Re: entrepreneurship…

If you look at the different kinds of underpinning or key components of what stands behind the “entrepreneurship” (presuming you’re admiring tech) and where so much of the foundation of that comes from, a relative disproportion comes from Outside USA.

Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla
Linus Torvalds Linux

HTTP, WWW Tim Berners-Lee

Cloud computing Allen Vermeulen, Werner Vogels

Relational Databases EF Codd, C. Date

NoSQL DBs: Carlo Strozzi, Erik Evans, Johan Oskarsson

PageRank Massimo Marchiori

JBoss Marc Fleury

….and on and on..

And when you go back further, the technology and innovation base that preceded this came not from entrepreneurs but places like the US Defense Dept., government laboratories, and large companies such as those from Bell Labs and Xerox.

And much of that talent that preceded these came from those fleeing Europe, but not because they were complaining about the entrepreneurship, they were fleeing war.

But there are many ways to look at a society. If you look at America today, you have to ask yourself is there a good whole picture of are you just looking at the novel form of capitalism called venture capitalism. And who provides a better life than whom?

On Transparency International’s Corruption Index, Finland ranks near the top in terms of least corrupt, #3 whereas the USA is #25. I would rather USA be a little closer to Finland.

And these are not unimportant:

suicide 2018 Finland 810 5,500,000 0.015%
USA 48,344 327,200,000 0.015%
homelessness 2020 Finland 4,341 5,500,000 0.079%
USA 553,742 327,200,000 0.169%
life expectancy 2020 Finland 82
USA 78
homicide 2020 Finland 90 5,500,000 0.002%
USA 20,000 327,200,000 0.006%
Annual Hours worked 2019 Finland 1,540
USA 1,779
Paid Vacation Days 2019 Finland 30
USA 17
Unemployment Rate 2018 Finland 7.36
USA 3.80
Poverty Rate 2018 Finland 11.80
USA 11.80
Inequality (GINI coefficent, less = less) 2018 Finland 27.30
USA 41.40