The Myth of an Ever-Expanding Entrepreneurial Youth | Hacker News Reader

The Myth of an Ever-Expanding Entrepreneurial Youth

boss.blogs.nytimes.com

30 pointsphyscab11 comments

It's probably just that now it's fashionable for most entrepreneurs -- especially younger ones -- to be more vocal about their business in a wider forum than the local newspaper.

Well, a lot of new business ventures being web-based helps too; since -- being web-based -- they have to advertise to a wider audience as well.

True. Also, they're more likely to want to start online businesses. Which they'll talk about -- online.

What incoming college freshmen consider important parts of their future lives isn't a good metric of anything useful. The percentage of freshman who want to be doctors doesn't say much about the current or future number of med-school applications, but rather it says being a doctor is culturally idealized and popular at the moment.

I've noticed that there's a class of people who enter college looking to major in whatever they see as the most lucrative field. In years past, they've targeted pre-med, pre-law, pre-business-school, computer science in the 90s, and econ/banking in the 2000s. Now that we always hear about tech entrepreneurs being worth big bucks, that's suddenly the "major-of-the-month", soon to be displaced by something else when another field explodes into the public conscious or when we get Bubble 2.0.

I'm curious whether or not younger entrepreneurs are increasingly more successful now than they have been in the past given that business isn't as restricted to being local, the growth in resources/technology that levels the playing field and falling costs.

Perhaps in 1984 more students had a desire to be entrepreneurs, but it seems that in 2008 more students could actually be entrepreneurs.

First year college students in 1984 might have thought that they'd like to own their own business, but I suspect that once senior year rolled around, they realized "oh crap, this is really hard" and gave up on the idea. The reality of "we need millions in investments and loans to build our widget and hire staff and stuff" hit, and they bailed.

By contrast, in today's world, the cost to entry is lower for most entrepreneurs in most fields, a higher proportion of people who would like to own businesses can actually follow through on giving it a shot. It's easier to prototype things, and it's easier to be a part-time entrepreneur, and the entry costs are measured in thousands, not millions.

fourth degree polynomial? Is this guy on crack!

Looks periodic to me, otherwise the function is really low < 1950 and really high > 2020. Excessively so.

Goes to show that a scholar of Entrepreneurship studies is either a dolt, or wasting our time.

He isn't using it to predict far outside the data, for which a polynomial will capture the important trends. 2013 is pretty close to the data, and to 4th order, it does match a sinusoid. So, I'd say it's your fault for trying to apply his predictions outside of the bounds that he did both implicitly (the graph) and explicitly (the 2013 quote).

There's no need to be angry just because he didn't do it the way you would have.

But can you really just use curve-fitting to extrapolate, without any theory of why the data should follow a curve? Would the data follow the same curve if you had 100 years of data? 200?

It seems to be the sort of mindless numerology that social science types seems to think makes them "scientific"; business and management are to social science what engineering is to physics.

I would argue that using 20+ years of data to extrapolate a mere 3-4 years in the future is perfectly acceptable. His coefficient of determination is quite high so I'm pretty comfortable using that model. Of course you have to be cautious when making predictions with any cyclical data, but I believe his methods are adequate.

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