““But increasing the amount of equity finance in an economy is easier said than done: it is a project that would take decades rather than years. Some of the barriers are institutional: outside of the very small world of venture capital (of which more later) and the even smaller and newer field of equity crowdfunding, most businesses do not raise equity, and most financial institutions do not provide it. There are established agencies that can rate the creditworthiness of even quite small businesses, and algorithms to allow banks to quickly and cheaply decide whether to lend to them. Nothing similar exists for equity investment, and the equivalent analytical task (working out a company's likely future value, rather than its likelihood of servicing a fixed debt) is more complex. And cultural factors stand in the ways too: despite a very elegant financial economics theorem that shows that business owners should be indifferent between equity and debt finance, for many small business owners there seems a cognitive and cultural bias against giving away equity.””