Everything is a hassle. Building permits, operating licenses, legal compliance, etc.
All those things arguably exist for good reasons, but it's a huge hurdle to doing anything useful.
I can't have a 20 foot radio tower in town, I can't subdivide smaller than 10 acres outside of town, I can't build any facility out there to operate the experimental tower without building permits, radio licenses, compliance with tracking (for the police) any radio customer I might get if I qualify as a "communication service provider", etc.
There are (major) hurdles in just about every conceivable industry, and hardly any provision for "hey I'm a guy who wants to experiment, perhaps even noncommercially".
You can overcome the hurdles, but how many people will just stay at their 9 to 5 and not bother because its a huge pain in the ass with no guaranteed benefit?
I wonder how much this holds us back, it's hard to say.
(US centric comment) I'll add that we're making it less likely people will take risks and act on their ideas with student debt and a lack of healthcare. People can't take risks if they don't have a cushion to rely on and risk their lives (or face massive debt) if a non-trivial health concern occurs. Compounding this is a draw back of social programs to get people back on their feet if their risk turns south. I'm not advocating for paying for "slackers", but giving people a chance at least as good as what their parents had.
Well, if governments let corporations dominate, monopolize markets they are inevitably giving up competition and therefore innovation. Forcing talented people to work on evil things that advance company's dominant position, rather than working on innovations to have a temporary edge over competition.
It depends on social pressure. For places like Silicon valley, the ultimate status symbol is being a founder, which inherently involves inventing (what a founder would call) important stuff. It's similar in Israel. Heck, there, startups are struggling to scale becuase everyone wants to be a founder.
I mean virtually nobody does anything that's important, whether they're talented or not or have a good degree or not. We're pretty good at fooling ourselves into thinking what we're doing is important though.
I think we can certainly incentivize people more, but in order to invent "important stuff" we need significant resources. If everyone was given the money to invent this important stuff, it's hard to allocate the proper resources to them, or at the very least, they will get fewer resources.
Even at large R&D companies which have the investment, people are still hesitant to invest in new ideas since they simply don't have the money. It works the same way with the government, just at a larger scale.
Many people don't care about any of this though. They just want to live their lives, find something to be passionate about, and die peacefully. You'll always have to fight these people, politically.
We also have to consider the legal ramifications of such things. It is difficult to do ethical R&D.
> We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen.
Perhaps it's also not what our industrial policy is tuned for? In California, if a company kills a project, the staff might go elsewhere to pursue it, but that can be harder in states which enforce non-competes. Similarly, in China, if a supplier drops a product, you might go elsewhere for it, which can be harder in the US which has patent law tuned for exclusivity. A great deal of VR/AR tech has vanished into FAMG, and become unavailable for anyone else in the US to "make ideas happen". Part of why China accepted trade war as the lesser of evils.
I was talking to someone the other day that boiled it down to "everyone's trying to solve their Red Queen problem." I was unfamiliar, and the Wikipedia page doesn't seem to support this reading, but the idea is that everyone's running as fast as they can just to stay in place, and the way out is different for every person so no general approach can work for everyone. Any solution will put people right back in the realm of running as fast as they can to stay in place.
You pull out a bottleneck, only to reach another bottleneck. Puts the problem squarely in the realm of myth. Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill. Someone blew my mind one day when they suggested that Sisyphus didn't keep rolling the boulder up the hill because of compulsion, he does it because he finds exquisite meaning in it. He knows every crack, every crevice, how to move most efficiently up that hill. This idea moves the problem from mythological to religious. What is heaven and what is hell?
Some wind up burning out, and reverting to a simpler, more primitive form of life. Yours truly has a hard time seeing that as anything more than a rest stop. As humanity connects and we learn more about ourselves, our minds, and our bodies, we'll start unlocking dizzying heights of human achievement. These things will look like self-inflicted torture.
But at the end of the day, humans yearn for one thing, greatness, elevation, perfection. So they'll keep pushing themselves to that next level.
I feel like this is stating the obvious and putting the emphasis on the exact wrong end of it.
"Oh no! Think about all the potential geniuses we are missing out on! We must be doing something wrong!"
Ok, thought about it.
My conclusion is:
"Wow, the rate of genius production has never been higher, we must really be doing something right."
Could it be better? Sure. Is it getting better? According to Factfulness: sure.
