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Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

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

#271

Post by wegs »

jimbokun wrote: post #165
wegs wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience as well, until the first time I got funded. After a success under your belt, it's easy to keep going and get more funding. There's no shortage of capital looking for people to fund right now (it goes through spells). The first time I got funded, it was through a rich elite idiot's social connections (CEO). CEO was a sleazeball, and got all the financial and most of the branding benefit of the venture, d…

"1) Unskilled labor; to 2) Professional labor loaded with student loan/mortgage debt; to 3) Financial stability; to 4) Being able to launch high-risk high-reward ventures That's possible, but it generally takes a few generations" That sequence is coming up a lot lately in discussions of African Americans low wealth accumulation across generations, relative to whites. In the sense that, first through slavery, then thr…

Perhaps it might be enough to allow this sequence to play out is if they were a new immigrant family if it was actually playing out. At least where I live, it's not. Socioeconomic mobility is dead.

My family has moved up these rungs, and someone seems to have unscrewed the rungs. They just don't seem to be there anymore. Public schools no longer have:

* Gifted and talented programs

* Or any other support for kids getting ahead of standards (even quality books in the library)

This is all done in the name of social justice. The only families who can get ahead are ones who are already educated enough to teach their kids at home, or rich enough to hire tutors and pay for afterschool programs.

I'm not opposed to reparations per se, if someone were to make a coherent proposal (I haven't seen one, and with each generation, it gets harder to make one, as there aren't clean lines between former slaves, slaveowners, people who benefited from slavery, etc.), but I'm not actually sure they would help. If my grandparents on my dad's side were slaves, and on my mom's side, owned slaves, am I paying reparations? Am I getting paid? How's this even supposed to work?

And how would we manage this so it wouldn't be like winning a lotto, where the money just fades into nothing?

But on the whole, I'm more a fan of fixing obvious problems, such as how public school funding ranges at least 4-5x between rich and poor districts, issues with criminal justice, and so on.

I'm also a fan of targeted subsidies. I wouldn't mind if my taxpayer dollars paid for subsidies for lower-income kids to have the same sort of access to at-home and out-of-schools supports as my child does (STEM resources, programs like RSM/AoPS, etc.). Or if we had entrepreneurship subsidies in lower-income communities. Or more equitable tax structures. And so on.

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

#272

Post by ilaksh »

CalRobert wrote: post #49

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?

Because everyone is overblowing the safety net thing. It's not so much a safety net, it's handouts for parents to seed companies (pay kid's employee salaries) or investments at an early age. Or a free place to live so that a lot of th income can go towards startups.

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

#273

Post by Enginerrrd »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #23
SilasX wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or all the UBI money would pump up rents to the point that living costs make it infeasible again.

UBI needs to be paired with restricting rent increases or eliminating zoning restrictions that limit housing supply then.

Rent controls don't work very well. Much better to remove the barriers that prevent creation of more housing.

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

#274

Post by eeZah7Ux »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #243
ch4s3 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many countries do this by putting legal limits against gentrification. What does that even mean? I'm not aware of any country that restricts the change in the income mix of housing, or the renovation of dilapidated housing by new residents.

There are thousands of building regulations. Here are few examples among some EU countries: setting a minimum density and number of floors in urban areas to prevent "mcmansions". Mandated commercial areas (aka shops) on the ground floor on new buildings. Requirements on walkability applied to new road design to prevent sprawls e.g. limit cul-de-sacs. Minimum and maximum percentage of buildings for industrial / office…

There you go, silent downvotes for providing information...

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

#275

Post by pnutjam »

PeterisP wrote: post #93
iguy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thing is, requirement for on-site employment requires you to live where lots of people live; only the very wealthy can afford to live in places without jobs nearby - as UBI decouples income from where you live, then it would be a pressure to equalize rents, as underemployed people - the demand for whose labor is decreasing and will decrease further - can afford live in the many places which are currently shedding pop…

and, afford to risk starting their own business. Maybe something simple, maybe something that will grow.

Right now, only the wealthy can really risk things.

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

#276

Post by pnutjam »

iguy wrote: post #230
tsimionescu wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the counter is that entrepreneurship has strong network effects, it really pays to be around other talented people and hear about the future they're busy inventing. The actual powerful network effects are essentially a somewhat benign form of cronyism, not mere inspiration from other entrepreneurs. People do more business with less haggling with friends than with strangers.

I think you're talking about networking for money, and that's a thing. But there are also ideas. Even in fields where there's basically no money, half the world's innovation happening within a circle of a few miles is routine. For instance this happens in music, repeatedly.

Have you heard of this thing called "the internet"?

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

#277

Post by pnutjam »

epistasis wrote: post #259
rasz wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you write 'enough housing to go around' you are thinking about housing everyone in need. In a free market economy 'enough housing to go around' means enough real estate assets to safely park capital (for example Chinese one).

The "not enough housing to go around" isn't because of a "free market" (if such a thing even exists), it's because wealthy people have enforced housing austerity and refuse to allow new housing to be built near them. Without wealthy people controlling zoning and restricting what can be built, far more people would be building their own homes, or would at least be allowed to pool together to build. Instead we hand ove…

If rich people were the ones who had to build their estates far away, (instead of lower-middle class suburbs being pushed away from the urban areas) we'd have light rail and all sorts of ways for them to easily commute.

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

#278

Post by pnutjam »

burntoutfire wrote: post #228
mc32 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soviet style housing is an answer and also not an answer. It would provide housing for people on UBI, but because it’s operating on a thin budget, over time it becomes less desirable. Now, it’s not always the case _if_ you can get the tenants to coöperate and pitch in on basic maintenance and keep anti social behavior at bay ala Singapore, but my feeling is we’re not of the same mindset as Singaporeans.

> Now, it’s not always the case _if_ you can get the tenants to coöperate and pitch in on basic maintenance and keep anti social behavior at bay ala Singapore, but my feeling is we’re not of the same mindset as Singaporeans. I live in Soviet-style housing in Poland. The antisocial behavior of some tenants (it seems that there's always at least one) is something you learn to live with. Over the years, you start ignori…

What your describing is normal in lower income apartments in the US. People pay 50% of their take home to live like that.

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

#279

Post by pnutjam »

Knufferlbert wrote: post #115
narrator wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'r…

I don't think those reasons are true for the "lack of entrepreneurship". I'd love to know some numbers actually, I know EU doesn't have as many unicorns like Uber, Google, Amazon, etc. But that is a tiny amount of people who started those (and now employ a staggering number of people). I think there are two reasons why that may be: - Generally larger regulatory barriers. GDPR is an obvious recent one, but also market…

Until recently, I don't think you could start a company and reach the entire EU area. Can you now?

In the US, any person has access to consumers all across the US. I think this is a big part of the success of US companies.

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

#280

Post by eeZah7Ux »

willcipriano wrote: post #209
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any creation of affordable housing contributes to slowing down increasing prices. Many countries do this by putting legal limits against gentrification.

> Any creation of affordable housing contributes to slowing down increasing prices. As does creation of market rate housing[0], even in the short term. [0] https://research.upjohn.org/up_policybriefs/13/

But it's obviously more effective to create more affordable housing.
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