Live data from Hacker News

Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

jpost.com

81–90 of 291 posts

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#81

I've known this for decades. When Bill Gates started publishing Smart Basic (or whatever) in magazines, I got a copy and saw what crap it was. I could do better. Why didn't I? That was my very first thought. The reason was, I had to work halftime to pay tuition and buy food. I was mired in working to live. Ol Bill had a family to support him as he bought resources (ads in magazines etc), recruited staff, took meeting…

I cant wait for basic income, because I cant wait to quit my job and focus on my ideas.

If you can't wait, start focusing on your ideas now. Chip away, one hour a day, every day.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#82
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rents only get pumped up if we don't have enough housing to go around... in which case regular incomes do the same thing.

But we do have lots of housing, it's just located in places people don't want to live. Rents are high in places they do want to be, and that's partly a positional thing -- if you want to live where the top-10% of earners live, you need to bid against them for housing.

Exactly. The high costing of housing really has more to do with the type of person you've living around/near, than the house.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#83

I've known this for decades. When Bill Gates started publishing Smart Basic (or whatever) in magazines, I got a copy and saw what crap it was. I could do better. Why didn't I? That was my very first thought. The reason was, I had to work halftime to pay tuition and buy food. I was mired in working to live. Ol Bill had a family to support him as he bought resources (ads in magazines etc), recruited staff, took meeting…

The problem with most welfare schemes is they have big welfare cliffs. You make one dollar more than a certain amount and you lose thousands in benefits. It's the virtual equivalent of a greater than 100% marginal income tax.

Also, countries with greater welfare programs don't have greater entrepreneurship. The opposite is somewhat true. Probably due to higher taxes and it's very hard to go out of business once you're in business and to fire employees in other countries.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#84

So everything is at it should be. People who cannot afford to risk big, should not risk big. It is a simple fact that being wealthy allows one to risk more, financially. Even if you gave poor promising candidates free money with no strings attached, they would still be better of going into a stable career path with stable growth, rather than try to start a startup because of the opportunity costs. And, why should sma…

It's because we like to believe we live in a meritocratic society, where the people who have wealth have earned and deserved it.

There is a strong incentive for the successful to ignore all the many advantages they had in getting where they are in order to believe they 'pulled themselves up by their bootstraps' and that anyone as hard working or intelligent as they are could do the same. By convincing themselves of this, they are able to believe that they deserve everything they have and poor people deserve to be poor, and, being inherently superior, it is therefore ok to exploit their lessers.

This thinking is a hallmark of prejudice. White supremist have long held that black people and other races are genetically inferior, less intelligent, lazier, more prone to violence or criminality, etc. to justify their position. I have less experience with it, but it seems the same sort of rationalization is at work with the Indian caste nonsense too.

P.S. While your question seems to be meant in the objective sense of "why would one expect that intelligence and entrepreneurship are correlated?", it is apparently being interpreted as "why should society function such that entrepreneurship is a path available to anyone with enough intelligence?".

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#85
post #8

All my attempts at entrepreneurship have been via moonlighting, and have failed. There just aren't enough hours in the day. But I can't just quit my day job and take my income down to $0 to pursue a startup.

I find your comment amusing because, of course you can. And famously, the people that made it big did just that.

But I get it, I'm like you. Also had a college loan to pay off, later kids.... So I stuck to the day-job, read about the high-flyers and work instead on trying to get-rich-slowly.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#86
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship. I had to also wait till I paid off my student loans. There are a whole lot of shackles if you come from a humble background to starting a company full time. On the other hand it has never been cheaper to start a side hustle.

> Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship. I have a dream that Healthcare will someday be decoupled from employment. So much waste is tolerated simply due to the fact that the majority of the expense is borne by your employer before the number they put on your paycheck. I can live on a part time salary without issue, but health insurance, which is already $200/wk for my family with my…

They could even do this without too many major changes. Just three in fact:

- Increase HSA Contribution Limit

- Allow both Traditional & High Deductible insurance premiums to be paid with the HSA

- Ban employers from directly providing/choosing insurance (ex. US Military)

Essentially everyone goes out onto the open market and buys their insurance using pre-tax HSA contributions (similar to tax benefits to employers now). Employers can continue to "help" be providing dollars to HSA/HSA match, rather than picking your insurance for you.