I just don't understand the ridiculous in-built assumption that we are somehow wronging society and the potential geniuses themselves by them not being in a time and a place that makes use of the quality of the substrate of those particular individuals.
Well, sorry but nature doesn't optimize for the individual, it optimizes for the whole.
You may as well get equally mad at something silly like "why doesn't everyone always roll a 6?"
I think you missed the point that the opportunity is not equal, as a person if you grew up in rural Georgia and not knowing what to do with your life because you didn't get the memo kinda screws your future. It's about giving the opportunity for the smart minds to work on impactful things and frankly, if I would have that chance of a privileged kid, I would take it. Basically there are ways how to fix it, the question is what is the most effective way... Think about cheating on dropping the dice based on a pattern that always grants you two threes.
The opportunity is there. It's always there. It may not be an opportunity to immediately become the president of an international corporation, but it's an opportunity to improve your life and life of your future generations.
Give your children education. Make sure they grow up in a full family. Move to a better place. All these small things add up. You won't become a millionaire this way, but your grandkids may.
The lack of exposure to role models for girls is a load of carefully crafted dishonesty. It gives the impression that role models are the reason for gender differences in inventing without actually saying that. Instead, it uses the same weasel word "can" as cosmetics advertising telling you that some chemical "can" reduce wrinkles. It also doesn't quantify the effect because that would probably be embarrassing. Of course role models will have some effect but it's not the only one - sexual dimorphism is there too and all the role models in the world won't change that. I wish people would stop lying to themselves and others about gender differences. Men and women are not cognitively equal on average. We have different strengths and weaknesses. There's nothing wrong with that. You don't have to pretend that women would be just as good as men if only society would stop misunderstanding them. It's trying to pull girls under a spell of delusion to fool them into behaving like boys, perhaps so that more of those who can do so will fulfill their potential. Why not be honest and help people understand that their own individual qualities are not the same as their group average?
One place talent is not is in the screening process of VC. Attempting to raise money for a new venture is like returning to high school and being confronted by the popular kids demanding to know why you should be allowed into their club. I expected professionalism, and primarily saw immature 1%'ers so transparent in their shallowness, it turned raising funding into a surreal experience leaving bile in my throat.
The worst part isn't lacking opportunity. It's knowing that you lack the ability and are forced to live your life that way without any ability to do anything about it.
Opportunity is at least, largely changeable. Ability isn't.
Being average is the worst thing imaginable in today's society because nobody cares about average people.
I would give up anything to have the brain of an inventor. But it's something that has constantly haunted my mind knowing that I will always be sub-par.
It's even worse when you go through school and you're a top performer in your school work. You're given a false sense of being one of the best, only to be exposed in the real world as a complete fraud.
We shouldn't worry about finding the talent who can work as researchers, first we should worry about finding the talent who can reliably work as modern farmers or in factories. That is what Africa is missing before it can take the next step towards becoming a modern society.
Seems to me capital is not just ordinary resources.
More like when preservation or a positive return is intended in a businesslike situation, even though negative returns are often encountered.
Other people's money can be used to leverage some amazing outcomes.
When capitalism is dominated by greedy capitalists, basic needs are not intended to be taken care of, since no return on that type investment can be recognized.
When capitalism is dominated by benevolent capitalists, basic needs are intended to be taken care of, since huge return on that type investment can be recognized.
Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated,
And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other)
My solution is: take a piece of the federal budget and give $1-3MM to anyone with a far fetched idea that has a prototype to back it up. No long processes. If 30K -mostly students- a year get a mill to develop their thing, I suspect we would find ourselves way into the future in just a decade. And that’s just $30-90B/y
I don't think just giving the money to whoever has a prototype is a good idea. Some culturally relevant projects aren't the sort of thing you can make a prototype of, but I like where you're going. I'd amend it like so:
Once I've been a citizen long enough (i.e. paid enough taxes) I get to invoke my free year, which is a year where the government pays me enough to cover my bills and maybe a bit extra for projects and stuff.
During this year, I am encouraged to make some kind of contribution: maybe I start a business, maybe I do an art project, maybe I try to overthrow the government, it's up to me.
At the end of the year, I can provide a presentation about what society gained by funding my free year. If I do, it goes into an archive and part of the voting process means having citizens review these and decide whether I deserve another free year to persue similar endeavors. Maybe voted on free years are actually two years long so you can be more ambitious once proven viable.
