It's not that obvious if it's good for the poor person. I guess that everybody has their own risk aversion threshold.
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?
Their choices, consequences, and access to information are vastly different.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Additionally, founders who already come from wealth or have political connections, etc., are probably much more likely to succees in the financial senses that PG wants.
The only limited sense in which it’s good for PG is if there is a lottery winner he can claim credit for, a rags-to-riches story to whip up blind support for some ludicrous tech millionaire idealism.
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.