fallacy. If the Dutch are just as entrepreneurial as Americans, then there will be way more successful Americans and American companies because the USA is so much bigger. Ditto for China. You'd really need to calculate "successful entrepreneur per 100,000 people" or something like that. Also, selection bias. You're on a tech website. Switching to Denmark for a second, the Danes are incredibly…

>You'd really need to calculate "successful entrepreneur per 100,000 people" or something like that.

Even that wouldn't be enough, because the supporting apparatus and immediate market for a Dutch entrepreneur would be still very much smaller than for a US based on - so Dutch entrepreneurs should expect less support and not as good environment for their steps to grow their company, even if as a ratio there are e.g. twice the Dutch entrepreneurs for 100,000 people compared to the US.

>That's a pretty big disincentive to work hard to get big.

That sounds good. Now if we (EU) could also prevent other countries from having corporate behemoths that would be perfect...

Re: Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others?

#40

Post by enriquto » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 11:02 AM UTC

chewxy wrote: post #30

jmkd wrote: post #17

Always worth zooming out and considering this study that relates average temperature to economic production, claiming 13C as a sweet spot https://www.nature.com/articles/nature15725

Is this going to be a new Montesquieu's climatoethnic justification for racism?

What does it have to do with race? Aren't there people of every race in every climate?