Just for interest can you post the source of this quote?

Its alright, a swift google search found it from Carl J Schramm, thanks!

If you aren't smart enough to know how to find the source in the internet age given the huge direct quote I posted you aren't worth answering.

Technology isn't the answer, since everyone now either has the same technology or can easily obtain it. By definition, when everyone has access to the same asset, the asset itself can't supply an edge. Only innovative, entrepreneurial ways of employing that technology can provide a comparative advantage.

Copy and paste that PJ. Let me know when the training wheels are off.
You have improved since our discussion of Reagan I see.

took you long enough to start this thread...

Next time PJ do for yourself before you ask for any help. The world will run a lot smoother.
You should buy his book.

However I disagree with your statement that the US is number one in the world in Entrepreneurship.

Per capita I would say a lot of smaller countries have done better.

It is ridiculous, of course. The United states aren't the best country in the world. I don't know why they think they should be.

They don't have the most citizens (not even close), nor the highest production, nor the most natural resources. They're not the richest, they don't have the best legal/political system. And "entrepeneurship" isn't going to cut it, either.

The reason that US currently is the most important country, is historical and military. They can kick the shit out of anyone on this planet, and they have the balls to do so.

I think it would help both America and the world at large if Americans wouldn't try to set an example for the rest. They aren't number one, so they are not responsible for the world. Meaning they can invest their energy in solving american problems instead of global issues.

And america does have its own problems. 12 trillion of them...

>>The Importance of Enrtrepreneurship

The Importance of Spelling...

http://www.webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=69843 join

Spelling? But TC showed us how teachers are all lazy commies who get paid too much.

http://www.webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=69846

Fasces, the statement that the US is number one in the world in entrepreneurship is not mine. I do agree with it 100% though. Per capita seems like a useless stat considering entrepreneurship. You want aggregates in entrepreneurship.

The US has over 300 million people
Canada only has 30 million. We have more entrepreneurs per capita, but far fewer entrepreneurs...

Silicon Valley is in California, that's one state, not Canada.

Nice article from the Economist.
http://www.economist.com/node/13216037


The United States of Entrepreneurs
America still leads the world
FOR all its current economic woes, America remains a beacon of entrepreneurialism. Between 1996 and 2004 it created an average of 550,000 small businesses every month. Many of those small businesses rapidly grow big. The world’s largest company, Wal-Mart, was founded in 1962 and did not go public until a decade later; multi-million dollar companies such as Google and Facebook barely existed a decade ago.

American companies have an unusual freedom to hire and fire workers, and American citizens have an unusual belief that, for all their recent travails, their fate still lies in their own hands. They are comfortable with the risk-taking that is at the heart of entrepreneurialism. The rewards for success can be huge—Google’s Mr Brin was a billionaire by the time he was 30—and the punishments for failure are often trivial. In some countries bankruptcy spells social death. In America, particularly in Silicon Valley, it is a badge of honour.

America also has several structural advantages when it comes to entrepreneurship. The first is the world’s most mature venture-capital industry. America’s first venture fund, the American Research and Development Corporation, was founded in 1946; today the industry has an unrivalled mixture of resources, expertise and customers. Highland Capital Partners receives about 10,000 plausible business plans a year, conducts about 1,000 meetings followed by 400 company visits and ends up making 10-20 investments a year, all of which are guaranteed to receive an enormous amount of time and expertise. IHS Global Insight, a consultancy, calculates that in 2005 companies that were once backed by venture capitalists accounted for nearly 17% of America’s GDP and 9% of private-sector employment.

Vivek Wadhwa, of Duke University, notes that 52% of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants, up from around a quarter ten years ago. In all, a quarter of America’s science and technology start-ups, generating $52 billion and employing 450,000 people, have had somebody born abroad as either their CEO or their chief technology officer. In 2006 foreign nationals were named as inventors or co-inventors in a quarter of American patent applications, up from 7.6% in 1998.

America faces numerous threats to this remarkable entrepreneurial ecology. The legal system can be burdensome, even destructive. One of the biggest new problems comes from “patent trolls”—lawyers who bring cases against companies for violating this or that trumped-up patent. Because the tax system is so complicated, many companies have to devote a lot of time and ingenuity to filling out tax forms that could be better spent on doing business.

Yet despite these problems, America plays a vital role in spreading the culture of entrepreneurialism around the world. People the world over admire its ability to produce world-changing entrepreneurs, such as Bill Gates, wealth-creating universities, such as Harvard and Stanford, and world-beating clusters, such as Silicon Valley. Simon Cook, of DFJ Esprit, a venture-capital company, argues that Silicon Valley’s most successful export is not Google or Apple but the idea of Silicon Valley itself.

The same Economist article is not complimentary of Europe, Japan, and others.

