The report SuperEntrepreneurs shows that:
- SuperEntrepreneurs founded half the largest new firms created since the end of the Second World War
- There is a strong correlation between high rates of SuperEntrepreneurship in a country and low tax rates
- a low regulatory burden and high rates of philanthropy both correlate strongly with high rates of SuperEntrepreneurship
- Active government and supranational programmes to encourage entrepreneurship – such as the EU’s Lisbon Strategy – have largely failed.
- Yet governments can encourage entrepreneurialism by lowering taxes (particularly capital gains taxes which have a particularly high impact on entrepreneurialism while raising relatively insignificant revenues); by reducing regulations; and by vigorously enforcing property rights.
- High rates of self-employment and innovative entrepreneurship are both important for the economy.
- Yet policy makers should recognise that they are not synonymous and should not assume policies which encourage self-employment necessarily promote entrepreneurship.
- Policy makers should use a definition of entrepreneurship which is based on innovation.
SuperEntrepreneurs examined about 1,000 self-made men and women who have earned at least $1 billion dollars and who appeared in Forbes magazine list of the world’s richest people between 1996 and 2010.
Hong Kong has the most, with around three SuperEntrepreneurs per million inhabitants, followed by Israel, the US, Switzerland and Singapore.
The US is roughly four times more super-entrepreneurial than Western Europe and three times more super-entrepreneurial than Japan.
Super-entrepreneurs tend to be well-educated – 84% have a university degree.
Many started their own company but there is no clear relationship between self-employment and successful entrepreneurship
Steven Kaplan and Joshua Rauh’s “It’s the Market: The Broad-Based Rise in the Return to Top Talent” Journal of Economic Perspectives 2013 found that those in the Forbes 400 richest are less likely to have inherited their wealth or grown-up wealthy.
Today’s super-rich are self-made rich because they produce new and better products and services that people wanted and are willing to pay for.
John Rawls was alive to the importance of incentives in a just and prosperous society.
With his emphasis on fair distributions of income, Rawls’ initial appeal was to the Left. Left-wing thinkers then started to dislike his acceptance of capitalism and his tolerance of large discrepancies in income and wealth.
Rawls excluded envy when we are behind his veil of ignorance designed the social contract about how the society will be organised. He believed that principles of justice should not be affected by individual inclinations, which are mere accidents.
Rawls also argued that the liberties and political status of equal citizens encourage self-respect even when one is less well off than others; and background institutions (including a competitive economy) make it likely that excessive inequalities will not be the rule. He supposes that
the main psychological root of our liability to envy is a lack of self-confidence in our own worth combined with a sense of impotence
Then there is the old Russian joke that tells the story of a peasant with one cow who hates his neighbour because he has two. A sorcerer offers to grant the envious farmer a single wish any thing he wants: “Shoot my neighbour’s cow!” he demands.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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