So if society likes what you do when left to your own devices, they have the opportunity to keep funding it. If not, well you had your shot and nothing stops you from carrying on the old fashioned way.
As for yourself, you get to decide when to invoke your free year. Is the idea really ready? Do you have the skills? Should you put a bit more work into it on the weekends before you try to do it full time? These things ought to ensure sufficient seriousness from the participant. You can have a video game year on the government's dime, but unless people really want their tax money funding your gaming, your only going to get one.
If I had been given $1 million when I was 22 to build something, the world would have a pretty awesome Honda Civic with a flamethrower on the front, a 40" subwoofer in the hatch, and a dial to change the camber angle of the wheels on the fly.
This sounds similar enough to the SBIR/STTR program that many federal agencies already have from the NIH and Department of Agriculture too DARPA. Basically a company pitches an idea to a federal agency which if accepted will give you something like 100k (phase 1) to explore the initial idea and place in you in a pipeline that can lead to much more money if the idea seems valuable and doable (phase 2 and phase 3). This program has led to the development of all types of cool technology and has supported a bunch of small businesses. However it is not the silver bullet you are suggesting it is.
>My solution is: take a piece of the federal budget and give $1-3MM to anyone with a far fetched idea that has a prototype to back it up. No long processes. If 30K -mostly students- a year get a mill to develop their thing, I suspect we would find ourselves way into the future in just a decade. And that’s just $30-90B/y
Ideas require good execution to be off any value and money doesn't buy that. Look at all the Kickstarters which over-funded and failed because the people running them had no ideas about manufacturing, finances, physics, engineering, etc.
Education as a whole is not and cannot be overvalued enough given the trajectory of technology, society, and the nature of work.
What can be overvalued is the character of our present educational institutions. Because the system of education that produced many of us was designed for another time. This is reflected in both the character and the quality of education.
Education in the U.S. is also unevenly distributed due to a funding model that relies on municipality taxes, creating a multi-generational disadvantage.
Capital may be under-appreciated and you're correct that it's "trapped in networks" - but I believe that the solution is to legally tie that capital to real economic purposes. Companies floating billions in cash reserves waste the productive potential of those resources. Same could be said for the stock market, speculation has it's purposes but modern financial markets just churn money to make money. Wall-street was intended to fund the productive agenda of society, not tie up capital in the hands of an isolated few.
Capital is not underappreciated - it is hidden by owners. Because their power and wealth comes from control of a scarce, hidden resource. If everyone had access to capital, nobody would be “on top”, and that’s unacceptable to the owning classes.
Perhaps worth noting that the U.S. government already has a grant program with approximately this budget range. Pell grants give money to students who need money.
Is it possible that Pell grants already provide more economic return than is possible with a far-fetched-idea plan for a small number of people? Pell grants do help enable education for millions, and as we see in the article & study, education is absolutely correlated with innovation.
I am curious how you propose to vet far fetched ideas in a short amount of time? 30K startups is a lot to review, even if the cycle was continuous and spread out over the year. And far-fetched ideas are difficult to rank and fund. Whether this program works, I imagine, would depend on lot on whether the vetting process reliably allowed in far fetched ideas with real potential and kept out far fetched ideas that have no potential, as well as people who aren’t likely to bring the far fetched idea to fruition.
If you offer millions of dollars to anyone with a far fetched idea and a prototype, everyone will have a far fetched idea and a prototype, and you'll need some way to filter millions of applicants down to the 30k you can afford to give the money. It would be extremely competitive, just like VC is now, and picking the winners smartly/fairly would be just as difficult.
This doesn't mean that having some public subsidies for entrepreneurs is necessarily a bad idea, but it's not going to be a dramatic cure-all like you describe. The students in the top < 1% that would be getting funded from this system could most likely already raise that money from private investors. I think something like UBI would have a far wider and more equitable impact.
That's basically the thought process behind Tyler Cowen's 'Emergent Ventures' program. He secured a few million dollars that he can unilaterally give out to moonshot innovators, mainly to prove that traditional grant-making bureaucracies are inefficient.
The problem with pitching an idea is that person should have exposure to a particular field if the field is already developed. In my opinion the low hanging fruits are mostly taken. To have exposure it falls in the same trap where the person should be given an opportunity which is simply not there. Personally I have the same problem where it is difficult to get opportunity because people already present are simply blocking it.
