* Business is more competitive than ever. But in reality, we have more monopolies and duopolies than ever. Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" is all about how to achieve monopoly. Businesses in the US hate competing on price. Without strong antitrust enforcement, which the US hasn't had in decades, the number of players decreases until there's no price competition. How many Internet providers can you choose from in the US? How many in the UK or Germany?
* We live in an age of entrepreneurialism. But the big companies are making all the money. The Economist writes: "A large number of businesspeople who were drawn in by the cult of entrepreneurship encountered only failure and now eke out marginal existences with little provision for their old age." All YC applicants should read that.
* Business is getting faster. They compare the fast rise of the automobile. Electricity and aircraft were also deployed faster than the Internet. Progress in the first 50 years of aviation zoomed like the semiconductor industry. Then in the late 1960s, it was all done - the Concorde, the Boeing 747, the SR-71, and the Saturn V had all flown. Everything since then has been a minor improvement.
* Globalisation is both inevitable and irreversible. The Economist comments "In 1880-1914 the world was in many ways just as globalised as it is today; it still fell victim to war and autarky." The causes of World War One are worth studying. Nobody really wanted it, and it happened anyway. Before WWI, Germany's biggest trading partner was France.
Some things are moving fast, though; solar comes to mind as an excellent example of an area with exponential price drops. At any given time, some things are improving fast, and most things are improving slowly or not at all.
My feeling is that there are a lot of basic tech improvements just on the horizon, we start figuring out more ways to bring machine learning into hard fundamental problems of industrial design, medical diagnosis, and so on.
Which of course leads to inevitable discussions of displaced highly skilled labor; it's not clear that the areas of fast improvement will lead to a good distribution of positive outcomes, as we've discussed here so many times before...
On the whole, though, I agree with the other three points.
Funny how 'subsidies' is a bad word and 'VC funding' isn't.
The idea, in this case, is exactly the same: Invest enough to achieve the economy of scale, and get the actually-better solution to the point where it's cheaper than the happens-to-be-currently-dominant solution.
(obvs, subsidies can also be used for other purposes, like protectionism or ensuring that a vital-for-national-security industry isn't outsourced. But I believe that for solar it's about investment, more than these other uses.)
I like this comparison, actually. But realize that it is expected that most VC fundings fail. Subsidies is a bad word because it is often an attempt at rigging the game. With the assumption that we fully know what the answer should be.
So, if we can move subsidies to be more like experiments where it is expected that a significant percentage fails, I'm all for it.
"But the big companies are making all of the money" is tautological, because we define big companies by how much money they make. All of the startup unicorns you'd probably call at this point "big companies" but only because of how much money they make (and spend).
I feel like, in general, your comment cherry picks examples, and falls victim to the recall bias.
> But the big companies are making all of the money" is tautological.
It's likely the commenter is referring to the distribution of total income across all businesses, which is most definitely a real metric that can be evaluated.
* Business is more competitive than ever. But in reality, we have more monopolies and duopolies than ever. Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" is all about how to achieve monopoly. Businesses in the US hate competing on price. Without strong antitrust enforcement, which the US hasn't had in decades, the number of players decreases until there's no price competition. How many Internet providers can you choose from in the US? How many in the UK or Germany?
* We live in an age of entrepreneurialism. But the big companies are making all the money. The Economist writes: "A large number of businesspeople who were drawn in by the cult of entrepreneurship encountered only failure and now eke out marginal existences with little provision for their old age." All YC applicants should read that.
* Business is getting faster. They compare the fast rise of the automobile. Electricity and aircraft were also deployed faster than the Internet. Progress in the first 50 years of aviation zoomed like the semiconductor industry. Then in the late 1960s, it was all done - the Concorde, the Boeing 747, the SR-71, and the Saturn V had all flown. Everything since then has been a minor improvement.
* Globalisation is both inevitable and irreversible. The Economist comments "In 1880-1914 the world was in many ways just as globalised as it is today; it still fell victim to war and autarky." The causes of World War One are worth studying. Nobody really wanted it, and it happened anyway. Before WWI, Germany's biggest trading partner was France.