[inglor_cz]

The US population is 4 per cent of the entire world's, which means that the vast majority of talented humans is born abroad.

If you can snatch them, they will build SpaceX or Google for you. If not, well, they will do so either elsewhere, or not at all. (South Africa does not seem to be a good place to start business, and neither is Russia.)

Can you gain prosperity by employing three mediocre people instead of one talented one? Maybe, but you won't get a new vibrant sector like Silicon Valley this way.

Europe, where I live, is a lot more gung-ho on mediocrity and forced equality, and we seem to be the ones with clearly stagnating living standards, not you.

[harimau777]

> If you can snatch them, they will build SpaceX or Google for you.

Sure, but the vast majority of the wealth of building SpaceX and Google doesn't go to me. It goes to people like Musk and Larry Page.

[ertian]

So you'd be better-off if SpaceX and Google were Chinese companies?

Also, a lot of the wealth from the tech industry does spill over to the larger community. You're strictly better off having it. If the US had just stuck with their 1970s economy on the theory that any new industries wouldn't distribute their benefits equally, it would be vastly smaller, less powerful and less wealthy. Surely that's obvious?

[confidantlake]

Ah the famous trickle down rebranded as "spill over".

[ertian]

"Trickle-down" has become a thought-terminating cliche.

Of course your country is better off if you have successful companies and high-income jobs.

[inglor_cz]

Ceteris paribus it is better to live in a country which can generate lots of technological progress than in a country that cannot.