Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

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Presumably you'd want to see that such initiatives are increasing the number of sustainable businesses created, per capita. Is that the case?

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EDIT: Some quick searching indicates that the startup rate (per capita) in Germany is about 1.1%, while the USA is 1.5%. Not a huge difference, but the USA doesn't have any of those initiatives afaik.

Just wondering what actually moves the needle and how to better create a society that is entrepreneurial, and not just in a "billion dollar social media unicorn" kinda way, but businesses that provide actual tangible value. Definitely recognize that the "quality" of businesses being started in Germany could be higher, but I think you actually need to measure these things and understand what interventions actually make a difference. It is a similar issue with UBI in general: while it sounds nice and might be necessary if our "AI is the future" overlords get their way, you do actually need to back up the promise of "UBI will unlock human creativity" with some amount of hard data, imo.

> Some quick searching indicates that the startup rate (per capita) in Germany is about 1.1%, while the USA is 1.5%. Not a huge difference, but the USA doesn't have any of those initiatives afaik.

It sounds like these are small businesses and not startups. The US has 10% small businesses per capita.

My brief research was looking at new business registrations per year.

> Some quick searching indicates that the startup rate (per capita) in Germany is about 1.1%, while the USA is 1.5%. Not a huge difference, but the USA doesn't have any of those initiatives afaik.

I believe there's differences between east and west Germany, so if you look at the west specifically, the gamp might get a little bit smaller.

Beyond that, Germany doesn't have as much of a startup culture as the USA, which is precisely why we need to incentivise people in a way that others don't.

> Just wondering what actually moves the needle and how to better create a society that is entrepreneurial

Willingness and awareness, where the latter is probably easy to fix but the former is a bit trickier: You need those people who have the ability to pull it off to want it in the first place.

And there I guess it splits into a) the benefits of entreprenaurship b) the benefits of employment and c) the cultural influence on how these are weighed against each other.

So tl;dr: a) make starting a company attractive, b) make employment suck more and c) convince people that independence beats security.

Employment in Germany is definitely a lot cozier than in the US, so unless we want to get rid of that, a) and c) are the options we have. If you want to achieve it without propaganda, then all you can really do is a), and that's what these programmes are already doing.

I think reducing buerocracy and offering good social safety nets so a failing business doesn't translate to a ruined life are the way to go, at least in the short term.

Or maybe having a social safety net has the opposite effect you think it does, in that anyone starting a business without one is going to try that much harder to make sure their business doesn't fail, as otherwise their life is ruined. Someone with a safety net might be happy to give up after some minimum of effort because they know they'll be fine. Necessity is an incredibly strong motivator for people.

Not necessarily saying that relying on the specter of ruination would be the right choice (if the above was true), but I don't think you can reduce it to such simplistic levers.

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