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That’s not lottery mentality and thinking that it’s equivalent is why Europe isn’t innovating. If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better

That’s not lottery mentality and thinking that it’s equivalent is why Europe isn’t innovating. If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off. You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.

77pt77 2y ago
> If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off. The reality is that you get crap like Facebook, Instagram, Xwitter.
- baq 2y ago
  You get both, Facebook’s job is to be known about, so you know about it. There’s a ton of companies doing drug research basically silently… in the US. Most fail, it doesn’t matter as long as a few succeed.
  - cycomanic 2y ago
    It's worth pointing out that the biggest innovations (both scientifically, but likely also monetary) in the biomedical field in the last years happened in Europe not the US. So that seems to disprove the point that innovation happens in the US because of the chance of going from 100k to 100M.
  - 77pt77 2y ago
    Please tell me what those pharmaceutical companies with a similar maker cap to Facebook Are.
BrenBarn 2y ago
> You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success. It's fine to want that and to attract those kind of people. What you don't want is to attract people who want to do that in order to make a lot of money.
- Juliate 2y ago
  Yeah but you don’t spend 10s of years of your life studying if your primary goal is just « more money ». The incentive is waaay too far.
- baq 2y ago
  I used to think that too, but realized it’s very naive later in life. At some point people are good at what they do, but get tired, start a family, want to settle down. Money helps quite a bit to have those folks motivated. If you want innovators, motivate them with rewards. Money is a great reward since you can turn it into mostly anything you’d like. Want to buy a mansion? Fine. Want to travel around the world? Feel free. Want to give it away to charity? Great!
  - BrenBarn 2y ago
    Maybe I should have been more explicit. There's a difference between "money" and "a lot of money". People are in this thread talking about the likelihood of getting $100 million. If someone does a thing because they want to start a family and settle down, great. You don't need $100 million to do that. You don't even need $10 million. What I'm saying is you don't want to attract people who are aiming at making vastly more than what is needed to handle the "settle down and live a comfortable life" situation that you described. But right now our society does incentivize and glamorize that, and I think we're worse off for it.
    - kortilla 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - gambiting 2y ago
        >>You absolutely need $10 million if you want to retire to any city in the US. And...people accept that as a natural state of being? New York has over 8M residents, do all of them have $10M saved for retirement? Or is your idea of retirement completely out of sync with what retirement really is for most people?
forgotoldacc 2y ago
Once you get past a few million, you quickly get into "can't possibly spend this money in several lifetimes" territory. And wealth divides like that come at the cost of massive societal wealth divides. The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists, which results in far more people being seen as completely disposable. It also comes at the cost of worsening public education, worsening public health, crime rates beyond most first world countries, companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions. Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry. Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen. Some would kill half of them if they were promised a few % off their yearly taxes.
- kortilla 2y ago
  > Once you get past a few million, you quickly get into "can't possibly spend this money in several lifetimes" territory. This is incorrect and you’re really out of touch for suggesting it. Let’s say you have a 5 million dollar exit in the Bay Area. After tax you get roughly 2.5. That’s enough to buy a nice but modest house and now you have no money left. You now have to work a full time job to pay the property taxes, the rest of your living expenses, and try to save for retirement. Same thing applies in LA, NYC, SEA, etc. > The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists This is false. The US spends more on healthcare than any other nation, it just goes to a bloated system. More tax money from the 0.1% won’t change that. > crime rates beyond most first world countries Gonna need a citation there. This is likely a result of guns being legal if you’re talking about gun deaths or a result of the war on drugs if you’re talking about incarceration. Neither of those have anything to do with taxes. > companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions We’re talking about biotech exits. Drop your “muh capitalism bad” gish gallop. > Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry. Pure cope. A broad unsubstantiated statement about ethics followed by talk of milking residents dry when those residents have more disposable income per capita than nearly anywhere else in the world. > Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen. If they do this by treating huge breakthroughs like you are doing, they are stepping on all of their fellow countrymen through oppressive tall poppy syndrome. Knocking anyone doing well down is not how you lift everyone up.
amelius 2y ago
You are assuming that only money will make people do incredible things, but you only have to look at open source to know that this is false.
- kortilla 2y ago
  No I’m not. But it is what motivates people at a large scale. There are very few open source contributors that are actually really good. The nature of software means that their labor of love can scale very well. Additionally, there is nearly zero barrier to being an open source developer. Buy a laptop and start writing code. So open source only works well because when you get lucky and get a combination of a motivated contributor and essentially zero distribution cost, a single group can ship to billions of people. If we want someone making an artificial heart, it’s a completely different story. The research and development is very capital intensive so you need a war chest to even start tinkering. Then once you have something you want to try to get approved, you need either to be a medical doctor or employ one, which is a huge opportunity cost for a medical school debt ridden doctor. All of the capital needed to fund this is high risk so it needs a high upside return if private investors are involved. Now a founder could eschew all of their equity, but after going through all of the work to do this capital raising it would be quite unusual.
- cvwright 2y ago
  Almost all of the really high quality open source projects got that way because companies paid devs good money to work on them.
- mvieira38 2y ago
  We can't ignore the influence of money even on open source, though. How many people are contributing in an anonymous manner, so they can't claim financial benefits from publicity and networking? How many open source projects are rejecting VC funding?
fuzzfactor 2y ago
>If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. Actually, society is much better off since the money is dispersed into the economy faster and to a much greater degree than most other windfalls. And most other windfalls are crafted to accumulate money from the economy, so the difference in who ends up with the money is another major factor.
- kortilla 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - zelon88 2y ago
    $1bn / 200k people is $5k each. For a drug that probably costs $4. When you mark up the cost of saving a life by 1,200% I don't think you get to call that "wealth creation" or "saving lives" or even "preventing death". That's called "extortion."
lxgr 2y ago
Why wouldn't you rather want to attract people with much higher odds of a reasonable quality of life regardless of whether they personally hit the jackpot? In terms of expected value (which you'd hope that scientists and entrepreneurs understand at least at a surface level), that seems like the rational move.

