Since neither the US nor the EU is adhering to their WTO obligations, this may be irrelevant. The US and EU have WTO treaties that specifically disallow the direct government funding that airbus is receiving. The EU has argued that Boeings military contracts amount to the same thing. The flaw with this reasoning is that all military contracts to any company would have to be disallowed.

Being a wet-behind-the-ears engineer in the ‘80s, I can tell you that in addition to all the good observations in #23, on this side of the Pacific the spectre of “Japan Inc” was used to scare the bejezus out of not just blue-collar workers but the salaried white-collar class.

Think you should have a bigger paycheck given company products?? “Japanese engineers are so much cheaper you better be happy with what you got”. Think you need a bit more time off? “Japanese engineers work until 8:00 at night, be happy you go home at 5:00. Uh, except for tonight this thing really needs to get done, call me at this resturaunt* if you have any questions”.

*Pre cell phone so they couldn’t pretend they weren’t just goofing off.

Er, compare the bottom decile in, say, Germany to the bottom decile in the US, dude. Even with SS, without which it would get really ugly. But “of course” (no decent proofs ever given) we’d have even more growth.

And when you finally figure out where you’ve gone wrong please get back to us.

Alternatively, perhaps the failed entrepreneurs could be regarded as having donated their labor and capital as a sacrificial offering to the God of entrepreneurship.

I haven’t seen a lot of discussion of the role of failed entrepreneurs in our society, but obviously it’s a big one, and generally a favorable one, which is not rewarded. So they can be regarded as self-sacrificing altruists whose altruism, while not entirely voluntary, is predictable.

That said, if you know your stuff and have enough capital reserve, you can withstand the variance. But it takes a lot of capital to be sure of withstanding the variance of projects that make a meaningful return. Enough so that you don’t really need to work to earn money. You can just provide your capital to somebody else in the stock market.

I don’t see the point to pooling resources with zero sum gambling as you suggest though. I suppose if you really need 10 life savings to capitalize some business it might make some sense.

What would be a lot better is 10 entrepreneurs putting all their money into a pool, starting 10 different businesses and then splitting the profits. That way, if they are all really good, chances are that one company does quite well and pays for the many failures a few times over. The problem is that you’d have to have 10 different people who all have good ideas and the drive to make a good shot at commercializing them, and all of them have to trust that all the others are good enough to swap risk with. That seems very hard to do.

It would make a lot more sense for some people with capital to specialize in this sort of funding.

Michael

Suppose 10 entrepreneurs take their life savings and go into competition, except instead of starting businesses they put the money into gambling or duelling. Eventually one entrepreneur has 10 life savings, which would be a big profit and a healthy chunk of dough. Then he starts his business.

This isn’t a realistic model at all of course, I don’t claim that, but in businesses like the restaurant business success has a major, major factor of luck, and unsuccessful businesses often give a sort of subsidy to unsuccessful businesses.

A GDP figure is meaningless if you don’t also consider the inflation rate. What’s so impressive about a doubling of one’s salary if rice costs thrice as much as before?

Corporate groups on all sides find it a very efficient form of lobbying to Warn About the Foreign Bogyman, helped on by the myriads of economists and policy makers who are happy to churn out whatever opinion is most desired. For many years I watched a tit-for-tat volley between Japan and the US when it came to the semiconductor industry: the US “reacted” to the Japanese push by forming SEMATECH, the Japanese policy makers then churned out reports breathlessly warning how Japan was going to go under due to SEMATECH and how Japan needed a National Project in return, then the US reacted to that….

Many factors ⊆ Single Factor

Single factor ⊆ Many factors.

Simple enough for you?

Or are you now going to argue that the bottom decile looking for 1,000 calories of food per day is comparable to a bottom decile looking for a 2nd car and air conditioning?

Snark away tough guy.