Founders I know (including myself): - One worked years on the side to grow it enough just to get seed. With newborn kids, then quit his CompSci job to live off his teachers wife salary for years. - One was on foodstamps for 6 years, and kids on medicaid to pull his shop through - One saved for years, and spent most of his money to get through the rough spots and is coming out the other side just now. - One failed 4 times - each attempt taking a few years, entered bankruptcy to try on a 5th attempt. - One lived at poverty means for years with a family while bootstrapping.
So.... there is a lot of "entrepreneurship is easy pr0n" as viewed from Silicon Valley. But if you're rich - it's easier to just sit back and be rich. So only a small group do. The rest of us are just trying to create something with little resources in the rest of the country/world.
>> No access to credit, no chance of getting in front of a VC firm to pitch, etc.
You're looking at this from a startup perspective I presume. You're ignoring the many plumbers, electricians, corner shop owners and other small business owners. Very few of these people were rich before starting their businesses. In the online world you can do similar things through e-commerce, small SaaS businesses etc. You can work on these in your spare time until they start to generate income + they have little to no startup costs.
Even electricians and the like have a very difficult time getting beyond self-employed with an assistant and maybe a partner who helps part-time with billing and scheduling. That leap to getting a second employee who can work independently in the field is a big one. Why is that person working for you rather than themselves? A good portion of the time, the answer to that question is that they are related to the owner in some way.
One of the main take aways from Feriss' book was that he achieved the 4-hour work week by continuing to delegate more and more responsibility to the people working for his business.
This reflects my experience.
Co-founded a company, and we did OK for a while. At some point, we made a mistake that killed us.
I think I learned from that mistake, but have not had the opportunity to try again - the first lesson cost my savings to that point.
> The majority of people don't really care if the Harvard or Stanford kid had to put in 80+ hour weeks
They don't care about people busting ass for no reward and mostly downside, why should they care about someone doing it for much better odds?
I'm someone that's not from a privileged background, and I did not attend a prestigious university, but I sure do respect the time of anyone as much as I respect mine.
Sadly, it seems to me that it boils down to that quote from WarGames - the only winning move is not to play.
If we come to a point where the average person cannot afford a modest living (which we are pretty much on the brink of) then it doesn't matter what's logical or not. People are going to get upset and inevitably start breaking things.
the concept of a modest living is a forever changing goal-post, because people compare themselves with others.
What is modest today, is rich 100 yrs ago, and like a king 1000 years ago!
How is that even remotely similar to a modern modest living? Can we stop with this bullshit narrative?
But would you rather live as a king a few thousand years ago, or live as an average person of modest living today?
That you don't, is a sign of you being a 1%er like most people here. (And even here, I am sure many people would choose having thousands of people doing their bidding to the creature comforts of modern automation or medicine.)
Discrimination isn't by itself a problem, per se.
Discrimination combined with disempowerment/disenfranchisement/subservience, that is a problem.
I direct absolutely zero sympathy toward the Princeton grad who was born on third but thinks they hit a triple. Those are people who already hold much of the power in society, while simultaneously having no true understanding of what it's like to not be born into a life of privilege.
And those are the people this article is about: the privileged few who push the mostly false narrative that the rest of us can claw and scrape and eventually achieve the life they were simply given through birthright.
> Why should I belittle the hard work of a person that was fortunate enough to attend a prestigious university that gave them certain privileges? What is that majority trying to achieve? A world where that hypothetical person would stop trying?
A world in which everyone has approximately the same basic set of opportunities irrespective of the circumstances they were born in. A world in which hard work and individual achievement are, in fact, the primary determinant of success. In short: the very world these hucksters want us to believe exists today but doesn't.
Is that actually possible in the end? No. Inequality will always exist to some extent. But we can sure get a lot closer than the plutocratic disaster that we have today.
Heck, just raising the federal minimum wage in the US would go a long way. But when more than half of congress are millionaires (https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/04/majority-of-lawmake...) it's no great wonder that they have little sympathy, empathy, or just basic understanding of the rest of us and the lives we lead.
