Gli studenti britannici mancano di “spinta” dei loro coetanei americani, afferma il segretario commerciale
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/british-students-lack-drive-of-their-american-peers-says-business-secretary-5HjdDFy_2/
di tylerthe-theatre
Gli studenti britannici mancano di “spinta” dei loro coetanei americani, afferma il segretario commerciale
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/british-students-lack-drive-of-their-american-peers-says-business-secretary-5HjdDFy_2/
di tylerthe-theatre
50 commenti
He actually said the universities do not encourage students to be in business, this is a failing in schools as teachers very rarely have a business.
Perhaps, but then the ‘business secretary’ seems to have ZERO business experience himself and little of what many people might consider proper work, either.
Perhaps you should offer additional tax incentives or something then, rather than “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” nonsense rhetoric.
Every time you look under the hood of these kind of statements the actual dynamics at work are ‘Workers from [country with strong employee protections in law] don’t need to work as hard as workers from [country with weak employee protections in law] because they are not in constant fear of being fired’.
ETA this is the kind of statement it would be routine to hear from the tories, it is extraordinary, given the policy prospectus of the government, for a Labour Minister to say this.
This is the man who said anyone wanting to overturn the Online Safety Act is “on the side of predators” while also voting against a national enquiry into grooming gangs. He basically talks out of his bumhole.
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They also lack the pay that their American peers get.
Probably worth putting this in context
In Britain,” he said “if you went to a group of undergraduates, how big would that group have to be before you found someone that said their choice of going to university, and that choice of going to that specific university, was because they wanted to become a founder?
““The entrepreneurialism simply isn’t there – the drive, the vigour.”
Hmmm. Maybe he wants to take a long hard look at the structural issues that make starting a new business and scaling it beyond mom and pop stage hard in the UK. Tax filing, business rates, vat cliff, access to affordable capital, cost of employing staff, and a host of liabilities that kick into full force as soon as you scale. And let us not forget student debt. There hasn’t been a coherent or stable business strategy in the UK that encourages innovation or small and medium businesses development for decades. If only we had a government department for that…
As someone who’s taught and researched in the tech end of universities for coming up on 20 years post graduation, I can tell you there’s nothing wrong with the drive of students and many are, or would be, keen to develop businesses.
I don’t disagree that it probably is the case that more Stanford students do want and choose to create startups post graduation, and more who choose to probably succeed. However, he’s fundamentally misdiagnosing the case of this difference.
If I’m a Stanford graduate, I can walk out of my graduation on the last day of my degree and into a landscape where there are investors queuing up to support good ideas with multiple millions of dollars of seed funding. In the UK, I’d be lucky to get Deborah Meadon to give me £50k in exchange for for 35% of my business — and that doesn’t cut the mustard when you need to operate at a loss for multiple years until you find your model like many SV startups do.
Stanford graduates look to creating a startup as their first port of call (or second of third after cutting their teeth in salaried positions) because that is a seriously VIABLE possibility for them. However, it’s just not for UK students in most cases.
Fix the broken tech investment landscape, because that’s what’s really stopping entrepreneurship, before you blame the students for reacting sensibly to the consequences of our country’s failures.
Maybe the government should try giving people some hope and vision.
As a business owner the UK offers me absolutely no incentive to take on more staff, in fact it feels the opposite.
There’s no reason to innovate, drive development or investment. I just get taxed more and more roadblocks in my way.
A friend who runs a similar business in Colorado gets local incentives, tax breaks, sponsored schemes to take people on and even with their absolutely dire labour laws and work/life balance as a nation his staff probably do far better off in quality of life than anyone I could take on even if I wanted to.
Make it possible for businesses to innovate and incentivise and I’m pretty sure there’ll be more people wanting to start them or work for them.
Heaven forbid you should enjoy yourself whilst you’re still young.
Edit: got the context and message completely wrong, so i look like a fool below although the point is valid in a different context
American employees are overworked and don’t have job security so they have to pretend to be happy overworking for their masters ego or they can no longer live paycheck to paycheck and have a health insurance.
His comparison might well be valid, however of the multitude of US students that start a business, how many succeed? That is the important metric, is it 10%, 50% or 1%.
Difficult when the Online Safety Act means your tech startup has to hire a half a dozen lawyers to deal with it, you don’t get that barrier in America
This Peter Kyle?
