How on earth is Norway entrepreneurial by volume OR success?

It's not. They have a lot of oil which allows them to give back to their citizens.

and shit on the environment. this comment thread is full of the exact condescension that conservatives and libertarians are sick of. People who uphold the Constitution and the vision of the Founders are comically uninformed? Stanford's Hoover Institute is comically uninformed? What a joke.

Given every libertarian/conservative economic theory that's been advanced since Reagan entered office has been tried and without exception resulted in increased income inequality and bricking the economy, comically uninformed seems pretty accurate. Given conservatives collective track record of having legislation thrown out in court on constitutional grounds claims of upholding it are likewise clearly unfounded.

Totally and utterly false and uninfotmed nonsense. Quite accurate if leftist policies - the failures of which can be measured and hundreds of millions of dead bodies and collapsed economies.

Is Peter Thiel comically uninformed?

Fascinating. So we should ignore Kansas' state economy going belly up due to grotesque mismanagement by "conservatives" attempting to implement libertarian-inspired economic policies? What about the sharp (and enduring) spikes in income inequality and the market crashes provoked by the Reagan and Bush Jr. regimes? We pretending basic economic indicators are hard to track or something?

Incidentally, you probably don't want to drag body counts into a conversation that's teetering on the brink of a larger critique of capitalism. Unless, that is, you'd like to review deaths world-wide from preventable illness due to lack of access to healthcare? In the US alone it's estimated to be 45,000 deaths annually. Meanwhile Texas (in all it's staunch conservative glory) has 3rd world infant mortality rates.

Regarding collapsed leftist economies, what percentage of these are attributable to inherent failures of socialist policy vs simple economic sabotage and regime tampering by the US and it's allies? Would you like to review what the CIA has been up to since the 1950's?

Or would you rather simply review the number of times conservative legislators have run afoul of the constitution just in the last 5 years? We can start with the electoral maps of North Carolina getting chucked over illegal racist gerrymandering, and a thick stack of executive orders that have died in a judge's trash can this year.

51% of Republicans STILL believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya. http://www.newsweek.com/trump-birther-obama-poll-republicans...

There are definitely principled conservatives that are highly informed.

But the strategy the Republican party and media uses to win elections, includes a lot of disinformation and caters to the uninformed.

50% of Democrats believed George W Bush was complicit in 9/11 [1].

People like to believe their own tribe is the exalted one, but exploiting the uninformed isn't a partisan strategy.

[1] https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2011/04/more-than-h...

and that's a false equivalence. It is provably true that Obama wasn't born in Kenya. However, it is plausible that some in government (not just W) wanted that war. The survey you refer to does not compare to the simple yes/no of the Birther idiocy

As if upholding "the Constitution and the vision of the Founders" magically makes people informed about everything else?

I presume you're considering this per capita, and not a raw comparison of volume compare to the US? Norway has a population of around 5 million.

Whether comparing very large and very small populations is reasonable is a separate question mind you, but that aside, the comment stands.

Having lots of natural resources entrepreneutrial.

That's true, a lot of European startups focus on making it in their local market and from there branch out to other countries, whereas startups in the US are from their inception focussing on their large, single market with no language barriers.

I think that's slowly changing. Dutch startups are told to think big nowadays and access to venture capital is also improving.

What are you talking about? That's the complete opposite of what happens.

Nordic startups that focus too much on their local market die. The whole point of startups is to SCALE. This cannot be when the country you live in has less population than greater LA.

What actually happens is that the startups here are "Global-first". They immedietly start talking about branching overseas and meeting with investors that can help them do so.

It's actually the SV startups that can huddle in their bubble for years of time, before doing an easy US wide launch, that already is a huge market.

Is that really true of Silicon Valley startups? It seems that they start focusing on international sales shortly after their inception, mostly from VC pressure. Most SV startups that get big are international by default (can you think of one that wasn’t?).