What people call 'equality warriors' I call bloodshed preventers.
Seems prudent to support, even if you are born on level 50. The current system endures as long as most people feel like they still have more to gain playing by the rules.
If a critical mass of sufficiently capable people conclude that the game is rigged against them and they have exhausted their options to change it from within then attempting a hard reboot of all levels using pitchforks and guillotines starts to seem pretty rational.
Not sure how far we are from hitting that critical mass, but it would be nice not to find out.
Human needs are infinite. Every solved problem creates a new class of problems that you can solve.
And that’s ignoring the many bad solutions we already live with that are ripe for replacement.
Of course they aren't. Once the central bank hits the 2% inflation goal it is just a matter of time until there are enough opportunities for everyone.
Look at the most valuable companies today, and look 30 years ago.
There are numerous studies that show that income volatility at the top and at the bottom are very pronounced in US vs Europe and other developed countries.
More importantly, about 50% of people in the US will be in the top 10% of income, at least 1 year of their lives.
This goes against the tenet that the system is "rigged" or at least, it far less rigged here than in the rest of the world.
Alas, while you might want to believe the American Dream is alive and well, it's very much on life support. For example, the World Economic Forum ranked the US 27th in social mobility:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...
What I do know is income mobility since that's a hard number, and hard to manufacture.
And in that respect, citizens of the US are far better than the rest of the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/from-rags-...
You'll find in the article I provided that it offers the following definition:
Social mobility refers to the movement of individuals either up or down the socioeconomic ladder relative to their current standing, such as a low-income family moving up to become a part of the middle class.
Countries with high levels of social mobility exhibit lower levels of income inequality and provide more equally shared opportunities for its citizens across each of the five pillars.
This is, of course, precisely what we're discussing here.
For example, regarding Denmark, it notes:
Denmark holds the title for the most socially mobile country in the world, boasting an index score of 85.2. If a person is born into a low-income family in Denmark, the WEF estimates it would take two generations to reach a median income. In contrast, someone in Brazil or South Africa would take nine generations at the current pace of growth.
> And in that respect, citizens of the US are far better than the rest of the world.
The opinion piece you've cited makes absolutely no claims about how the US compares to other nations, and therefore does not support your claims.
It's of course a fascinating analysis. But it does not even broach the question of whether "citizens of the US are far better" off than those in other countries.
Europe has the very worst wealth (not income) inequality on the planet, but you won’t hear a peep about that.
Do you have information which contradicts the WEF analysis?
Sometimes I like to think what a world would look like - geopolitically and economically if we didn't have newspapers, the internet, or any other means of communication. Would our world be a more balanced place? Would it balance itself out in the end?
Like unpaid internships. This practice can shut off entire industries from people who do not have parents who can support them in expensive cities well through their 20s.
There are problems with this. Chances aren't always given out on merit, a fact that is a detriment to society. The other issue is what this article talks about: People selling a pipe dream.
Raising money gives them a shot at entrepreneurship by shifting the financial risk onto someone who can afford it.
When they’re successful, most startups tend to create a lot of good jobs. When they’re not, some rich folks lose some money.
This is all fine and good, and is one of the few parts of our economy that arguably works pretty well. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but pretty good.
I look at it like a baseball game. Most of us are stuck being spectators. We're perpetual employees, living paycheck to paycheck (the lucky ones saving a little) but we will never get to play in the major league. A few people are MLB players. They can afford to get one, maybe two at-bats during the game. If they miss, they're done. If they hit, they're heroes.
Then, you have the extremely lucky few who get infinite at-bats, due to being born into wealth. They swing, miss, fallback on their family, swing, miss, fall back, and so on until they finally swing, get a home run, then spend the rest of their life writing books about how to be talented at baseball.
Most people have zero shots, or at best one, in them until they have to get back to paying their bills - and get stuck in the rat race forever. No access to credit, no chance of getting in front of a VC firm to pitch, etc.
The majority of people don't really care if the Harvard or Stanford kid had to put in 80+ hour weeks to build his or hers business. However hard that is to pull off, people won't respect it because it's just privilege asserting itself most of the time.