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I'm shaking my head right now because I can't believe people at the top is still susceptible to sampling/survivorship bias. I've tried searching but cannot fin

I'm shaking my head right now because I can't believe people at the top is still susceptible to sampling/survivorship bias. I've tried searching but cannot find a good empirical study of privilege and entrepreneurship correlation. However, I've found an essay paper [0] that exactly predicted this twitter drama; that entrepreneurs simultaneously present and erase this conversation about class and entrepreneurship. The paper also concluded: > Whereas gender, together with race, have long been foregrounded in studies of entrepreneurial identity and difference, class may be a more powerful organizing discourse, though certainly one supported by discourses of gender and race. [0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1350508412464895 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/135050841246489...

KaiserPro 7y ago
The only data I can get is this: https://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/education-and-tech-entrepreneurship https://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/educati... 93% had a degree, with 30% having a masters, That would suggest to me that you'd need a decent wedge of cash. Now, what is interesting, is that in 2016 at least, the US created gross 960k new companies (there is some smoothing here, so +- 100k) The UK created 460k. Seeing as how the UK is 60 million, versus 300 million people, either the US is under performing, or the UK is wildly over performing. (https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/2018-Small-Business-Profiles-US.pdf https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/2018-Small-... and https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06152/SN06152.pdf https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06... for stats) Perhaps, as we don't have to worry about healthcare or no competes, that might be a factor.
- rahimnathwani 7y ago
  Registering a company in the UK, and keeping it running, is both simpler and cheaper than in the US. Registering a company takes a few minutes and costs less than $30. Compulsory annual filing costs less than $20. If your company's revenue is below some threshold, you don't need to register for VAT (similar to sales tax). And there's another (even higher) threshold below which you can file very simple annual accounts (unaudited, and including neither income statements nor cash flow).
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Agreed, I founded a UK company on a whim one day so I can bill for some freelancing work. It made a few thousand a year and everything was hassle-free, basically "pay $50/yr and file some stuff that tells us you're active, and when you get large enough to afford a good accountant they'll take care of it".
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Based on those differences I'd wager that a lot more people in the UK would register their side gigs whereas in the US the trade-offs are rarely worth it unless you intend to make it a "legitimate business" at some point.
  - brianwawok 7y ago
    Eh, in my state in the US it is like $85 every 2 years for a LLC and essentially no paperwork if a simple pass-thru. Not everyone needs a Delaware C-Corp from day 1.
    - Reedx 7y ago
      Nice. That's a lot simpler than CA. Here there's paperwork, more complicated taxes and $800/yr for a single-member LLC.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    That's about the process in Texas. Incorporating is a different story, but you don't have to incorporate to register a business (and it's probably a waste of money if you are the sole owner with no employees).
    - rahimnathwani 7y ago
      Does the simpler option provide limited liability?
- pjc50 7y ago
  The UK also makes company formation very easy and still slightly advantageous for sole traders, which may be a factor. I did check the criteria and they do include "must be listed for VAT or PAYE", so they're all real businesses to some extent and not just shells. The US would do well to look at its business licensing requirements to see if they could be simplified in terms of paperwork.
  - lurcio 7y ago
    It's also cheap and trivial to form a UK company with bank account - no matter whether UK citizen/resident or not.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      Filing for a company was trivial when I did it, but not many banks would give it an account (NatWest/Barclays/etc wouldn't). Has this changed?
      - lol768 7y ago
        There are quite a few non-legacy bank accounts that you can apply for a company account with in a very painless manner. Monzo, Starling and Tide spring to mind. I use Monzo as part of their business banking trial, but I previously have used Tide and (unfortunately) RBS.
      - jdietrich 7y ago
        Most company formation agents offer a free "bank introduction service". I have no idea how the logistics work, but I was able to open an account with Santander in a matter of minutes.
  - mikhailfranco 7y ago
    The smaller businesses can file with a flat-rate VAT (not itemized) which often means 5-10% tax benefit. The UK also has universal free healthcare for residents, so no need for private insurance when you leave an employer and set-up on your own.
- sfifs 7y ago
  Interestingly, only a quarter of the businesses are employers in UK, so most of the company creation is presumably basically city of London financial engineering :-)
  - sheeshkebab 7y ago
    what's with justifying an existence of a company by having employees? If a company is profitable and you as an owner are doing well financially, does it really matter?
    - DreamSpinner 7y ago