>My solution is: take a piece of the federal budget and give $1-3MM to anyone with a far fetched idea that has a prototype to back it up.
The problem is that people are smart. This kind of policy would be gamed in no time.
>If 30K -mostly students- a year get a mill to develop their thing
Today there may be 30k smart, ambitious students with a great idea. With your policy there would be 30k smart, ambitious students and 10 million others pretending to be.
Thats how biomedical research funding works. Its not pretty, thousands of unambitious tiny studies , tons of overlap, millions dead mice , but progress is slow
but subsequent included nothing vis-a-vis the expensive, industrial lifestyle we have these days. It is unfortunate that cultural innovation doesn't make the list, since it would go a long way toward address some pertinent problems
I'd go farther and suggest that culture is the central problem.
Only better culture can deliver peace and a modicum of justice. In particular, a social culture in which neighbors do not seek to rob or enslave each other.
Self-driving cars, or even a cure for cancer, will not advance this central goal. Better schools on the other hand, just might.
If I hadn't had to work jobs just to keep food on the table, I'd have invented the things I did A LOT earlier. I'd probably be finished rewriting the internet's protocols by now, instead of only being 30% of the way there.
But that's not how this world works. Most of the early discoveries were by affluent people or had benefactors and didn't need jobs and thus actually had time.
> "The list of innovations we need is long: clean and cheap energy, better crops, interventions to help against the diseases that shorten and impair our lives. This, and much more besides, is needed to make progress against the big problems we face. But while the demand for innovation is large, its supply is limited."
Yes and no. What we need is better problem identification and more appropriate priorities.
For example, we don't need "better crops." We need to stop wasting so much of that we do have. Less waste means less wasted resources.
For example, less wasted food also means less chemicals and pesticides, which likely means less disease and medical issues.
If we solved for root problem (i.e., apply The Five Whys) we'd waste less time and resources solving for symptoms.
As for the supply of innovation being limit. IDK, I've heard that scarcity breeds innovation. So perhaps we are innovating, but in the wrong places, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.
One problem I see in education today is that we give lots of extra resources to kids with learning problems, behavior problems, and physical handicaps, but not many resources go to gifted kids because "they'll do okay on their own". Yes, they might do "okay", but they might turn into brilliant innovators if they were given the same extra attention that the kids below the median get.
This article is specifically about kids who score above average in math in 3rd grade. As a society, we have chosen (or someone has) to provide extra teaching staff to help kids that are below the median, not the ones who are exceptional.
I have tech talents that maybe a few thousand people in the world have, and research ability to move the needle (maybe even novel ideas in the field, if you ask me).
I can't work in academia (no Ph.D), find capital (no connections), and the software job market is a crazy stupid PITA (no thanks).
I know it's me, that I can have what I want if I really go for it, and that is what I do by living simply and continuing my work.
But it would be swell if it was easier to be seen, at such a high level. I would gladly teach, if offered the role.
Basically, it should made way-too-easy for obviously talented, experienced, people to find some kind of work in teaching or civic developments.
Invention is overvalued as well as the idea of "creativity."
The biggest proof is the current China-USA standoff.
USA is on the paper the biggest nation on earth by manufacturing output, but what was the last time you saw made in USA household goods in supermarket without having to specifically look for them?
Why China has industrial base and USA doesn't?
Wages difference? No, not by a chance. In some places in China, the cost of trained blue collar labour begins to exceed that of US.
An hourly rate for an experienced pick and place machine operator in South China certainly exceeds $15 per hour, and may be closing on $20. This is what I can tell from my own experience.
Even plain assembly line workers now get close to $15, and trained ones above that. For any manufacturing automation specialist in China, wages are better than in USA...
You don't see Chinese industrialists racing to setup factories in USA. Think why now?
I was telling my own story on HN few times already. I was trying to setup an electric scooter factory in Vancouver, Canada, and then in US northwest on behalf of my employer.
I had to hire university grads to do plain assembly, as anybody else had hard time to just wire a battery, throttle, BMS board, and a motor. And that with colour coded wire harness with mechanical keys to prevent miswiring... We spent 6 months looking for an operator for our model of pick and place machine.
In China, those are the jobs I can hire a highschooler for.
America wastes its talent not any much less than, say, most countries Americans call "the third world."
