There’s a big difference between poor and zero, and a poor person betting on a startup can hit zero really quick.

At zero, you cannot pay rent and are likely to get evicted. Once evicted you are potentially NFA, which means you can’t get a bank card posted to you if you have problems with your card. How can you pay for food? Where can you use the bathroom? What about the electricity bill before you got evicted? The electricity bill that was late and now unpaid that’s ruining your credit score? Now you have bad credit and will find it harder getting a flat.

The above sentences where not chronologically cohesive because there’s so much working against the poor and those at zero, and I’m on mobile, I couldn’t take an hour to type it all out.

How on earth do you expect a poor person to do a startup, when they can barely feed themselves and keep a roof over their head?

Most of immigration happened during high risk dangerous and unstable times. Most immigrants were not bored of super safe and stable life where they came from. They were running away, because original place was dangerous.

Comparing your great grandfather’s situation to a poor person today doesn’t make sense to me.

Their choices, consequences, and access to information are vastly different.

There's less risk today. If your company fails, you're in debt, but you probably won't die in a ditch.

So why not jump feet first into what you want to do? To quote the eminent Shia LeBouf "It's you're life, don't let your dreams be dreams. Just do it"

Its easy to say platitudes from rich people.

When there's little/no social net when you fail, failure is disastrous.

I'm diabetic. I'm nearly chained to a company with a decent medical plan, since our "wonderful" country has little to impetus to fix medicine. So failing means 'not able to go to the doctor and not afford my drugs'.

Failure also means 'not affording rent'.

Failure also means being unemployed, and no way to get unemployment.

So where being a business owner means it could free my way out of poverty, the %success rate for me absolutely must be balanced with the failure rate and the ramifications aforementioned.

Mr LaBeouf comes from a broken home. His father has struggled with drugs and alcohol to self medicate his Vietnam War PTSD. He started performing at age 10, pretended to be his own manager to get signed with an agency. He's exactly the "live without a net" kind of guy we're talking about.

So if we don't struggle like him, and make multiple breaks (read: luck), and get into that career, we don't deserve to have basic needs met?

Rags to riches (read:Horatio Alger) stories should absolutely not be the basis of social assistance. If you want to see what happens to those that don't win, look no further than the "Smoke N Lotto" store at all whom lose the lottery every day.

But also free land, and a reliable market for the goods produced on it.

GP's point of view: A poor person can have a small safety net that separates him from absolute poverty and homelessness. If they start their own business, fail, and end up without enough money to pay for the rent, the consequences could be terrible. They also have a finite time to save enough for a descent retirement. Spending several years on a startup with a high fail rate can dramatically reduce the quality of their old days.

There is opportunity cost (of a stable industry job) that the educated but poor person is foregoing.

Note that by not foregoing that opportunity cost the poor person can save up enough of a safety net for his children to take a risk.

Generations are important. A poor person with a family is best not taking risks. However they can bring up enough of a safety net for their children.

Heathcare that was provided by employer before and house in low crime area, say.

Isn't that oversimplifying the whole social issue of why people are poor, stay poor or become poor?

No. Betting is a reasonable choice when you, like a VC can bet on a ton of options and still have cash left for immediate problems. All other times, betting is playing your luck and bound to fail.

First, I don't want to read to much into the OP regarding betting. Because there is something to it. Without risks no rewards. Yet what constitutes a risk and a reward differ significantly based on your resources.

That being said, risking some of your resources, money, time, whatever, to get out of poverty is reasonable. Betting on a start-up might not be. Simply because if it goes wrong instead of rewards there might be debt and even worse poverty.

>Without risks no rewards.

This is a fallacy. The vast majority of people are rewarded for minimizing risk, not taking it. People justify extra risk for disproportionate reward, not reward in general. You have to take risks if you want relatively unbounded returns. Getting out of poverty does not require that at all.

When you're in poverty, getting out of poverty is about risking, but not in a lottery kind of way you're talking about. It's about risking to get away with not spending the money on some immediate emergency and holding it for some bigger emergency in the future.

> A poor person not betting on anything is bound to stay poor. Your point is?

And the poor know this. And yet, they still have literally everything to lose if they fail. They don't want to be poor, but being poor is better than being with absolutely nothing.

To you it may seem there is little difference between being poor and being financially wiped out. To the person experiencing it, the difference is huge. Among other things, it can mean the difference between struggling to make rent, and not being able to.

Some bets are safer than others. A poor person betting everything had better have a sure bet that will pay off quickly. Not many of these exist.

A poor person is safest betting on a stable (if low paying) job and ensuring he keeps it. Taking on a few side projects on the weekend can earn some extra cash, but there comes a time you either need to bet on growing that side business, or not: if you bet on it you better have enough contacts to grow it to a real job quickly, if not you have to start refusing work for the side job - the worst thing you could do is to fall asleep and get fired from the day job while the side job isn't paying enough to live on.

Not many people care about startup failures, except high profile ones.

Journalists looking to (justifiably or unjustifiably) undermine start-up incubators or VC firms easily could care.

You could just as lazily & dismissively say nobody cares about failed taxi drivers, and yet there it is on the front page of the most popular Western newspaper in the world.

If there’s an angle to make it a story, people will care. The angle to make it a story about how start-up programs are basically scams exploiting lottery biases of people not in a life position to sustain that risk is very easy, straightforward & compelling to a wide audience.

And hence it’s probably bad for PG & others if people without safety nets are going bust on failed start-ups.