Uber then named UberCab was limited to just San Francisco at the start, they then did other US cities before going international over a year later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Uber

Even international by default aka pure internet companies like Facebook start as English only and tend to stay that way for a long time.

Facebook was far from international by default. They scaled very slowly, individual college by college (you needed an email address on a whitelisted .edu domain).

You could still use it in a foreign country when you went home for the summer or on a vacation etc. Edu only was all about fake exclusivity and building a network effect not inherent necessity.

Uber on the other hand is only useful inside specific cities.

No, it was about managing the growth curve. Nobody can turn on a website for the world all at once. It would be better for network building if they could.

It's more than just growth curve as they could have simply limited signups to handle growth issues.

Remember they where .edu only for 2 years even thought they had significant funding. Their core problem was if nobody in Australia signs up then it's boring for the first users in Australia. However, by starting with an EDU focus they could leverage word of mouth to grow a network by location.

The path was starting a Harvard, then other ivy's, then other US collages, then US high-schools. That's clearly designed to leverage exclusivity.

Sure, then how does that compare to non-SV startups in Europe?

How long was Facebook English only after they got VC?

Yes, I think you are right. There are a lot of factors involved. Hard to say that US success is due to specific things. California is a US state that has higher social support and higher taxes but does well economically. It is too simplistic to say the philosophy of the country is a certain way therefore success.

California has aspects of it that do well economically, overall its situation is quite dismal. It boasts the COLA adjusted highest poverty rate in the country. Worse than Mississippi, West Virginia or Alabama.

[1]http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20/...

From my experience as someone having moved to California from Canada, it seems there is quite a large homeless population which actively chooses to be in California as opposed to other places owing to its extremely mild climate.

Since I moved to San Jose, it's only rained a handful of times, and this place's harsh colds of winter have reached such dreadful temperatures as I'd witness on a mild fall day in my former country of residence.

That certainly can't help those numbers, even if I do think the absurd costs of living are quite bad, depressing the QOL for everyone outside of the engineer class here.

Homeless populations are small silver of people measured in thousands, compared the to millions in poverty in california.

And of those homeless, a fraction of them create the 'bad experience' chronic homeless with drug or mental problems that make most people dislike the homeless.

The median home price to median income ratio in San Francisco is 10.8x.

In San Jose it is 7.8x.

Nationally, it is 3.8x (5.8x in NYC metro).

http://www.burbed.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/SFvNational...

California is doing well economically? No it's not.

If not for NATO Sweden and Norway might well be part of Russia.

Nations are not isolated systems. Comparing national policies as though they didn’t interact gives wrong answers.

I find that hard to believe, given that Finland, sitting between Russia and Sweden and Norway, is not a part of Russia.

Finland was invaded by the USSR multiple times and never got the eastern city of Vyborg (as well as a large chunk of national territory) back from Russia, even after the USSR collapsed.

Except Finland was never invaded by the USSR at any time after WW2, so NATO can't be implicated in any way for those.

That territory is the price for being in bed with the Germans -- it's like people conveniently seem to forget why it is so; my mother likes to talk about history when she has had too much wine, it's surprising there is anything left between Stalingrad and Berlin -- I still get mistaken for being Jewish which is ironic considering Jews didn't exist in the region I'm from after around 1944 - also about 25% to 30% of the civilian population. Given how much a pain in the ass the Winter War was (my grandfather volunteered for the Red Army in the 1930s) somebody likely decided it simply wasn't worth it at some point to have the Scandinavian countries be part of the USSR -- has it really worked out that bad in the end? Best of both worlds between capitalism/socialism and widely regarded as a region people want to live in.

Can someone please explain why this well written post was downvoted?

FYI, Finland's relationship with Russia inspired an entire word to describe a country that is not formally occupied, but behaves as if it were:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization

Please. For innovation, Denmark and Finland plays in a different league than Norway. /the swede

Entrepreneurship and cultural appreciation self reliance/independence don't necessarily go together. I think it was a mistake of the GP comment to make that link.

Sweden is, not Norwawy.