there were some great quotes in this interview from bill gates... 'And he [Lee Kuan Yew] was not only just thoughtful, just the very idea that he would take parts of the Western system and say 'Oh this part is good, this part may not apply everywhere,' this part he disagreed with. It was kind of bold because of course the Western system was succeeding, you know, basically all the rich countries in the world had followed the Western system, and so the idea that he thought he would do it slightly differently was a huge contribution. And so Singapore's a city state, so you do things in terms of paying government salaries and excellence there that may not scale up but what he did was very incredible. What we really want is this mix of democracy and expertise and no country has that balance right. If you err on the side of democracy there are certain extreme thing about the wrong person getting in power and if you kick them out then how do you get new people? So a democracy they have some huge advantages that helped the US quite a bit. It is a little scary now when we have complex problems like how do you run a healthcare system efficiently. Why is the US paying so much? And there really isn't at this time any elected representative who can have a good discussion about the dynamics of the system and why it's different from other countries and how we might change that. So government has to deal with very complex issues and the Chinese government although I'd say the trend is a tiny bit away from it has had engineers and scientists in a lot of key positions and a willingness to look at what other countries do and also this notion that if you're going to have a new policy you can often try it out in part of the country see if it works and tune the policy before you try to scale it up in a really broad way. So the Chinese government is a student of policy more than just a, say, the UK Parliament or the US Congress where people are kind of yelling at each other like 'I'm right', 'No you're right' It's not like 'oh we're going to do an experiment.' I've never sat in the US Congress and had them say 'Oh let's try yours out in one state and we'll try out mine and we'll come together and let's combine the best features.' That's not a typical electoral dialogue that we're having right now. So it's a work in progress. There are things like how you run your universities where the US model - you know other people should just adopt it. Then there's things like health systems and governance where they should take some aspects that try out variation. So we get the benefit of 192 countries slightly different experience including at the sub-national level.'Robin Li replies 'We have a very strong government and they have very strong execution capabilities when it comes to infrastructure, like high-speed rail or highways. We have massive constructions and now is probably the largest infrastructure in terms of transportation in the world. But when you have a strong government are you concerned about innovation?
There might be things that are too strict that's going to hurt innovation.
Bill Gates'...in terms of things like, how do you make energy the state policy's not holding back somebody figuring out some big invention. In fact, I have a nuclear power company called Terra Power. That really, China's the most natural partner for us with the breakthrough generation of nuclear. Because China's a lot like the United States was in the 1960s, where the idea you want to go forward and do new things, it's very clear. The idea that the status quo isn't where you want to be. The US today is very careful that they were pretty happy with the current conditions, so if somebody wants to build a new building or take some new approach, there's a lot of 'Hmm, maybe no.' There's like five levels you go through, maybe no, maybe no. Whereas the bias towards moving and doing new things which has a small downside but a huge upside as well. I'd say in terms of breakthroughs in some areas, like nuclear, it's more likely to come out of China than almost any other place because of this bias towards doing big projects. And 1950s, 1960s that was the US and the 70s it started to be Japan. Korea took on that role, that big engineering bias is great for the world.'
the flaw in your reasoning i think is that there will be zero-sum fight to have the limited number of companies in your country so that you can tax those companies and support the massive number of unemployed people. there will be a race to the bottom in the automation regulation that you describe because companies will just move if they are not allowed to lower costs through more automation... thus i think the result is that some countries will have very high employment rates because all the high-skilled, unautomatable jobs are located there (e.g. the US) and some countries (e.g. spain?) will have really high unemployment... this will lead to extreme tensions internationally followed by god knows what..
Unfortunately (fortunately?) your rebuttal assumes that 1) companies can move easily from country to country and 2) companies are motivated entirely by profit.
As for 1, countries have many ways from persuasion to coercion to keep companies in their sphere of influence. There are plenty of business-unfriendly countries in this world that somehow retain businesses. In the real world, there's friction.