[How Labour MP Peter Kyle triggered a 4am police raid on a constituent — for writing to him about Israel’s genocide](https://greghadfield.medium.com/exclusive-how-labour-mp-peter-kyle-triggered-a-4am-police-raid-on-a-constituent-for-writing-to-dd012f23122e)
The one who called opponents of the OSA pedophiles despite being best friends with Ivor Caplin (who was arrested for offences against young children)
That Peter Kyle?
It was very funny pre-election when they were talking about only wanting ‘high quality candidates’. Labour can’t even fill a cabinet with high quality candidates let alone the backbenches.
Assistant manager of petrol station in US: $125k vs Senior submarine design engineer in UK £38k. Hmmm….
So many of the Labour people talk about businesses and admiration for entrepreneurs yet none of them have any business experience themselves. It’s kind of bizarre.
Maybe pay people then? And not just those that work in London?
There’s simply a different career path for our overconfident, overprivileged offspring of generational wealth. In the US, they consider politics rather grubby and corrupt and business to be honourable and aspirational. In the UK, we consider business to be rather grubby and corrupt and politics to be honourable and aspirational. The poshos who would go to Stanford then Silicon Valley in the US go instead to Oxford then Westminster in the UK. Everybody else, in both countries, has to go out and get a job.
> The entrepreneurialism simply isn’t there
It’s kind of hard and dangerous to be an enterpreneur in a cooked economy. Also, maybe… just maybe, tax rates are like 50% higher in the UK when compared to the US. Not exactly an environment for business-making, huh?
>“In Britain,” he said “if you went to a group of undergraduates, how big would that group have to be before you found someone that said their choice of going to university, and that choice of going to that specific university, was because they wanted to become a founder?”
Talking at an event for NVIDIA, a multi billion pound global company which has been around for a long time. Oh bore off.
I don’t think many 18-21 year olds have a great idea for a business/company, a fully fledged business plan proving it’s viable, and money to get it up and running. But that’s not a soundbite worthy thing to say to millionaires is it?
Probably because British students know there is nothing waiting for them on the other side except being treated as a prisoner in their own homeland..
Yes America leading the way in time travel after banning vaccines and climate satellites the bar is not exactly set very high in America your lucky you you get out of highschool without being shot
From my experience of working with students, this is just false.
Anecdotal I know (although I doubt his statements are based on peer reviewed research either!) but almost every student I’ve met has had at least one, if not multiple side hustles on the go during their studies. Many of them run their own businesses, are involved in industry projects on top of their core work, and are involved in commercial spin outs for innovative ideas they’ve developed.
What they lack is the opportunity and support to develop their business ideas further. There is little funding available and what exists is often highly specific. Outside of this where is a student going to get startup money?
Why not look at that statement as a symptom rather than a cause.
Why have we suddenly started comparing the UK to the US? The US is fucking mental. When you have such a violent crime issue that a school shooting barely breaks into the news cycle it’s fucking problematic.
British jobs lack ‘pay’ of their American peers, says British student
I’d say British politicians lack the ‘drive’ to repair the country instead of playing politics & offering their voice to the highest bidder
Give UK students the opportunities of US students then
The UK has a much harsher start-up culture that makes it much more risky to try and set up your own business. I suspect many more would like to try but write it off immediately because they are more risk averse, knowing the financial support is going to be very tough to come by. It is not the students that are significantly different, it is the entire landscape around starting a business from scratch.
We should be proud of our pessimistic realistic youth. They clearly see there is no future for them in neoliberlism. Unlike their american peers who are still drinking the koolaid of hard work equals success.
Please don’t let them gaslight you into giving up your personal.life for the corporate grind.
The basis for this claim is so evidently dumb.
He visited Stanford, one of the top universities in the world for those going into business with fees of over £60,000, and spoke to “10 or 12 undergraduates. Coincidentally they all (supposedly) said they wanted to found a business. He claims that if you went to a random group of British undergraduates the group would have to be big before you found one who said the the same. Apparently this is evidence that the UK lacks the entrepreneurial spirit.
Alternatively, hear me out, most students in any country, including America, do not go to university to become a founder because they are studying a whole host of subjects. 10 students is not a sample size that means anything and if I went to say Oxford it wouldn’t be hard to find a similar group. Also, if the business secretary is giving a talk somewhere I would assume it would attract those with an interest in business, who are obviously more likely to want to found a company.