Even if wages are comparable, are other costs of employment, such as unemployment insurance, healthcare, pay roll tax comparable?
And even if they are comparable now, its true that it no longer matters. The work moved to China because of low wages, and its going to stay there now because all of the labor force and supply chain infrastructure are much better developed. You are quite right those things no longer exist in the US, they have atrophied.
It's not at all surprising that low-wage assembly jobs aren't going to attract the best talent in a high-wage country. Also not surprising that low-margin manufactured goods are made in a low-wage, not high-wage, country.
[+] [-] petra|6 years ago|reply
Very few.
Educating more kids and having more "ideas" won't change that.
We're not lacking ideas. We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen.
[+] [-] PostOnce|6 years ago|reply
All those things arguably exist for good reasons, but it's a huge hurdle to doing anything useful.
I can't have a 20 foot radio tower in town, I can't subdivide smaller than 10 acres outside of town, I can't build any facility out there to operate the experimental tower without building permits, radio licenses, compliance with tracking (for the police) any radio customer I might get if I qualify as a "communication service provider", etc.
There are (major) hurdles in just about every conceivable industry, and hardly any provision for "hey I'm a guy who wants to experiment, perhaps even noncommercially".
You can overcome the hurdles, but how many people will just stay at their 9 to 5 and not bother because its a huge pain in the ass with no guaranteed benefit?
I wonder how much this holds us back, it's hard to say.
[+] [-] cwingrav|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzzcpan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aripickar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulcole|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solinent|6 years ago|reply
Even at large R&D companies which have the investment, people are still hesitant to invest in new ideas since they simply don't have the money. It works the same way with the government, just at a larger scale.
Many people don't care about any of this though. They just want to live their lives, find something to be passionate about, and die peacefully. You'll always have to fight these people, politically.
We also have to consider the legal ramifications of such things. It is difficult to do ethical R&D.
[+] [-] mncharity|6 years ago|reply
Perhaps it's also not what our industrial policy is tuned for? In California, if a company kills a project, the staff might go elsewhere to pursue it, but that can be harder in states which enforce non-competes. Similarly, in China, if a supplier drops a product, you might go elsewhere for it, which can be harder in the US which has patent law tuned for exclusivity. A great deal of VR/AR tech has vanished into FAMG, and become unavailable for anyone else in the US to "make ideas happen". Part of why China accepted trade war as the lesser of evils.
[+] [-] Guthur|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vinceguidry|6 years ago|reply
You pull out a bottleneck, only to reach another bottleneck. Puts the problem squarely in the realm of myth. Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill. Someone blew my mind one day when they suggested that Sisyphus didn't keep rolling the boulder up the hill because of compulsion, he does it because he finds exquisite meaning in it. He knows every crack, every crevice, how to move most efficiently up that hill. This idea moves the problem from mythological to religious. What is heaven and what is hell?
Some wind up burning out, and reverting to a simpler, more primitive form of life. Yours truly has a hard time seeing that as anything more than a rest stop. As humanity connects and we learn more about ourselves, our minds, and our bodies, we'll start unlocking dizzying heights of human achievement. These things will look like self-inflicted torture.
But at the end of the day, humans yearn for one thing, greatness, elevation, perfection. So they'll keep pushing themselves to that next level.
[+] [-] jzebedee|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manveru|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james_s_tayler|6 years ago|reply
"Oh no! Think about all the potential geniuses we are missing out on! We must be doing something wrong!"
Ok, thought about it.
My conclusion is:
"Wow, the rate of genius production has never been higher, we must really be doing something right."
Could it be better? Sure. Is it getting better? According to Factfulness: sure.
I just don't understand the ridiculous in-built assumption that we are somehow wronging society and the potential geniuses themselves by them not being in a time and a place that makes use of the quality of the substrate of those particular individuals.
Well, sorry but nature doesn't optimize for the individual, it optimizes for the whole.
You may as well get equally mad at something silly like "why doesn't everyone always roll a 6?"
[+] [-] kirso|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexTWithBeard|6 years ago|reply
Give your children education. Make sure they grow up in a full family. Move to a better place. All these small things add up. You won't become a millionaire this way, but your grandkids may.
[+] [-] lopmotr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsenftner|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jshowa3|6 years ago|reply
Opportunity is at least, largely changeable. Ability isn't.
Being average is the worst thing imaginable in today's society because nobody cares about average people.