      I believe the general thought is that at a very simple level, operating as a company provides for a number of protections for the owners/operators. At a societal level, the broad justification for allowing unnatural beings with those benefits is that it still provides a net benefit to society through things like employment opportunities, taxes and the encouragement of economic activity. If the concept of a company no longer provides any non-trivial benefit to society (for example, no jobs or taxes), why should society collectively provide laws that allow them in the first place?
    - KaiserPro 7y ago
      Shell companies are not the same as a person working as a "one man band" For example a company I worked for had a structure where the employees and customers (~250 employees and £50million turnover) were mostly interacting with the named company, but there were three other companies that "onion skinned" the company with the name. This was done to manage debt, primarily, which then allowed manipulation of taxes.
    - michaelt 7y ago
      For reasons outside my area of expertise, UK companies sometimes divide themselves into numerous sub-companies. This produces the result that publicly traded company Tesco PLC has a great many sub-companies [1]. This is at odds with a lot of expectations about how companies are counted. [1] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/officers/uZl4-qVGUWaBK3JdZy4zFMkg0Vw/appointments https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/officers/uZl4-qVGUWaBK3Jd...
- bko 7y ago
  Why do you need "a decent wedge of cash" to have a degree? There are plenty of universities that are affordable. For instance, City University of New York (CUNY) offers four year undergrad degrees for $6,730 a year [0]. You can get a room share in an outer borough for maybe 500 - 1.5k a month or Jersey for even less [1]. And this is one of the most expensive cities in the world. If you're smart, avoid unnecessary expenses, you can probably get by on 20k a year in expenses, which comes out to 26 hours a week at $15/hr, ignoring taxes. Taxes at about 15% at that low income means you'll probably want to earn closer to 25k to have 20k net which means 31 hours a week. But realistically you'll probably want to work full time or over time during the months school is not in session and closer to 20 hours a week at other times. Or try to find a job that pays more. Don't know much about health insurance so that's also something you'll have to consider getting maybe through the school or some city program or just go without it. Or just move to a more affordable city and probably cut everything above in half while hopefully only giving up a bit of the wage you'll earn [0] https://www2.cuny.edu/financial-aid/tuition-and-college-costs/tuition-fees/#1452179204200-d27abe14-99f4 https://www2.cuny.edu/financial-aid/tuition-and-college-cost... [1] https://newyork.craigslist.org/d/rooms-shares/search/roo https://newyork.craigslist.org/d/rooms-shares/search/roo
  - KaiserPro 7y ago
    So, working a four day week, and studying full time to do a degree. Yes, I can see that allowing lots of time to form a network and come up with business ideas.
    - bko 7y ago
      I was replying to the specific claim that getting a degree requires a lot of money.
      - hef19898 7y ago
        Undergrad programs are what, 3 to 4 years. That means enough money to replace 30 hour per week job for four years. With uncertain healthcare status. That is a lot of money. Over here studies are basically free, about 100 EUR incl. public transport per semester. And even then working full-time to be able to finance all of that is hard.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Suggesting one variable explains such differences is incredibly reductive. Plus, The US is not a single country, there is federalism and you should treat all states differently since setting up a business in NY is supposedly a lot harder than in other states.
  - KaiserPro 7y ago
    Indeed, and lots of companies have shells in Delaware. Because its lower taxes & "better" company law.
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      > Because its lower taxes Lower taxes is irrelevant unless all your operations are in Delaware. It's a great trick for IP holding "companies" that are just a couple lawyers in Wilmington, but otherwise you are paying taxes to whatever states you actually generate revenue in anyway.
- luckylion 7y ago
  The UK used to (?) be a haven for Ltd creation because of low costs, low bureaucracy and quick reactions. It's what lead to Germany's laws regarding UGs (Unternehmergesellschaft, literally entrepreneur company), much more comparable to the Ltd regarding easier access, much lower startup costs than the typical GmbH. It will be interesting to see where these numbers move post-brexit.
jonathankoren 7y ago
Why is it surprising? There’s a combination of blindness, and inflated sense of self worth. America romanticizes the “self-made man”, and so any help is discounted. (Famously, a $1M family loan in 1975 (4.8M in 2019 dollars) was described as “small”.) Not coincidentally, these is a strong correlation with ascribing their success to a meritocracy, even though luck has been repeatedly shown more influential factor in success.[0] [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/40510522/meritocracy-doesnt-exist-and-believing-it-does-is-bad-for-you https://www.fastcompany.com/40510522/meritocracy-doesnt-exis...
- huffmsa 7y ago
  It's romanticized because the majority of Americans had someone in their family throw caution to the wind and get on a boat and cross the Atlantic with zero knowledge of what was going to happen.
  - misterbishop 7y ago
    many slaves.
  - village-idiot 7y ago
    That seems pretty silly to me. My family has such stories, from the 1860s. Why should I lionize the self-madeness of someone from almost 200 years ago and pretend that the same social factors are at work?
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Well, that was at a time when those places where at war, famine, turmoil, and the US economy was rising. Easy to "throw caution to the wind" when all you have is some small plot of land struck by drought.