77pt77 2y ago

> If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off. The reality is that you get crap like Facebook, Instagram, Xwitter.

baq 2y ago
You get both, Facebook’s job is to be known about, so you know about it. There’s a ton of companies doing drug research basically silently… in the US. Most fail, it doesn’t matter as long as a few succeed.
- cycomanic 2y ago
  It's worth pointing out that the biggest innovations (both scientifically, but likely also monetary) in the biomedical field in the last years happened in Europe not the US. So that seems to disprove the point that innovation happens in the US because of the chance of going from 100k to 100M.
- 77pt77 2y ago
  Please tell me what those pharmaceutical companies with a similar maker cap to Facebook Are.

BrenBarn 2y ago

> You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success. It's fine to want that and to attract those kind of people. What you don't want is to attract people who want to do that in order to make a lot of money.

Juliate 2y ago
Yeah but you don’t spend 10s of years of your life studying if your primary goal is just « more money ». The incentive is waaay too far.
baq 2y ago
I used to think that too, but realized it’s very naive later in life. At some point people are good at what they do, but get tired, start a family, want to settle down. Money helps quite a bit to have those folks motivated. If you want innovators, motivate them with rewards. Money is a great reward since you can turn it into mostly anything you’d like. Want to buy a mansion? Fine. Want to travel around the world? Feel free. Want to give it away to charity? Great!
- BrenBarn 2y ago
  Maybe I should have been more explicit. There's a difference between "money" and "a lot of money". People are in this thread talking about the likelihood of getting $100 million. If someone does a thing because they want to start a family and settle down, great. You don't need $100 million to do that. You don't even need $10 million. What I'm saying is you don't want to attract people who are aiming at making vastly more than what is needed to handle the "settle down and live a comfortable life" situation that you described. But right now our society does incentivize and glamorize that, and I think we're worse off for it.
  - kortilla 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - gambiting 2y ago
      >>You absolutely need $10 million if you want to retire to any city in the US. And...people accept that as a natural state of being? New York has over 8M residents, do all of them have $10M saved for retirement? Or is your idea of retirement completely out of sync with what retirement really is for most people?

