[ClumsyPilot]

> The money should be returned to private hands where it belongs and those individuals should be the ones to decide how to invest their own capital

This is not a meaningful statement

‘Returning money in private hands’ does not result in more startup investment, it’s not in the culture to do this.

The money will be put into real estate, bonds, or whatever.

Look at London - it has as much wealth as NewYork or LA but all the money just piles up in real estate or Fintech.

But outside those niches? Good luck getting a farm-tech startup funded, no-one will take a punt.

So it falls to the government to try and kickstart something. As flawed as it may be.

Then they put together a competition for funding that basically feels like a school exam

[rowanajmarshall]

> Good luck getting a farm-tech startup funded, no-one will take a punt.

There are so, so many examples of British agtech companies getting funded:

https://www.lettusgrow.com/blog/2020/1/9/press-release-uk-ag...

https://edinburgh-innovations.ed.ac.uk/news/roslin-technolog...

https://fischerfarms.co.uk/fischer-farms-secures-26m-funding...

https://tropic.bio/tropic-biosciences-raises-28-5-million-se...

[ClumsyPilot]

That's what I am saying - look at the size of deals in UK fintech - Revolut, $577 million, Monzo $374 million, checkout.com $333 million

Uber's Series C was $361M, that's the kind of money you need to put a company on the global map.

[rowanajmarshall]

Then you should also look at Wayve (self-driving cars, $1 billion Series C), Lighthouse (travel and rental data, $370 million Series C), Highview Power (novel energy storage, £300 million). Lots more too. I won't deny that the UK specialises in fintech, but there's a lot more going on than that.

[chii]

> So it falls to the government to try and kickstart something.

why should it fall to the gov't? They're one of the worst funders of startups imho.

In these scenarios, the gov't isn't funding the business via equity, but grants - aka free money. This makes all the wrong incentives. Taxpayers don't feel the loss (not truly, like a private investor would), if the startup fails.

[loxodrome]

Bullshit. All the big VC firms in the USA are funded by private investors (rich people). They fund risky tech startups because big, fast gains are possible and the marginal capital gains tax rate is 20%. In the UK it's 39%! But 24% for residential property, hence the focus on real-estate that you mention.

Tax less, and prosperity follows!

[laurencerowe]

I don't think your numbers are correct. In the UK capital gains tax rates on shares are 24% for higher rate tax payers.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/capital-gains-tax-rates-and-allo...

In California those rates go up to 33.3% (20% federal + 13.3% state).

[alephnerd]

> All the big VC firms in the USA are funded by private investors (rich people)

They are also funded by large public investors like pension funds (American and European) and sovereign wealth funds.

There is just a lot of capital sloshing around in the US, and it's fairly easy to start a firm here. The same isn't true in much of the EU.

[disgruntledphd2]

The funny part about this is that lots of the capital comes from European savers.

[disgruntledphd2]

This is incorrect, except possibly at pre seed levels. Most of the money for VC comes from pension funds and insurance companies.

[michaelteter]

Prosperity for whom?

[alephnerd]

The HDI of European states is on par with that of the United States [0].

The US has issues, but using American issues as an excuse to ignore European issues (which in reality are a result of soverignity tussles) is ridiculous.

[0] - https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks

[bobxmax]

The US is the place to be for ambitious and highly talented people

For average/unambitious or unfortunate/poor people, places like Europe or Canada are much better standard of living

[alephnerd]

I've lived in Canada as a kid and have family in Europe - at a macro level the differences in QoL aren't that significant, as HDI (an aggregate benchmark of developmental indicators) highlights.

I guess the question becomes, which "Europe" and which "America" are you comparing. And even then, developmentally, the US isn't much different than Western or Northern Europe.

> For average/unambitious or unfortunate/poor people

I mean, youth and normal unemployment remains significantly higher in much of the Europe compared to the US [0][1] and median income after tax remains roughly on par [2], even factoring for purchasing power parity [3].

As a whole, it appears that the US is roughly on par with much of it's peers in Western and Northern Europe, and American problems appear to be overreported and European ones underreported

I personally think there is a lot of glamorization of Europe because more Americans visit Western and Northern Europe as tourists than the other way around, and attribute their tourism experience as that of a normal European, which is an unrealistic assumption.

And it's not like ambitious risk takers don't exist in Europe - look at the startup and dev scene in Sweden, Czechia, Romania, and Poland. It's clearly an institutional problem.

[0] - https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/youth-unemploym...

[1] - https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/unemployment-ra...

[2] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-income-after-tax-l...

[3] - https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPEX@WEO/USA

[ryandrake]

These places are so large and diverse it doesn't make much sense comparing them. You really want to be comparing many-to-many American states to European countries. You can't generalize about "The USA" quality of life. Massachusetts is going to be vastly different from Mississippi in terms of basically every quality of life attribute you can possibly measure. I'm not from Europe, but I bet the same is true country-to-country there.

[bobxmax]

I don't disagree. I also hate playing this card but there's a racialized element to it... snobs on Reddit and HN love to glamorize Nordic countries in particular, despite being tiny, racially homogenous countries with their own bucketload of problems.

In my opinion the only real issue the US has is healthcare. In all other ways even for middle class people it's better. People think Canada is some socialized heaven... yet home ownership is MUCH more realistic in say Michigan than it is just across the border in Ontario.