    - huffmsa 7y ago
      Even easier when you know you can go back to whatever job you're currently doing if your entrepreneurial idea doesn't pan out.
pfortuny 7y ago
You are totally on spot. Survivorship bias is the ban of any honest discussion on this.
bubblewrap 7y ago
Class may also mean you have no examples of entrepreneurship in your environment. I don't think PG claimed that poor people are as likely as rich people to become successful founders. That's not the same thing. He says you don't have to be rich to succeed.
- zepto 7y ago
  Sure but he’s making a category error, and it’s so obvious as to be irresponsible coming from a person in his position. All it takes is one person who succeeds who is not defined as rich for his statement to be technically true, even if every other poor founder fails and dies in poverty.
  - bubblewrap 7y ago
    What do you mean by category error? All he says is that poor people can succeed at startups, too. How is that making a category error?
    - zepto 7y ago
      It’s not all he said. He also included his anecdote about the AirBnB founders. It’s a category error in that his statement is a binary one i.e. true/false, which he is using to defeat arguments which are about continua. That is a category error. It’s also a common method of deceptive persuasion - i.e. a dark pattern, but I don’t think PG was doing that on purpose, hence my assumption that it was an error.
      - bubblewrap 7y ago
        You mean the issue is that the AirBnB founders were not really poor, and the category error is using them as an example for "poor"? And isn't he just providing one example, it seems too much nitpicking to me to then go on claim he made a categorcial assumption based on an example of one? Maybe the AirBnB founders were comparatively poor. You can always find somebody poorer, and even too poor to do a startup. Like if you have no money, no arms, can't talk, you may be so poor that doing a startup might become difficult. Yeah - OK. Poverty that makes it impossible to do a startup does exist. Doesn't mean that most people couldn't do a startup.
buro9 7y ago
> class may be a more powerful organizing discourse Yes! Yes! Yes! Other things contribute to class, but it remains a class issue. I'm reminded of this: "If your feminism isn’t intersectional, it isn't feminism.". We need something similar for those who think the issue is one-dimensional - "the poor". Because why someone is poor, and what conditions and circumstances result from being poor... poverty (which includes the psychological impact of being poor)... deeply affect the individuals affected, and some of those factors have wider societal causes (racism, homophobia, xenophobia, perceived sex, sexual identity, etc).
- KaiserPro 7y ago
  In the US, Class is a pretty good proxy to wealth, far more than say the UK.
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    I'd say class in the US is solely based on your wealth, whereas int he UK it's based on your heritage/background. There isn't much of an aristocracy in the US.
- ad_hominem 7y ago
  It's okay to call yourself a feminist if you're not okay with biological males demolishing female sports records. It's okay to not go down the infinite intersectional/deconstructionist rabbithole to the point where it's normative for 8-year-olds to dress in drag and do sexually suggestive stripteases while men throw money. It's okay to retain your common sense.
michaelmcmillan 7y ago
In which direction is causality flowing here, and how do you justify it? We didn't choose our brains––so how do we differentiate the privilege we got from our "class" from the traits we were born with? Does privilege imply that you got it from your "class"? This seems like a classic nature/nurture fallacy.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >In which direction is causality flowing here, and how do you justify it? We didn't choose our brains No, but our privileged parents did contribute to them, and their our upbringing, early months, lack of childhood stress over things as food and war, familial support, good schools, and so on. Brains is hardly the best contributor to entrepreneurial success. In fact a plot of IQ vs success I've seen plotted looked like random noise except below a certain threshold (obviously seriously cognitive impaired people will have much more trouble becoming entrepreneurs). But aside from that, whether you are 105 or 120 or 150 didn't seem to make much of a difference.
  - michaelmcmillan 7y ago
    Induction gets you nowhere though: where did our privileged parents get their brains from? You're proving my point here: we inherit roughly 50% of our traits through our parent's genes. I never claimed IQ was the best measure (surprised it looked like random noise though), but certainly our cognitive traits matter. So to my question: How do you distinguish that privilege from the privilege you got from your "class"? Edit: Sorry if I came across snarky here, I appreciate your answer!
    - todd8 7y ago
      Where do the other 50% of our genes come from?
      - bluGill 7y ago
        You get 50% of your parents genes, the other 50% isn't passed on to you at all. They might be passed on to your siblings.
coldtea 7y ago
>I'm shaking my head right now because I can't believe people at the top is still susceptible to sampling/survivorship bias. Why the disbelief? They are the one who are primed to be the most susceptible to that!
Miner49er 7y ago
There are studies that show that welfare increases entrepreneurship. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/welfare-makes-america-more-entrepreneurial/388598/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/welfare... So providing more people with safety nets increases entrepreneurship. Having a strong safety net is a form of privilege.
bubblewrap 7y ago
If you take the word of some gender studies person over his, OK... So fine, don't do a startup. Take up gender studies instead.

