Entrepreneurs Don't Have a Special Gene for Risk, They Come From Families with M (2015)

I wonder what you consider regular, not because I disagree with you, but because I wonder if the term "moneyed" means something different to you than the author.

I am always fascinated by the normal human bias to assume that a single person's experience is that "average" experience.

To me "moneyed" in terms of being an entrepreneur would mean that if everything failed catastrophically I would have somewhere to go to have a roof over my head and food to eat while I got back on my feet.

My personal bias would lead me to believe that most people have less of a support system then the wonderful people on HN. Most of us have degrees and/or well paying STEM type jobs.

There's actually a third group: many folks in poor countries have no option but to start some sort of business as jobs pay very little.

There's a supermarket chain in Uruguay that started from selling vegetables on a street corner.

There's this guy near my house that sells electronics at a traffic light. I've been witnessing his business grow and grow and now he has a car full of stuff parked nearby.

> It's looking just at the moneyed class of entrepreneurs and declaring that "entrepreneurs come from backgrounds that provide a lot of resources".

This is incorrect. For example, here's one of the links in the article:

"We study a sample of individuals who choose either to be employees or to run their own businesses." "we find that the probability of self-employment depends markedly upon whether the individual ever received an inheritance or gift." https://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/entrepre.pdf

Also: “If one does not have money in the form of a family with money, the chances of becoming an entrepreneur drop quite a bit,” Levine tells Quartz.

> I've had the good fortune to get to know and work with quite a lot of successful entrepreneurs

But this is survivorship bias. You also need to consider the people who never became entrepreneurs, or who failed as entrepreneurs due to lack of money.

Note that my quote above says the chances of becoming an entrepreneur drop quite a bit, but it doesn't say the chances drop to zero. So of course the number of non-privileged entrepreneurs will be greater than zero. It's all about the odds.

I'm personally an entrepreneur, not wealthy, but currently doing better than the majority of people. It took me 5 years to establish a sustainable business, and I nearly went broke, burning through my entire life savings (now restored). This never would have been possible if I didn't already have a substantial life savings before I quit my job.

> I'd say about 25% of them came from a "moneyed" background. The rest were just regular people with regular backgrounds who were obsessive about starting businesses.

This is a very similar point to the article though -- the moneyed class is much smaller than 25% of the population, so they are disproportionately represented in even your anecdotal sample. To be clear, that doesn't mean that regular people can't make it though!

That's orthogonal to the idea of the piece.

Success can come from working hard at something. Whether you're comfortable working hard at something depends on the risk of doing so.

Lebron James works hard, spends all day getting better at basketball. He also has a cooking staff, training staff, and house keepers.

If I took the same amount of time playing basketball, the same effort, I'd be broke and homeless.

If I come from money, sure I can spend all day working on the nuances of my startup, to the exclusion of all else. My ability to exist is taken care of.

They want you depending on megacorporations or, even better, the government.

This is a misinterpretation of the article and perhaps more of an indication of your own political ideology. Here's the same author with a different article: "A UBI would free Americans to shift from scarcity to abundance mode, which would enable more people to take risks and engage in a greater, more expansive vision for their future. Yang’s freedom dividend would give Americans greater agency to leave codependent relationships, professional or otherwise, and operate as the CEO or entrepreneur of their own lives." https://qz.com/1687957/the-case-for-andrew-yangs-ubi-plan

I'm curious about this take and what you think of https://www.metroparent.com/parenting/tweens-teens/how-to-be...

While it may be true that entrepreneurship means being overly absent in your child's life I think MOST parents are TOO present in their child's life.

> The few that I know for a fact come from exceptional money

The article is not about people "coming from exceptional money". And I bet a lot of the people you are assuming are "middle class" aren't actually middle class.

There is a really bad habit in this country of assuming that you can have money, but unless you are "movie star rich" then you are middle class. That's not the case.

A lot of people work for a living but are not middle class (nor are they CEOs of fortune 500 companies).

More specifically a lot of the people reading HN right now likely fall into the category the researchers talk about. If you work in tech there is a very, very good chance you are not middle class. Just because you don't think of yourself as rich doesn't make you middle class.

It's something that being in an echo chamber of tech that people easily forget.

Someone can go look up a more precise definition, but if middle class were the middle 50th of household incomes, then if you have a household income (not individual, but combined AGI) that is > $100k you are not in the middle-class.[1] That doesn't mean you have multiple yachts, or act privileged or have exceptional money. It simple means (by that definition) you aren't middle class.

And before someone replies with it, "Cost Of Living" arguments do not change this substantially at all. Look at the AGI tables below, many people who think of themselves as middle class, are not. And if you're on HN reading that post, with a US job in tech, there is a good chance that includes you.

[1] Income in the United States - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_States

In theory, I agree with this wholeheartedly.

I have no idea if it's true in practice.

No. Here's the same author with a different article: "A UBI would free Americans to shift from scarcity to abundance mode, which would enable more people to take risks and engage in a greater, more expansive vision for their future. Yang’s freedom dividend would give Americans greater agency to leave codependent relationships, professional or otherwise, and operate as the CEO or entrepreneur of their own lives." https://qz.com/1687957/the-case-for-andrew-yangs-ubi-plan