There are more radical and arguably better solutions, but if you want to see a large improvement with minimal changes/the least controversy this is it. Most insurance companies could likely just convert existing employer provided policies into employee direct ones paid via HSA.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#87
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a rent-restricted area. There is quite a bit of construction, and the average person moves almost once every two years. The effects of rent-restriction you quote are theoretical effects. In the real world, it does work, as long as the rent-restrictions are well-thought-out.

My interpretation of the evidence leads to the opposite conclusion. Here's a good summary: https://www.slowboring.com/p/induced-demand

This article is completely orthogonal. Yes, building more pushes price down. Eventually though, you stop being able to increase density economically, and at that point the only way to prevent housing prices from increasing is rent restrictions.

It's important to note that even according to your article, you need to drastically increase supply even for a modest decrease in rent.

No one here is against increasing density. It is however insane to believe that increasing density is enough to fix the problem. Cities at the edge of density still have affordability issues, whereas much less dense cities with appropriate rent restrictions don't.

There is not a single reference to induced demand here. As long as housing stays a profitable investment, and as long as density cannot be increased infinitely without increasing marginal costs, then rent will rise.

The only long term solution is to reduce the profitability of speculation on land prices, so that only productive activities, such as building, are profitable. Rent restrictions are part of this, as rent is a large part of the profitability of land.

And rent restrictions can work. There are many cases where they have been implemented without a significantly negative impact to mobility. So why oppose them?

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#88

One thing that confuses me, though - if having a strong safety net to fall back on is important to enable entrepreneurship, why does it seem like Europe is so bad at it?

Europeans may be more risk averse too -- perhaps more YOLOs in America because there's nothing to lose, where as in Europe you can still have a normalish life, but it's not just a strong safety net either though -- many unicorn concepts were done in Europe, but they didn't become big globally.

Maybe the lack of VC to scale - a lot of money sloshing around in SF. Maybe there's less of an culture of thinking "my way is the best" that Americans have more than others[0], maybe the smaller cultural market (there are 350 million Americans, only 30 million Spaniards). Maybe could be Americans are more into Consumer Ethnocentrism and less likely to buy into foreign things than Europeans too (the number of American flags waving around in the states is shocking). I wouldn't expect to see "Designed in Finland" if I bought a nokia phone. The US market has always been far harder for europeans - even Brits - to crack than the other way round.

[0] https://infographic.tv/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Map-Who-th...

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#89
post #67
post #9

Wired covered the "myth of meritocracy" as it pertains to entrepreneurship and Silicon Valley 8 years ago: https://www.wired.com/2013/11/silicon-valley-isnt-a-meritocr...

> But if the tech scene is really a meritocracy, why are so many of its key players, from Mark Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, white men? I disagree with the author that Jobs and Zuckerberg are evidence that meritocracy is a myth. According to Wiki: > ... Zuckerberg excelled in classes. After two years, he transferred to the private school Phillips Exeter Academy, where he won prizes in mathematics, astronomy, physics, and…

It is a meritocracy, but some get to start at a chute, and some start at a ladder.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#90

I've known this for decades. When Bill Gates started publishing Smart Basic (or whatever) in magazines, I got a copy and saw what crap it was. I could do better. Why didn't I? That was my very first thought. The reason was, I had to work halftime to pay tuition and buy food. I was mired in working to live. Ol Bill had a family to support him as he bought resources (ads in magazines etc), recruited staff, took meeting…

I knew Bill Gates's family was well to do when he started with his endeavors, but I recently came to know Bill Gates Sr. was a prominent personality from Howard Schultz's account of him.

The story goes like this -

When Howard was offered Starbucks for US$3.8 million by original founders, he was working to raise funds for that and his current investors went over his back to buy Starbucks. Howard was introduced to Bill Gates Sr.(Lawyer) by a friend, who took Howard to the building where those investors were straight away and threatened them out of it immediately.

Post reply on HN