KaiserPro 7y ago

The only data I can get is this: https://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/education-and-tech-entrepreneurship https://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/educati... 93% had a degree, with 30% having a masters, That would suggest to me that you'd need a decent wedge of cash. Now, what is interesting, is that in 2016 at least, the US created gross 960k new companies (there is some smoothing here, so +- 100k) The UK created 460k. Seeing as how the UK is 60 million, versus 300 million people, either the US is under performing, or the UK is wildly over performing. (https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/2018-Small-Business-Profiles-US.pdf https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/2018-Small-... and https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06152/SN06152.pdf https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06... for stats) Perhaps, as we don't have to worry about healthcare or no competes, that might be a factor.

rahimnathwani 7y ago
Registering a company in the UK, and keeping it running, is both simpler and cheaper than in the US. Registering a company takes a few minutes and costs less than $30. Compulsory annual filing costs less than $20. If your company's revenue is below some threshold, you don't need to register for VAT (similar to sales tax). And there's another (even higher) threshold below which you can file very simple annual accounts (unaudited, and including neither income statements nor cash flow).
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Agreed, I founded a UK company on a whim one day so I can bill for some freelancing work. It made a few thousand a year and everything was hassle-free, basically "pay $50/yr and file some stuff that tells us you're active, and when you get large enough to afford a good accountant they'll take care of it".
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Based on those differences I'd wager that a lot more people in the UK would register their side gigs whereas in the US the trade-offs are rarely worth it unless you intend to make it a "legitimate business" at some point.
- brianwawok 7y ago
  Eh, in my state in the US it is like $85 every 2 years for a LLC and essentially no paperwork if a simple pass-thru. Not everyone needs a Delaware C-Corp from day 1.
  - Reedx 7y ago
    Nice. That's a lot simpler than CA. Here there's paperwork, more complicated taxes and $800/yr for a single-member LLC.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  That's about the process in Texas. Incorporating is a different story, but you don't have to incorporate to register a business (and it's probably a waste of money if you are the sole owner with no employees).
  - rahimnathwani 7y ago
    Does the simpler option provide limited liability?
pjc50 7y ago
The UK also makes company formation very easy and still slightly advantageous for sole traders, which may be a factor. I did check the criteria and they do include "must be listed for VAT or PAYE", so they're all real businesses to some extent and not just shells. The US would do well to look at its business licensing requirements to see if they could be simplified in terms of paperwork.
- lurcio 7y ago
  It's also cheap and trivial to form a UK company with bank account - no matter whether UK citizen/resident or not.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Filing for a company was trivial when I did it, but not many banks would give it an account (NatWest/Barclays/etc wouldn't). Has this changed?
    - lol768 7y ago
      There are quite a few non-legacy bank accounts that you can apply for a company account with in a very painless manner. Monzo, Starling and Tide spring to mind. I use Monzo as part of their business banking trial, but I previously have used Tide and (unfortunately) RBS.
    - jdietrich 7y ago
      Most company formation agents offer a free "bank introduction service". I have no idea how the logistics work, but I was able to open an account with Santander in a matter of minutes.
- mikhailfranco 7y ago
  The smaller businesses can file with a flat-rate VAT (not itemized) which often means 5-10% tax benefit. The UK also has universal free healthcare for residents, so no need for private insurance when you leave an employer and set-up on your own.
sfifs 7y ago
Interestingly, only a quarter of the businesses are employers in UK, so most of the company creation is presumably basically city of London financial engineering :-)
- sheeshkebab 7y ago
  what's with justifying an existence of a company by having employees? If a company is profitable and you as an owner are doing well financially, does it really matter?
  - DreamSpinner 7y ago