I would give up anything to have the brain of an inventor. But it's something that has constantly haunted my mind knowing that I will always be sub-par.
It's even worse when you go through school and you're a top performer in your school work. You're given a false sense of being one of the best, only to be exposed in the real world as a complete fraud.
[+] [-] username90|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reality_counts|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] blurbleblurble|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fuzzfactor|6 years ago|reply
More like when preservation or a positive return is intended in a businesslike situation, even though negative returns are often encountered.
Other people's money can be used to leverage some amazing outcomes.
When capitalism is dominated by greedy capitalists, basic needs are not intended to be taken care of, since no return on that type investment can be recognized.
When capitalism is dominated by benevolent capitalists, basic needs are intended to be taken care of, since huge return on that type investment can be recognized.
[+] [-] eaenki|6 years ago|reply
Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated,
And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other)
My solution is: take a piece of the federal budget and give $1-3MM to anyone with a far fetched idea that has a prototype to back it up. No long processes. If 30K -mostly students- a year get a mill to develop their thing, I suspect we would find ourselves way into the future in just a decade. And that’s just $30-90B/y
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|6 years ago|reply
Once I've been a citizen long enough (i.e. paid enough taxes) I get to invoke my free year, which is a year where the government pays me enough to cover my bills and maybe a bit extra for projects and stuff.
During this year, I am encouraged to make some kind of contribution: maybe I start a business, maybe I do an art project, maybe I try to overthrow the government, it's up to me.
At the end of the year, I can provide a presentation about what society gained by funding my free year. If I do, it goes into an archive and part of the voting process means having citizens review these and decide whether I deserve another free year to persue similar endeavors. Maybe voted on free years are actually two years long so you can be more ambitious once proven viable.
So if society likes what you do when left to your own devices, they have the opportunity to keep funding it. If not, well you had your shot and nothing stops you from carrying on the old fashioned way.
As for yourself, you get to decide when to invoke your free year. Is the idea really ready? Do you have the skills? Should you put a bit more work into it on the weekends before you try to do it full time? These things ought to ensure sufficient seriousness from the participant. You can have a video game year on the government's dime, but unless people really want their tax money funding your gaming, your only going to get one.
[+] [-] criddell|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecorithm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcinzm|6 years ago|reply
Ideas require good execution to be off any value and money doesn't buy that. Look at all the Kickstarters which over-funded and failed because the people running them had no ideas about manufacturing, finances, physics, engineering, etc.
[+] [-] rrivers|6 years ago|reply
What can be overvalued is the character of our present educational institutions. Because the system of education that produced many of us was designed for another time. This is reflected in both the character and the quality of education.
Education in the U.S. is also unevenly distributed due to a funding model that relies on municipality taxes, creating a multi-generational disadvantage.
Capital may be under-appreciated and you're correct that it's "trapped in networks" - but I believe that the solution is to legally tie that capital to real economic purposes. Companies floating billions in cash reserves waste the productive potential of those resources. Same could be said for the stock market, speculation has it's purposes but modern financial markets just churn money to make money. Wall-street was intended to fund the productive agenda of society, not tie up capital in the hands of an isolated few.
[+] [-] toyg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahart|6 years ago|reply
Is it possible that Pell grants already provide more economic return than is possible with a far-fetched-idea plan for a small number of people? Pell grants do help enable education for millions, and as we see in the article & study, education is absolutely correlated with innovation.
I am curious how you propose to vet far fetched ideas in a short amount of time? 30K startups is a lot to review, even if the cycle was continuous and spread out over the year. And far-fetched ideas are difficult to rank and fund. Whether this program works, I imagine, would depend on lot on whether the vetting process reliably allowed in far fetched ideas with real potential and kept out far fetched ideas that have no potential, as well as people who aren’t likely to bring the far fetched idea to fruition.
[+] [-] danenania|6 years ago|reply
This doesn't mean that having some public subsidies for entrepreneurs is necessarily a bad idea, but it's not going to be a dramatic cure-all like you describe. The students in the top < 1% that would be getting funded from this system could most likely already raise that money from private investors. I think something like UBI would have a far wider and more equitable impact.
[+] [-] pikwip|6 years ago|reply
Site here: https://www.mercatus.org/emergentventures
Info about cohorts here: https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=emergent+ventures
[+] [-] easytiger|6 years ago|reply
You only have to look at the industrialised corruption of public tenders for legitimate needs in Africa for a glimpse of human nature.
