351–360 of 528 posts
My 2 cents, some of the reasons America succeeds: (fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations. Expansion is cheap in America. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to expand to another US city than it does to expand to Norway or New Zealand; but for a company in those countries, expansion is very expensive, expanding requires new laws, regulations, business entiti…
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Culture is real. Americans tend to be optimistic and positively inclined towards entrepreneurship. This is often refected in business practices and regulations.
The only thing those business practices and regulations reflect is that the 'entrepreneurs' get a lot of political and regulatory rights, and the people who work for them get very few. That kind of arrangement works out very well for the former, but just because a king is doing well for himself doesn't mean that the serfs are 'positively culturally inclined towards autocracy.' ---- A country's regulations and politic…
> All that you've demonstrated is that 'entrepreneurs' are a politically powerful group in America [1]. That says nothing about the average culture.
I haven't demonstrated anything yet. I've only asserted things.
My 2 cents, some of the reasons America succeeds: (fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations. Expansion is cheap in America. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to expand to another US city than it does to expand to Norway or New Zealand; but for a company in those countries, expansion is very expensive, expanding requires new laws, regulations, business entiti…
I think you're right, but I'd like to add, a lot of rhetoric surrounds this idea that America is as successful as it is because of freedom. And I like freedom, and it has played a role, but it isn't really true. America is most of (and the most temperate region of) a vast continent, the original local inhabitants of which mostly no longer exist, with resources, some of which people didn't even know they needed when i…
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Consider Japan: (fact) a single market with a single language (fact) geographically isolated (fact) not much space (fact) burned to the ground in WW2 and yet for a while it was an economic powerhouse on the world stage. Taiwan, Hong Kong and S Korea, similar stories. So what is the common thread? Free markets.
Interestingly, among the Asian Tiger economies, their massive growth first unlocked during a period where they were not meaningfully democracies and their governments intervened heavily to pick winners. The proximate success of their economies was export oriented industry, but the industries and the companies within them were more or less hand picked by the ruling regimes. The remarkable thing is that Korea, Taiwan,…
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Let me answer you honestly and in depth: Why? Why not? If I am alive, I may as well make an effort, since I have a finite time to do so. It's fun. It's a challenge. I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to…
Rich people become rich by paying other people less than the value of their labour. Sometimes, that's to the net benefit of the community, since the value of the labour involved is increased by a superior process. Often, that is to the net detriment of the community: for example, a landlord. The reality is, the impact of a wealthy person is almost always small, and usually negative-on-net. That's why, in the thousand…
People can make money through success in positive sum games, which wouldn’t require exploiting other people.
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Consider Japan: (fact) a single market with a single language (fact) geographically isolated (fact) not much space (fact) burned to the ground in WW2 and yet for a while it was an economic powerhouse on the world stage. Taiwan, Hong Kong and S Korea, similar stories. So what is the common thread? Free markets.
It's hard to know who's best when you don't play fair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...
If the US is simply better at it, isn't that relevant?
It's not like other (former) superpowers didn't do the exact same things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_involvement_in_regime_c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_involvement_in_regime_...
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Let me answer you honestly and in depth: Why? Why not? If I am alive, I may as well make an effort, since I have a finite time to do so. It's fun. It's a challenge. I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to…
You're describing so many things wrong with humans as a species, or at least modern humans. We shouldn't change things just because we can. We shouldn't assume that if we're able to extract natural resources its also our right to use them without question until they're completely depleted. Why should we assume that every invention, every technology, everything we call "progress" is actually advancing in a good direct…
Nobody really believes that. You're not living in a mud-hut. You've decided the balance should be less than whatever that guy said, but it's all relative. You are ridiculously wealthy and having such an incredibly outsized impact compared to any non-human animal that the relative difference between you and the GP is effectively nil.
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Forgive the nitpick, but absolutely nowhere near 80% of Americans are encountering homeless on a regular basis. Homelessness in particular and inequality in general are major problems! I don't mean to sweep that under the rug! However, I don't think it's true that anywhere near a majority of Americans encounter homeless people on a daily basis. Something like 80% of Americans live in an urban setting Yes, for the Cen…
I just looked up the math and this is probably right. It looks like 1 in 3 Americans live in a city of >100K people, which, again, just in my experience, is where you’d be hard pressed to not encounter a homeless person. This however probably skews higher when we factor in things like working age adults vs the total population.
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> I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying Why? Really. Maybe I’m in a midlife crises but I care about money less and less. I used to get a a lot of satisfaction from the simple fact of seeing the number on my bank account increase. Not so much in the past decade. My computer, phone, speaker, camera and other tech toys are amazing and not that expensive. Great food and…
Let me answer you honestly and in depth: Why? Why not? If I am alive, I may as well make an effort, since I have a finite time to do so. It's fun. It's a challenge. I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to…
Or perhaps energy disparity? The guy who serially starts companies and works from 3am in the morning is probably in the 99th percentile in terms of raw energy available to him.
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America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible. In a century marked by rapid technological change, it is probably better to hybridize the American and European approaches, allowing faster bankruptcies and more flexible job termination in Europe while also providing a more generous safety net in…
> America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible. Banks seems exempt from this. I’m not financially savvy enough to know if bailing out banks is good or bad. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/governmen...