The other two of the world’s three biggest developed economies—the EU and Japan—are far less entrepreneurial. The number of innovative entrepreneurs in Germany, for instance, is less than half that in America, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), a joint venture between the London Business School and Babson College. And far fewer start-ups in those countries become big businesses. Janez Potocnik, the EU commissioner for science and research, points out that only 5% of European companies created from scratch since 1980 have made it into the list of the 1,000 biggest EU companies by market capitalisation. The equivalent figure for America is 22%.

This reflects different cultural attitudes. Europeans have less to gain from taking business risks, thanks to higher tax rates, and more to lose, thanks to more punitive attitudes to bankruptcy (German law, for example, prevents anyone who has ever been bankrupt from becoming a CEO). When Denis Payre was thinking about leaving a safe job in Oracle to start a company in the late 1980s, his French friends gave him ten reasons to stay put whereas his American friends gave him ten reasons to get on his bike. In January last year Mr Payre’s start-up, Business Objects, was sold to Germany’s SAP for €4.8 billion

European egalitarianism, too, militates against entrepreneurialism: the EU is much more interested in promoting small businesses in general than in fostering high-growth companies. The Europeans’ appetite for time off does not help. Workers are guaranteed a minimum of four weeks’ holidays a year whereas Americans’ vacations are much less certain. Europeans are also much more suspicious of business. According to a Eurobarometer poll, 42% of them think that entrepreneurs exploit other people’s work, compared with 26% of Americans.

Small businesses fail more often than not. More often than not they're a net drain on the economy. I admire countries that aren't littered with the debris of the service industry.

If "Enrtrepreneurship" is so important, why do you misspell it?

Nice. So in Putin's ideal Soviet State, Sergei Brin, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and that Facebook guy would have all been toiling away in some government job reviewing computer ownership applications, their absurd business ideas having been vetoed by the Technology Commissar ("Why does the state telephone monopoly need to invest in this internet thingy when our Fax machines work just fine? And what's a 'GUI'? Ah... Development would take years and be a total waste of human resources, comrade. Citizens just need to learn how to use vi - it's really not that hard."). We'd all - or rather, those whose computer ownership applications were approved - be playing Diplomacy with an ASCII map, having to make $.50/minute long distance calls to Kestas' unauthorized BBS in Australia if Putin had it his way.

And my failed small business has not been a drain on anyone but myself, thank you...

@Tettleton's Chew,
Debate entirely aside... how can you possibly make a statement like the opening one on this thread, knowing full well that the US is not the only free market economy in the world?
Point 2. Do you support the attitude in the article, which seems to imply that the social stratification seen in the US (a small number of very affluent people on one end and a large number of people struggling hopelessly with their debt on the other end) is preferable to the higher average quality of life (less poverty but also less extreme wealth) in Europe? I know you're pretty right-wing, but logic would seem to point to the higher average being better...

Ah yes, in libertopian dream world the internet was some invention by intrepid "small businessmen" and not the result of a lengthy government project to protect against the vulnerabilities of communication lines during the Cold War. Why is it, that despite the boasts of the "entrepreneurs", most of our most significant advances in technology seem to come from the defense industry at the command of the government? Including the computer industry that people always tout. The only reason Microsoft became big was because he attached himself to IBM through collusion. IBM's giganticness during the 1980s itself was because it was built up by the government and defense industry for several decades. Gates never actually developed anything. He bought DOS from someone else and pirated the GUI from Apple.

Why is it that socialist Cuba, under decades of sanctions where they couldn't even get basic materials for medical equipment, has developed a vaccine for Lung Cancer when we have a multi-billion dollar privatized pharmaceutical industry that has more money than god?

You may enjoy urban decay and the driving through never ending series of strip malls thanks to the supplanting of manufacturing with haircut/nail salons, overpriced restaurants/disgusting fast food chains, stores peddling random junk, and any number of other petty businesses that we don't need, but I don't. It's why America, despite its riches, is aesthetically an ugly place to live, with some exceptions of some trading cities on the coasts. Services don't add wealth, they drain it. The service industry has turned us into a nation of maids, dishwashers, janitors, masseuses and porters for the rich. Even hospitals have their medical professionals refer to patients as "clients". Education has completely been transformed into a coddling the spoiled brats of America - customer service industry.

And since we all worship at the alter of 'small business', we have to make believe that most of them actually provide some kind of actual value to us, when they don't. They don't hire workers, they spend most of their time opposing any regulation or labor standard in the guise of "defending small business".

The economist is the mouthpiece of British millionaires, written in anonymous format so they never have to be accountable for their pathetic and predictable defenses of Capital.

G1, All I can say is I'm completely unimpressed with your intellect.
Have a good life.

Tolstoy +++++++

"Gates never actually developed anything. He bought DOS from someone else and pirated the GUI from Apple."