Me when working my ass off for 40 years finally gets me 70k a year but I lose half of it to taxes and it isn’t even being used to fix the healthcare or potholes in my town 😀
Translation, people in the UK have an expectation of human decency and an understanding that working to death for no rewards is essentially slavery.
Yours a Dual National USA & UK who worked in the USA for 35 years, and had only 2 weeks vacation in that time.
Pay us like the American workers then? Give us the same housing and medical facilities and then we can talk. Till then, it’s just hot air.
They have ‘drive’ because jobs are tied to healthcare and live in fear of being financially destroyed if they get sick, where your job can be terminated without cause at any time, where women go back to work days after giving birth because of nonexistent maternity pay.
I don’t care to hear advice about worker motivation from a country that thinks healthcare and maternity pay should be perks of a good job. No wonder students have ‘drive’ facing that sort of employment culture.
Getting a business off the ground is hard work and it’s risky their is alot that can go wrong and in this economic environment nobody wants to take the risk of throwing their own money into an business when they still need money to live.
There is few incentives for small business formation
What an outrageous claim. Sounds like he doesn’t know many British students and is looking to impress US politicians instead of championing the UK.
Why would you compare us to another country on a different continent? American businesses operate on a totally different set of laws.
With only seeing the headline and thinking about this for 5 seconds, I’m 95% sure that British students are just less likely to overtly display their passion in a falsely embellished way.
In short they’re both more honest in how they outwardly project themselves, and they’re more introverted in general.
Our culture is more aligned with modesty, humility and privacy in general.
Source: I work with people from the states and UK
The employment rights bill is fucked with this bellend as business secretary
Workers rights and a social safety net? Who needs em!
Alternative headline: “business secretary says it’s everyone else’s fault that no one wants to start a business in the UK, nothing to do with him”
The comparison between the UK & US is absolutely mental. We’re a completely different economy, with very different values! The only way we’re similar is that they speak English.
What is with people pushing to be more like the US. It’s an absolute shit show where money is valued more than peoples lives. They have extreme poverty everywhere you go. You essentially need to be rich enough to live in your own bubble where you can get a private driver to take you from safe neighbourhood to safe neighbourhood and tip people enough that they will worship you for. handout.
We should want to be nothing like America, yet LBC, Farage etc keep pushing this agenda for a reason. Modern day slavery.
Show me that angel investor with 10 mill to invest in me.
Show me that $29 trillion-big single market.
What an inspiring opinion for our youth from the governments business secretary.
Lets have a crack at some factors that may be impacting our students:
– Our youth have less chance of securing employment and AI is threatening job security.
– If they do secure employment wages are multiple times lower than his comparison.
– The tax burden is significantly higher than his comparison.
– Our Student loan repayment scheme is horrendous, they’ll be trying to pay off their investment in education for decades to come.
– They’ve lost freedom of movement within the EU.
– The state pension and retirement age will potentially be gone by the time they get there but they have to pay for the current generation.
– They will struggle to own a home and will have to rely upon the bank of mum and dad for much longer.
– They have limited disposable cash because of said tax burden and therefore it impacts opportunities to socialise and network, hence they may struggle to get a life partner.
– The modern work-life balance is so heavily skewed towards work and work places demand dedication far more than any other generation. They also heavily surveilled in the workplace.
– The price of energy and essentials rises with inflation far above wage growth.
– They had their education impacted by global pandemic that the world had not seen for a hundred years with little to no support.
– This generation is much smaller than the baby boom and therefore even if every single one voted it would be drowned out by the grey vote to which governmental policy is targeted because votes mean staying in power. Few policies are ever tailored to them or benefit them.
– The preceding generations have knackered the climate for this generation and future generations to reside in.
Thats just off the top of my head. I’m not even close to being a student anymore but if you’re a student reading this; thanks for keeping your head up and apologies we handed you the keys to this shit show.
I wondering what could possibly be impacting their moral or drive?
Please Labour; can you stop kicking the ball into your own net.
How can someone be so out of step with reality and say such utterly stupid things.
It’s nationally and internationally embarrassing It’s beginning to border on self-harm.
Yeah because most value living their life over money