forgotoldacc 2y ago

Once you get past a few million, you quickly get into "can't possibly spend this money in several lifetimes" territory. And wealth divides like that come at the cost of massive societal wealth divides. The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists, which results in far more people being seen as completely disposable. It also comes at the cost of worsening public education, worsening public health, crime rates beyond most first world countries, companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions. Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry. Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen. Some would kill half of them if they were promised a few % off their yearly taxes.

kortilla 2y ago
> Once you get past a few million, you quickly get into "can't possibly spend this money in several lifetimes" territory. This is incorrect and you’re really out of touch for suggesting it. Let’s say you have a 5 million dollar exit in the Bay Area. After tax you get roughly 2.5. That’s enough to buy a nice but modest house and now you have no money left. You now have to work a full time job to pay the property taxes, the rest of your living expenses, and try to save for retirement. Same thing applies in LA, NYC, SEA, etc. > The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists This is false. The US spends more on healthcare than any other nation, it just goes to a bloated system. More tax money from the 0.1% won’t change that. > crime rates beyond most first world countries Gonna need a citation there. This is likely a result of guns being legal if you’re talking about gun deaths or a result of the war on drugs if you’re talking about incarceration. Neither of those have anything to do with taxes. > companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions We’re talking about biotech exits. Drop your “muh capitalism bad” gish gallop. > Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry. Pure cope. A broad unsubstantiated statement about ethics followed by talk of milking residents dry when those residents have more disposable income per capita than nearly anywhere else in the world. > Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen. If they do this by treating huge breakthroughs like you are doing, they are stepping on all of their fellow countrymen through oppressive tall poppy syndrome. Knocking anyone doing well down is not how you lift everyone up.

amelius 2y ago

You are assuming that only money will make people do incredible things, but you only have to look at open source to know that this is false.

kortilla 2y ago
No I’m not. But it is what motivates people at a large scale. There are very few open source contributors that are actually really good. The nature of software means that their labor of love can scale very well. Additionally, there is nearly zero barrier to being an open source developer. Buy a laptop and start writing code. So open source only works well because when you get lucky and get a combination of a motivated contributor and essentially zero distribution cost, a single group can ship to billions of people. If we want someone making an artificial heart, it’s a completely different story. The research and development is very capital intensive so you need a war chest to even start tinkering. Then once you have something you want to try to get approved, you need either to be a medical doctor or employ one, which is a huge opportunity cost for a medical school debt ridden doctor. All of the capital needed to fund this is high risk so it needs a high upside return if private investors are involved. Now a founder could eschew all of their equity, but after going through all of the work to do this capital raising it would be quite unusual.
cvwright 2y ago
Almost all of the really high quality open source projects got that way because companies paid devs good money to work on them.
mvieira38 2y ago
We can't ignore the influence of money even on open source, though. How many people are contributing in an anonymous manner, so they can't claim financial benefits from publicity and networking? How many open source projects are rejecting VC funding?

fuzzfactor 2y ago

>If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. Actually, society is much better off since the money is dispersed into the economy faster and to a much greater degree than most other windfalls. And most other windfalls are crafted to accumulate money from the economy, so the difference in who ends up with the money is another major factor.

kortilla 2y ago
[flagged]
- zelon88 2y ago
  $1bn / 200k people is $5k each. For a drug that probably costs $4. When you mark up the cost of saving a life by 1,200% I don't think you get to call that "wealth creation" or "saving lives" or even "preventing death". That's called "extortion."

lxgr 2y ago

Why wouldn't you rather want to attract people with much higher odds of a reasonable quality of life regardless of whether they personally hit the jackpot? In terms of expected value (which you'd hope that scientists and entrepreneurs understand at least at a surface level), that seems like the rational move.