Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

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We disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between "entrepreneurs" and other business owners. We show that the incorporated self-employed and their businesses engage in activities that demand comparatively strong nonroutine cognitive abilities, while the unincorporated and their firms perform tasks demanding relatively strong manual skills. The incorporated selfemployed have distinct cognitive and noncognitive traits. Besides tending to be white, male, and come from higher-income families, the incorporated—as teenagers—typically scored higher on learning aptitude tests, had greater self-esteem, and engaged in more disruptive, illicit activities. The combination of "smart" and "illicit" tendencies as youths accounts for both entry into entrepreneurship and the comparative earnings of entrepreneurs. In contrast to past research, we find that entrepreneurs earn more per hour and work more hours than their salaried and unincorporated counterparts.

So, basically, if you start a local landscaping business, you don't count for purposes of being "an entrepreneur" in their eyes.

That's exactly my point. It's not some kind of rebuttal of my point.

They're following a long line starting with Schumpeter (of "creative destruction" fame).

The reason for this distinction is that if you only divide the population into other-employed and self-employed, they have similar profiles in almost every way, except that the self-employed earn less. That doesn't square with the theory that entrepreneurs are somehow different from the general population -- smarter, more charming, whatever it might be.

They use data to show that the population of unincorporated and incorporated businesses closely tracks two groups in the underlying population of job titles, those which are more manual and those which are less. They also note that business types rarely change, so what you start with is usually what you wind up with.

When you make that distinction, the paradox of entrepreneurship disappears. The populations have distinct characteristics.

If you want entrepreneurs to include folks with small businesses (fine by me, regular small business is much harder than being handed millions of dollars by a VC) then the conflict with Schumpeter's notion reappears. If you go with the narrower definition, this paper has useful contributions.

An argument over the exact scope of "entrepreneur" as a word doesn't really change the shape of the data.

It boils down to "Them that has, gets." which is hardly groundbreaking news.

All this does is very, very politely tell us in extremely PC terms what we already know: Rich white people have more opportunities in the US than people outside that group.

I'm interested in figuring out how we break down some of those barriers. I'm a woman. I've been on HN a decade. Virtual hobnobbing with all the right people has so far failed to open any doors for me. As best I can tell, my gender has played a large role in that.

My efforts to understand that, resolve that, or even just discuss it tend to be met with open hostility.

So color me unimpressed with this extremely PC way of saying "The Old Boy's Club is alive and well. No girls or brown people are really welcome."

I live with that reality every single day.

It's common in science to research an "obvious" thing, because sometimes it leads to nonobvious results. The Michelson-Morley experiment is probably the most famous example.

Your experiences are upheld by the literature that I've seen (eg [0]). I don't think anyone intends to reinforce the current state of the world by studying it closely, quite the contrary.

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2846047

It's common in science to research an "obvious" thing, because sometimes it leads to nonobvious results.

Yes, I'm aware.

I don't think anyone intends to reinforce the current state of the world by studying it closely, quite the contrary.

And yet you and other people here are all too happy to dismiss small businesses as not really entrepreneurs in part because of how this article chose to define a word for which there is no generally agreed upon definition.

Entrepreneurship Definitions

Economists have never had a consistent definition of "entrepreneur" or "entrepreneurship"

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/entrepreneur.asp

So, I don't count because I'm poor. I will never count because it's circular reasoning that will help to continue to exclude me (and others like me).

I'm getting downright aggravated at this point. This article seems to be doing a very handy job of gatekeeping and reinforcing the current status quo.

Then I'm sorry for my part in it. Let's stop here.

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