[+] [-] mindentropy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macspoofing|6 years ago|reply
The problem is that people are smart. This kind of policy would be gamed in no time.
>If 30K -mostly students- a year get a mill to develop their thing
Today there may be 30k smart, ambitious students with a great idea. With your policy there would be 30k smart, ambitious students and 10 million others pretending to be.
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marmaduke|6 years ago|reply
but subsequent included nothing vis-a-vis the expensive, industrial lifestyle we have these days. It is unfortunate that cultural innovation doesn't make the list, since it would go a long way toward address some pertinent problems
[+] [-] everybodyknows|6 years ago|reply
Only better culture can deliver peace and a modicum of justice. In particular, a social culture in which neighbors do not seek to rob or enslave each other.
Self-driving cars, or even a cure for cancer, will not advance this central goal. Better schools on the other hand, just might.
[+] [-] kstenerud|6 years ago|reply
But that's not how this world works. Most of the early discoveries were by affluent people or had benefactors and didn't need jobs and thus actually had time.
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|6 years ago|reply
Yes and no. What we need is better problem identification and more appropriate priorities.
For example, we don't need "better crops." We need to stop wasting so much of that we do have. Less waste means less wasted resources.
For example, less wasted food also means less chemicals and pesticides, which likely means less disease and medical issues.
If we solved for root problem (i.e., apply The Five Whys) we'd waste less time and resources solving for symptoms.
As for the supply of innovation being limit. IDK, I've heard that scarcity breeds innovation. So perhaps we are innovating, but in the wrong places, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.
[+] [-] mLuby|6 years ago|reply
Assuming talent seeks opportunity to express itself, places looking for success (=talent*opportunity) should to make it easy for talent to move there.
For the US, let students who earn masters/doctorates at American schools stay.
[+] [-] known|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prirun|6 years ago|reply
This article is specifically about kids who score above average in math in 3rd grade. As a society, we have chosen (or someone has) to provide extra teaching staff to help kids that are below the median, not the ones who are exceptional.
[+] [-] segmondy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdiq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NHQ|6 years ago|reply
I can't work in academia (no Ph.D), find capital (no connections), and the software job market is a crazy stupid PITA (no thanks).
I know it's me, that I can have what I want if I really go for it, and that is what I do by living simply and continuing my work.
But it would be swell if it was easier to be seen, at such a high level. I would gladly teach, if offered the role.
Basically, it should made way-too-easy for obviously talented, experienced, people to find some kind of work in teaching or civic developments.
[+] [-] baybal2|6 years ago|reply
The biggest proof is the current China-USA standoff.
USA is on the paper the biggest nation on earth by manufacturing output, but what was the last time you saw made in USA household goods in supermarket without having to specifically look for them?
Why China has industrial base and USA doesn't?
Wages difference? No, not by a chance. In some places in China, the cost of trained blue collar labour begins to exceed that of US.
An hourly rate for an experienced pick and place machine operator in South China certainly exceeds $15 per hour, and may be closing on $20. This is what I can tell from my own experience.
On an another hand, it is $16 in USA. https://www.indeed.com/salaries/SMT-Operator-Salaries
Even plain assembly line workers now get close to $15, and trained ones above that. For any manufacturing automation specialist in China, wages are better than in USA...
You don't see Chinese industrialists racing to setup factories in USA. Think why now?
I was telling my own story on HN few times already. I was trying to setup an electric scooter factory in Vancouver, Canada, and then in US northwest on behalf of my employer.
I had to hire university grads to do plain assembly, as anybody else had hard time to just wire a battery, throttle, BMS board, and a motor. And that with colour coded wire harness with mechanical keys to prevent miswiring... We spent 6 months looking for an operator for our model of pick and place machine.
In China, those are the jobs I can hire a highschooler for.
America wastes its talent not any much less than, say, most countries Americans call "the third world."
A very good story about that https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-...
[+] [-] jeremyjh|6 years ago|reply
And even if they are comparable now, its true that it no longer matters. The work moved to China because of low wages, and its going to stay there now because all of the labor force and supply chain infrastructure are much better developed. You are quite right those things no longer exist in the US, they have atrophied.
[+] [-] soniman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jimmc414|6 years ago|reply