    I believe the general thought is that at a very simple level, operating as a company provides for a number of protections for the owners/operators. At a societal level, the broad justification for allowing unnatural beings with those benefits is that it still provides a net benefit to society through things like employment opportunities, taxes and the encouragement of economic activity. If the concept of a company no longer provides any non-trivial benefit to society (for example, no jobs or taxes), why should society collectively provide laws that allow them in the first place?
  - KaiserPro 7y ago
    Shell companies are not the same as a person working as a "one man band" For example a company I worked for had a structure where the employees and customers (~250 employees and £50million turnover) were mostly interacting with the named company, but there were three other companies that "onion skinned" the company with the name. This was done to manage debt, primarily, which then allowed manipulation of taxes.
  - michaelt 7y ago
    For reasons outside my area of expertise, UK companies sometimes divide themselves into numerous sub-companies. This produces the result that publicly traded company Tesco PLC has a great many sub-companies [1]. This is at odds with a lot of expectations about how companies are counted. [1] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/officers/uZl4-qVGUWaBK3JdZy4zFMkg0Vw/appointments https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/officers/uZl4-qVGUWaBK3Jd...
bko 7y ago
Why do you need "a decent wedge of cash" to have a degree? There are plenty of universities that are affordable. For instance, City University of New York (CUNY) offers four year undergrad degrees for $6,730 a year [0]. You can get a room share in an outer borough for maybe 500 - 1.5k a month or Jersey for even less [1]. And this is one of the most expensive cities in the world. If you're smart, avoid unnecessary expenses, you can probably get by on 20k a year in expenses, which comes out to 26 hours a week at $15/hr, ignoring taxes. Taxes at about 15% at that low income means you'll probably want to earn closer to 25k to have 20k net which means 31 hours a week. But realistically you'll probably want to work full time or over time during the months school is not in session and closer to 20 hours a week at other times. Or try to find a job that pays more. Don't know much about health insurance so that's also something you'll have to consider getting maybe through the school or some city program or just go without it. Or just move to a more affordable city and probably cut everything above in half while hopefully only giving up a bit of the wage you'll earn [0] https://www2.cuny.edu/financial-aid/tuition-and-college-costs/tuition-fees/#1452179204200-d27abe14-99f4 https://www2.cuny.edu/financial-aid/tuition-and-college-cost... [1] https://newyork.craigslist.org/d/rooms-shares/search/roo https://newyork.craigslist.org/d/rooms-shares/search/roo
- KaiserPro 7y ago
  So, working a four day week, and studying full time to do a degree. Yes, I can see that allowing lots of time to form a network and come up with business ideas.
  - bko 7y ago
    I was replying to the specific claim that getting a degree requires a lot of money.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      Undergrad programs are what, 3 to 4 years. That means enough money to replace 30 hour per week job for four years. With uncertain healthcare status. That is a lot of money. Over here studies are basically free, about 100 EUR incl. public transport per semester. And even then working full-time to be able to finance all of that is hard.
ekianjo 7y ago
Suggesting one variable explains such differences is incredibly reductive. Plus, The US is not a single country, there is federalism and you should treat all states differently since setting up a business in NY is supposedly a lot harder than in other states.
- KaiserPro 7y ago
  Indeed, and lots of companies have shells in Delaware. Because its lower taxes & "better" company law.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    > Because its lower taxes Lower taxes is irrelevant unless all your operations are in Delaware. It's a great trick for IP holding "companies" that are just a couple lawyers in Wilmington, but otherwise you are paying taxes to whatever states you actually generate revenue in anyway.
luckylion 7y ago
The UK used to (?) be a haven for Ltd creation because of low costs, low bureaucracy and quick reactions. It's what lead to Germany's laws regarding UGs (Unternehmergesellschaft, literally entrepreneur company), much more comparable to the Ltd regarding easier access, much lower startup costs than the typical GmbH. It will be interesting to see where these numbers move post-brexit.

