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Comment by La1n | Hacker News Reader

>Counter-intuitively, limitations drive innovations. When your resources are limited, you are forced to innovate.

If this was true you'd see people from poor families being more entrepreneurial than those from rich.

What you actually see in America is that most millionaires come from humble beginnings. That doesn’t mean most people from humble beginnings become millionaires. A->B does not equal B->A. Basic logic.

Go talk to the owners of the five nearest local small businesses, ask them how they started, and see how it goes.

Speaking from experience, btw.

That doesn't mean anything though: vastly more millionaires are from usa than from Dubai, it doesn't say anything about any place, you can replace "millionaires" with any category and likely end up with a true statment, USA just has way more people. Those with humble beginnings are most of us, off course* there are going to be more humble-born <$anything> than privileged-born <$anything>, that's just how populations work.

*: in fact, merely being "humble" is still relatively privileged, a vast sea of humans exists where internet and food and clean water are fleeting dreams

Well, as another commented pointed out, there is a difference between innovating and starting companies. So I would argue that you do see more innovation from poor families than rich families. After all, rich families have no need to innovate, they just throw money at problems until they go away. Poor people are financially constrained and have to think outside the box to solve their problems. But you also see more companies started by rich people. Not necessarily innovative companies, mind you, just companies.

> So I would argue that you do see more innovation from poor families than rich families. After all, rich families have no need to innovate, they just throw money at problems until they go away.

This is not something to argue about, this is something that that we should measure.

And how do you measure innovation in poor families? Does jerry-rigging your car to work using duct tape and aluminum cans count?

In the discussion here, I am assuming innovation refers specifically to innovative products and business ideas, not stuff that remains confined to your close family.

Well yeah, you probably aren't going to get a lot of business innovation from the poor, but because they are resource constrained, you'll see innovation in other forms - such as how they adapt to broken cars, appliances, shortage of food, clothing, etc. The rich have no need to come up with novel ways to mend shoes - they just buy a new pair.

Well, this whole thread started from your claim here:

> From what I understand EU has way better social safety nets, yet much smaller entrepreneurship rates compared to USA.

> Counter-intuitively, limitations drive innovations.

It seemed like you were claiming that people with fewer resources may counter-intuitively do more innovative businesses, so providing people with UBI or similar resources could reduce innovation in entrepreneurship.

The inventiveness you need to thrive as a poor person is very different from that, and I don't think losing that kind of inventiveness would be a real loss in our world.

In my travels in Brazil I saw some incredible hustling going on in poor areas.

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