Agreed. Not a huge Bill Gates/Microsoft fan, but I am pleased you are acknowledging that these advancements in computer technology were due to private initiative, not government diktat.

"most of our most significant advances in technology seem to come from the defense industry at the command of the government"

The Personal Computer was born as the product of hobbyists in the '80s, not the government. If everything was left to the DoD, we'd all still be connecting to mainframes with dumb terminals (I am familiar with that setup only because the library at the government university I went to was still on such a system... even though it was 2001). All of the significant advances in computer technology since you were born have been the product of 'parasitic' entrepreneurs, the vast majority of them *not* working for the government. The operating system on my computer (Windows Vista) is the result of almost two decades of development by Microsoft, who has been working to please not the military or computer geeks like myself but consumers who want an 'easy' method of interacting with their computers. Computers themselves have fallen 90% in price and have found a place in just about every home over the last 20 years because businesses - not the computer commissar - have sought new ways to bring their products to market at prices the most consumers could afford. The internet is usable (ie, the pipes are more than 300bps) not because of the government or DoD, but because of investments by private telcos and ISPs - I have an inexpensive 25/25 internet connection because Verizon thought FTTH would be a great investment (a very expensive investment that would've been ruinous had it not worked out, BTW). Thank God there was no "internet commissar" who could tell Verizon "no". My phone system runs over VoIP, a technology that was developed without government funding, and is (whether you know it or not) how your voice call gets from Ohio to anywhere else in the world. People can get 5,000 TV channels not because the Military Industrial Complex thought it would pacify us but because TV providers made private investments in technology to support it, since they figured consumers were willing to pay for it (and they were right). The browser I'm using to view this page was invented and provided to me *for free* by an evil corporation (Google) - the government played no part in it. Technology has moved so far so fast because government has been too slow to figure out how to regulate and control it, thank God.

"Cuba...has developed a vaccine for Lung Cancer"

Fascinating. Would be interesting to see if that finding would survive review by doctors and researchers who don't work for the same government that owns all the cigar factories.

"Services don't add wealth, they drain it."

While I agree that a shrinking manufacturing sector is not healthy, services are a necessary part of any economy where a division of labor exists. Businesses pay me to set up their networks because they lack the time or inclination to learn how to do it themselves. In your ideal Soviet system, do you really expect the factory manager to configure his $15,000 router himself?

"Education has completely been transformed into a coddling the spoiled brats of America - customer service industry. "

Sounds like someone got some bad student reviews.

"And since we all worship at the alter of 'small business', we have to make believe that most of them actually provide some kind of actual value to us, when they don't."

An ironic comment, coming from someone who survives primarily by mooching off the taxpayers of the State of Ohio. Just how many of your undergrad students do you suppose would be paying you to teach them if they didn't have to take your class to satisfy their GE requirement?

Nice pathetic attempts at personal attacks. Another misfire from another wannabe bourgeois parasite who is frustrated he can't join their ranks so he descends into Paleo-libertarian conspiracy theorizing and warmed over Hayekian drivel.

My class isn't part of any "GE" requirement, you presumptuous ass. And evidently you don't have the foggiest clue of how universities are funded. Ohio State gets 590 million out of its 5 billion dollar budget from the "taxpayers of Ohio". I'm paid a meager living stipend to do the work that others get paid much more generously to do, from money derived largely student fees or money acquired from sales and other services, in other words the paying customers. Apparently working for a paycheck is "mooching" while being a failed businessman getting tax write-offs and other subsidies is honest work. Figures.

"Businesses pay me to set up their networks because they lack the time or inclination to learn how to do it themselves. In your ideal Soviet system, do you really expect the factory manager to configure his $15,000 router himself?"

If only I ever called for the complete abolition of the service industry. And heaven forbid we ever lose the valuable contributions the computer service industry provides. An industry that is notorious for ripping people off with outrageous optimization and virus removal fees that could be done for a fraction of the charge, or overcharging people for installations that any primate with thumbs could do. But price gouging by private industry isn't "mooching" off the labor of others, I guess. The inevitable refrain is you can always go to some other do-nothing, price gouging, shitty service who could do an equally shitty job and rip you off just as much. "Consumer democracy", the freedom to choose who robs your money.

"Fascinating. Would be interesting to see if that finding would survive review by doctors and researchers who don't work for the same government that owns all the cigar factories."

What a bizarre comment. Are you actually criticizing big gubmint in Cuba for not being regulatory enough? I love how even a revolutionary discovery like a lung cancer vaccine is met with cynicism because it wasn't done by gangsters like Pfizer and approved by our toothless and servile FDA. Obviously the record of our for-profit pharma giants is stellar when it comes to preventing potentially dangerous and slipshod products on the market with slipshod testing.