jonathankoren 7y ago

Why is it surprising? There’s a combination of blindness, and inflated sense of self worth. America romanticizes the “self-made man”, and so any help is discounted. (Famously, a $1M family loan in 1975 (4.8M in 2019 dollars) was described as “small”.) Not coincidentally, these is a strong correlation with ascribing their success to a meritocracy, even though luck has been repeatedly shown more influential factor in success.[0] [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/40510522/meritocracy-doesnt-exist-and-believing-it-does-is-bad-for-you https://www.fastcompany.com/40510522/meritocracy-doesnt-exis...

huffmsa 7y ago
It's romanticized because the majority of Americans had someone in their family throw caution to the wind and get on a boat and cross the Atlantic with zero knowledge of what was going to happen.
- misterbishop 7y ago
  many slaves.
- village-idiot 7y ago
  That seems pretty silly to me. My family has such stories, from the 1860s. Why should I lionize the self-madeness of someone from almost 200 years ago and pretend that the same social factors are at work?
- coldtea 7y ago
  Well, that was at a time when those places where at war, famine, turmoil, and the US economy was rising. Easy to "throw caution to the wind" when all you have is some small plot of land struck by drought.
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    Even easier when you know you can go back to whatever job you're currently doing if your entrepreneurial idea doesn't pan out.

pfortuny 7y ago

You are totally on spot. Survivorship bias is the ban of any honest discussion on this.

bubblewrap 7y ago

Class may also mean you have no examples of entrepreneurship in your environment. I don't think PG claimed that poor people are as likely as rich people to become successful founders. That's not the same thing. He says you don't have to be rich to succeed.