In my cursory research, I find 2 to be, once again, a liberal-democratic assumption which relies on our particular barrier between public and private. This barrier doesn't exist the same way everywhere: some corporations operate as extensions of nationalistic projects. Gazprom's relationship to Russia is different than Apple's relationship to the US. Samsung (and other Chaebol corporations) has a different relationship to the Korean nation than Google has with the US.
it is not just a function of companies moving after they are successful. just look at silicon valley where most of the best start-ups are founded. silicon valley is a classic global zero-sum game because the network effects are so strong... look at attempts in chile, dublin, london etc. to create startup hubs, they are struggle with the fact that silicon valley is taking all the best companies first...
re 2) that's a good point i didn't thikn of that and many countries may seek to nationalize big corporations to keep them based in the domestic country etc..
clearly i'm not arguing that there will be no companies in some countries and all the companies in other countries, but maybe just a more extreme version of what you already see now where most of the big technology companies are based in just two countries: usa and china... maybe you need only half of all the companies in the world to be global enough to serve the world from just one location/country to have extreme international inequality/differences in % unemployed etc.
i think that's why you can't have western governments investing in students, because they don't have any money.. in fact my friend and i have applied to this yc batch with our idea for a 'vc firm for people' where you pay for students university education in return for a % of their annual income (i.e. in return for taxing them).
Private debt slavery! This is a terrible idea. Moreover, your cost of capital cannot possibly be lower than the interest rates paid by Western governments.
haha u have hit the nail on the head re: our bad pr problem..usually people go for indentured servitude rather than all the way to slavery though haha...
we think equity>debt for students because a) in bad times your debt is lower (% of income vs flat payment) and b) longer time scale allows transfer consumption from middle-age to years immediately after graduation
re: western government interest rates that's probably true, the uk has lost a lot of money on their loans which have very nice terms & conditions.. the US market still has a large private loans component which we think we can beat (for reasons above). to be honest though we are probably thinking more about the developing world (india, china etc.) where student loan financing isn't as available (particularly true at a graduate level)
finally, the x-factor is on the investor side where we can allow investors to bet on industries without having to be on a specific company because the income stream of someone working in a given industry is a better long-term proxy than a company in that industry (particularly if it's a new industry)..
this is a really cool idea.. its also great intel on the yc batch companies haha!
how do you track returns? how much money the companies raise? what the companies are valued at? isn't this dangerous because all angel investors including ron conway and pg say it's not about how much money you raise and that is a poor indicator of how successful your start-up is going to be...
obviously a fantasy league where you have to wait 10 years to see who actually wins and becomes a 10 billion company etc. isn't that much fun, but i can't figure out what short-term metrics that would work across different start-ups with different growth plans (i.e. some start-ups will focus on page views, others on sign-ups, others on transactions etc.)
The idea is that after the "seed" stage we're in now, the shares will float, so you can put in bids and asks to buy and sell. But, whenever real-world liquidity news comes in (raise money, acquisition, ipo), people will be able to buy/sell at that price for a week before it goes back to floating!
ahhh so it's less fantasy football more stock exchange where value is determined collectively by the market, as opposed to externally e.g. with fantasy scores every week. i understand now.
this could indirectly be a good way to reveal peoples biases (including angels) about what companies will be successful... it's especially interesting as it removes from the equation the one component that vcs/investors say is most important which is their feeling about how good the team is... if the stock exchange can accurately predict which companies are going to be successful without that information that has interesting implications for vcs approach in picking companies.
it would be interesting to have two separate fantasy leagues. one just like this one . but another where investors get to see 2 minute videos with the founders just talking about themselves/their company... it would be itneresting to see if the companies they invest in are any different because of these videos... and furthermore if 2 minutes of video lead to significanlty better predictions about which companies will be successful..
incl. obvious implications for ycombinators model with 10 minute interviews etc.
the statistical term is sample selection bias. to test the importance of mentors you'd need to figure out some way to compare to groups of start-ups which are identical in every way except access to mentors... which i can't think of a good way to do... maybe if you could find start-ups that had been accepted by the same vcs.. so maybe one vc gives more money the other vc had more 'mentor's then you might be able to reasonable estimate the effect of vcs... but even this isn't great.
i'm similarly baffled... but this is what elon says 'I think it's worth noting that when somebody has a breakthrough innovation it is rarely one little thing. Very rarely is it one little thing. It's usually a whole bunch of things that collectively amount to a huge innovation. But the problem is because it's hard to convey a complicated thing to people the innovator or the innovator's PR department will say such and such is the reason why it's better. This little catch phrase. Like what was it with ebay, Pam wants to do Beanie Babies or something. I mean really, that's not the basis of ebay. Oh right, yeah pes dispenser. It's like something the PR department made up. So really innovation is a collection of complex things which are usually difficult to convey so there is some soundbite that's given. You know why's South-West Airlines the most popular Airline in the whole business. It's not just because they use 737s. I mean if it was that easy everybody could do it.' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xohhz9Hn8p0
