Molson Hart

The most valuable new companies in the world are getting build where land is expensive, not cheap. When you raise the type of money necessary to build a billion dollar startup you can pay $10k/month in personal rent.

2. Cheap land in the abstract sense. One of the most powerful, replicate-able effects in psychology is anchoring. This manifests itself in effort and ambition. Whether it's an immigrant who sees how much more he earns per hour in America vs. his home country or a 1st generation

American, seeing how much better off he is than his parents who toiled, day-in and day-out in their laundromat so he could be the first in his family to attend an ivy league school. That matters a lot for motivation. It might be driving China's resurgence now in fact.

So, yeah it overlaps with the venn diagram of "empty lands" both abstract and concrete but I feel like there are better ways to explain it, especially with the haigui or 海龟 or sea turtle phenomenon. Chinese are going back to China from the USA to build wealth.

AFAIK, Eric Yuan is one of the last of his generation. The guys like that don't foudn companies in American anymore because it's better for them to be in China.

If we're talking about psychologically empty lands, why not Hungary? I don't know the history well enough, but Hungary was communist through 1989. All the ambitious Hungarians I know are here in the USA, not there. The few smart Hungarians I speak to living in Hungary have been

really unambitious, I find. Smart, capable, maybe even hard-working, but...there is no capitalist killer instinct. Surely Hungary, with all its psychological empty land, should be better than easy-life for past 100+ years America? But it's not like that.

You're making a lot of good points but a lot of it has nothing to do with what i meant. 1. I wasn't really talking about land prices. I was talking about the overall development of a region. Let's say we use GDP per capita as a proxy (i know it's a shitty metric).