zepto 7y ago
Sure but he’s making a category error, and it’s so obvious as to be irresponsible coming from a person in his position. All it takes is one person who succeeds who is not defined as rich for his statement to be technically true, even if every other poor founder fails and dies in poverty.
- bubblewrap 7y ago
  What do you mean by category error? All he says is that poor people can succeed at startups, too. How is that making a category error?
  - zepto 7y ago
    It’s not all he said. He also included his anecdote about the AirBnB founders. It’s a category error in that his statement is a binary one i.e. true/false, which he is using to defeat arguments which are about continua. That is a category error. It’s also a common method of deceptive persuasion - i.e. a dark pattern, but I don’t think PG was doing that on purpose, hence my assumption that it was an error.
    - bubblewrap 7y ago
      You mean the issue is that the AirBnB founders were not really poor, and the category error is using them as an example for "poor"? And isn't he just providing one example, it seems too much nitpicking to me to then go on claim he made a categorcial assumption based on an example of one? Maybe the AirBnB founders were comparatively poor. You can always find somebody poorer, and even too poor to do a startup. Like if you have no money, no arms, can't talk, you may be so poor that doing a startup might become difficult. Yeah - OK. Poverty that makes it impossible to do a startup does exist. Doesn't mean that most people couldn't do a startup.

buro9 7y ago

> class may be a more powerful organizing discourse Yes! Yes! Yes! Other things contribute to class, but it remains a class issue. I'm reminded of this: "If your feminism isn’t intersectional, it isn't feminism.". We need something similar for those who think the issue is one-dimensional - "the poor". Because why someone is poor, and what conditions and circumstances result from being poor... poverty (which includes the psychological impact of being poor)... deeply affect the individuals affected, and some of those factors have wider societal causes (racism, homophobia, xenophobia, perceived sex, sexual identity, etc).

KaiserPro 7y ago
In the US, Class is a pretty good proxy to wealth, far more than say the UK.
- sangnoir 7y ago
  I'd say class in the US is solely based on your wealth, whereas int he UK it's based on your heritage/background. There isn't much of an aristocracy in the US.
ad_hominem 7y ago
It's okay to call yourself a feminist if you're not okay with biological males demolishing female sports records. It's okay to not go down the infinite intersectional/deconstructionist rabbithole to the point where it's normative for 8-year-olds to dress in drag and do sexually suggestive stripteases while men throw money. It's okay to retain your common sense.

michaelmcmillan 7y ago

In which direction is causality flowing here, and how do you justify it? We didn't choose our brains––so how do we differentiate the privilege we got from our "class" from the traits we were born with? Does privilege imply that you got it from your "class"? This seems like a classic nature/nurture fallacy.

coldtea 7y ago
>In which direction is causality flowing here, and how do you justify it? We didn't choose our brains No, but our privileged parents did contribute to them, and their our upbringing, early months, lack of childhood stress over things as food and war, familial support, good schools, and so on. Brains is hardly the best contributor to entrepreneurial success. In fact a plot of IQ vs success I've seen plotted looked like random noise except below a certain threshold (obviously seriously cognitive impaired people will have much more trouble becoming entrepreneurs). But aside from that, whether you are 105 or 120 or 150 didn't seem to make much of a difference.
- michaelmcmillan 7y ago
  Induction gets you nowhere though: where did our privileged parents get their brains from? You're proving my point here: we inherit roughly 50% of our traits through our parent's genes. I never claimed IQ was the best measure (surprised it looked like random noise though), but certainly our cognitive traits matter. So to my question: How do you distinguish that privilege from the privilege you got from your "class"? Edit: Sorry if I came across snarky here, I appreciate your answer!
  - todd8 7y ago
    Where do the other 50% of our genes come from?
    - bluGill 7y ago
      You get 50% of your parents genes, the other 50% isn't passed on to you at all. They might be passed on to your siblings.

coldtea 7y ago

>I'm shaking my head right now because I can't believe people at the top is still susceptible to sampling/survivorship bias. Why the disbelief? They are the one who are primed to be the most susceptible to that!

Miner49er 7y ago

There are studies that show that welfare increases entrepreneurship. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/welfare-makes-america-more-entrepreneurial/388598/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/welfare... So providing more people with safety nets increases entrepreneurship. Having a strong safety net is a form of privilege.

bubblewrap 7y ago

If you take the word of some gender studies person over his, OK... So fine, don't do a startup. Take up gender studies instead.