"The first thing I expected the article to show: a correlation between welfare state strength and rate of entrepreneurship, with the counterintuitive result tha

"The first thing I expected the article to show: a correlation between welfare state strength and rate of entrepreneurship, with the counterintuitive result that there are numerous countries with higher rates than the US and weaker welfare states, but if there are, it didn't list them." Here you go: http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micro/Small-and-medium-enterprises/Number/Per-capita http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micro... The US is pretty low on that list. "Then there's idle theorizing about how food stamps "must" embolden entrepreneurs because they know they can fall back on it if their venture fails. While it sounds superficially plausible, can anyone give a concrete example of the kind of hypercompetent person who launched a successful startup and who would also have needed food stamps if it didn't succeed? Bezos? Musk? Kalanick? Even Brin or Page?" All of those people were already rich.