"simply not having to worry about healthcare and medicine costs as a freelancer makes a huge, obvious differences the length and viability of their careers"
I've been a freelancer for 10 years and have always purchased my own health insurance in the US. When I was single, it was only around $150/month (even only a few years ago). This included Doctor visits, prescriptions, and if I had an emergency..I wouldn't go bankrupt.
If Canada and Europe are great places for startups, why do they lag so far behind the US? The reason is because while it seems great that you get free healthcare, as your company grows, it's many more times difficult survive because of the taxes and regulations imposed on you.
An increase in taxes and regulations only helps large companies because they have the attorneys and employees to handle all of the paperwork and can still survive when a large percentage of their revenue is given to the government.
Rates of entrepreneurship are comparable to (and in some cases higher than) the US in most wealthy European countries. The difference in “startup” culture has more to do with the access to capital and the US government’s historic, unmatched investment in technology infrastructure in the context of the Cold War. It’s the same reason why Russia today still punches above its weight in the IT sector.
Startups are just one small category of business: the sort which must grow at 6% per week or else they will fail.
The U.S. does great with these “bet the farm” business models because most of them can fail, and the few that succeed can pay off the capital class handsomely.
Personally, I would rather live in a world where all of my most talented friends can start lifestyle businesses that allow them to do their best work, and be healthy.
The success of startups has some nice macro effects on GDP, but does not solve the problem of labor exploitation that, for me, is just as important a goal of entrepreneurship as making a windfall for the capital class.
While taxes are high, employees in Europe are still way cheaper than say SF or NYC. You can get a decent web developer for EUR 60-80k in total cost per year in Austria. Spend 100k and you get the top 5% talent.
What Europe lacks is private funding. I don’t find the article now, but years ago read that there’s 5x as much funding in the US market as compared to the EU market. Seed funding is 3-5x less than you would expect in the US.
This has seemed to me to be a key problem for the European tech industry. A few seemingly minor structural differences mean there is very little domestic VC available. Those are:
1. In the U.S., there are many pension funds that put some of their money into venture investment. In general in Europe it is illegal for a pension fund to invest in such risky assets at all.
2. In the U.S. there are many more private foundations and private universities that have large investment funds, and some of this gets put into VC. For a variety of reasons, there aren't many large private foundations and there are few private universities with large endowments.
If I were doing industrial policy in a European country, the first thing I would do is to start to invest a couple percent of the state pension funds into VC like vehicles. Given how underinvested it is, the returns should be great, and the extra economic activity should help the fiscal health of their economies a lot.
> it's many more times difficult survive because of the taxes and regulations imposed on you.
There are several things going on here:
* "Europe" isn't one place.
* It can both be true that there are higher taxes and more regulations, and the health care system is better. You're still paying less for health care as a % of GDP, so it's not like you're paying the same amount, just through taxes.
* There are a lot of other factors such as universities, access to capital, and simply 'culture'.
I've been a freelancer for 10 years and have always purchased my own health insurance in the US. When I was single, it was only around $150/month (even only a few years ago). This included Doctor visits, prescriptions, and if I had an emergency..I wouldn't go bankrupt.
If Canada and Europe are great places for startups, why do they lag so far behind the US? The reason is because while it seems great that you get free healthcare, as your company grows, it's many more times difficult survive because of the taxes and regulations imposed on you.
An increase in taxes and regulations only helps large companies because they have the attorneys and employees to handle all of the paperwork and can still survive when a large percentage of their revenue is given to the government.