[ianlevesque]

> NASA funding, which peaked during the Apollo program in the 1960s, has dwindled, making it next to impossible to recruit young computer-science majors away from the likes of Google and Facebook.

This problem can be attacked in a couple of ways, one way is to increase compensation sure, but another is to make it possible to have healthcare and housing on the salary they do offer. The chasm between pay and cost of living is huge and growing.

[macintux]

I've long thought universal healthcare (& UBI) would enable more people to take entrepreneurial risks, but I hadn't considered that passion jobs like NASA could also be beneficiaries.

[zrail]

UBI and universal healthcare would enable _so_ many people to take risks that they can't today. We would see an explosion in the arts, in fundamental science, in passion projects like this. It would be absolutely incredible.

Except according to half of the people in charge it would mean The Wrong People would get money and all they would do is buy drugs. And that's why we can't have nice things.

[rrdharan]

Is this about the US specifically?

There are many countries with universal healthcare and a decent social safety net (Scandinavia comes to mind).

Why haven’t we seen this explosion coming out of them?

[dboreham]

> Why haven’t we seen this explosion coming out of them

You might argue that there's more tech came out of the UK (which still has some sort of healthcare, and had free education until recently) than there should considering its population and economy size. E.g. ARM, HTML, cloned sheep... Also quite a bit of popular music came from the UK. And Harry Potter was written by a person on state benefits.

[larperdoodle]

Nowhere in the world has UBI.

The Scandinavian social safety net is excellent and I think the positive effects of that are apparent. People can take larger risks than they can in the US, but still nowhere near as large as they could with UBI

[gizajob]

Also very high taxes to pay for it. Very productive granted, but also taxed at a commensurate rate. Plus Norway now has a bottomless pit of oil money keeping it afloat for the foreseeable future.

[paulddraper]

> Nowhere in the world has UBI.

Does anywhere have something close that we could see partial "explosion"?

Or is the completely novel?

[aklemm]

Go there and look at how they live; that takes inspiration. The benefits of their social welfare are apparent in their lifestyle compared to US daily life.

And the flip: Shouldn't Scandinavia be overrun with drug-addled do-nothings if social welfare is so bad?

[rrdharan]

I completely agree and am generally supportive of universal healthcare and the welfare state and suspect the Scandinavian model would be an improvement on the current US state of affairs.

I’m just skeptical of the parent poster claim that a Cambrian innovation explosion awaits us all if we would just welfare harder.

[gosub100]

And reverse your flip: how do Scandinavians perform when they immigrate to other countries (vs the local population) ?

[gizajob]

They spend a lot of money on education, and almost everyone is multilingual – Finns generally speak both Finnish and Swedish natively given they’re the state languages, and many I’ve met have very fluent English and German alongside. So I imagine they do pretty well. Look at Linus Torvalds, for example…

Oh btw, “Scandinavians” only includes countries in the Swedish axis of influence, so to include Finns alongside one has to say “Nordics”. Finland is Nordic without being Scandinavian (technically)

[mattkrause]

Sweden and Norway have about 50 Nobel Laureates between them out of 15M people.

[Muromec]

Capital is concentrated in US, so you have to go there, make some good money and if that doesn’t work — fall back into safety net of your home country.

[zrail]

I was speaking of the US, yes. I should have been more specific.

[wolverine876]

> UBI and universal healthcare would enable _so_ many people to take risks that they can't today. We would see an explosion in the arts, in fundamental science, in passion projects like this. It would be absolutely incredible.

> Except according to half of the people in charge it would mean The Wrong People would get money ...

If you look at that 'half' as people representing the status quo power, they don't want an explosion in such things that cause change.

[SoftTalker]

This is a tangental subject but I disagree. I think this is one of the many excuses used by people who feel pressure to be entreprenurial but in their hearts are not risk-takers. And that's OK -- the world needs a lot of people who work for others.

If you are a risk taker, especially a young one, lack of UBI or health insurance is not going to stop you. It never has in the past, when those things didn't exist.

[jwells89]

I think there’s a substantial number of people who aren’t averse to calculated entrepreneurial risk specifically, where negative outcomes are more predictable/bounded.

These are your types who currently bootstrap themselves and grow slowly rather than seek explosive growth by way of external funding, and I think you’d see both see this group grow and become more bold if basics like housing weren’t something that was ever in question.

[eszed]

Your "especially a young one" is doing a lot of work.

I anecdotally know a number of people, both in and out of tech, who would prefer to be independent contractors or small-business owners - in fields that they know well, and stand better than even chances of ending up with higher total compensation - but have families. Their fear of losing healthcare benefits (temporarily, whilst they get their businesses off the ground; or longer-term, should their businesses fail) keeps them working for others.

The sibling post about "calculated risk" is correct. The conclusion these folks have made (not to strike out on their own, under current circumstances) is likely the correct one, but it's a continual drag on total economic potential. Worse, this is a cost which isn't captured by calculations of what's currently spent on health-care, nor can be off-set against what a more robust social safety net would "cost". It is, nevertheless, considerable.

[gizajob]

But at the same time, rents and prices would go up so we’d soon be back where we started unless we made changes to capitalism alongside.

[umeshunni]

If that were true, we would be seeing far more entrepreneurship from countries with Universal healthcare (most of EU) or UBI (most gulf countries).

[mvdwoord]

EU taxation and regulation plays into this more I guess, outweighing the benefits of healthcare and other social benefits?