My argument is the flip side of (and generalization of) the usual claim that poor people are discouraged to try anything entrepeneurial.

Another competing claim could be that rich people are honestly less competent than poor people. I could easily argue against that one; IQ and conscientiousness are highly positively correlated with income, based on numerous sociological studies. People who dispute this fact have an agenda.

Being poor is what made me an entrepreneur! When you have nothing to lose, then there's little risk in rolling those dice.

For example, I and many of my colleagues are battling large amounts of student loan debt; if we were truly starting from 0 and had absolutely nothing, pursuing entrepreneurship would be at worst 0 gain and wasted time, but at best a successful endeavor.

Realistically, however, many of the young and poor are starting from a disadvantaged state where in reality, taking a large risk is dissuaded by the risk of defaulting on student loan payments or shredded credit scores.

What I'm getting at is, many people would love to be truly poor rather than in the pit, and being in the pit brings a lot more risk to the average person (who otherwise might have the drive or skills to really make something worthwhile)

I'm not sure that I understand the distinction you're making here. Yes, one path to being poor is losing what you have. But in the end, such people are just as poor as those who never had anything in the first place. They both have nothing (more) to lose.

> many of the young and poor are starting from a disadvantaged state where in reality, taking a large risk is dissuaded by the risk of defaulting on student loan payments or shredded credit scores.

Most poor people are living in a trap of debt -- that tends to go hand-in-hand with being poor, as is having shredded credit scores.

It's very hard to find a poor person who isn't saddled with debt, whether they have student loans or not. Being poor is very expensive, after all.

That said, I don't think a person's monetary wealth can be measured by their income alone. It has to be measured in net terms: assets (including income) minus overhead and debts owed. A lot of people who consider themselves wealthy are actually poor and living on borrowed (i.e., somebody else's) wealth.

I wouldn't say I was ever discouraged from entrepreneurship, even at my lowest. But it did make the math a hell of a lot harder. When you're poor, there's always something more you can lose. Choosing between investing in your business or what you eat that week is a difficult decision.

What I would say is that those circumstances give you the motivation to find the clever, efficient solutions, and to make wiser, less risk-adverse decisions. I never wanted a startup that burned money just to get acquired. I wanted one that could make me real money from the very beginning.

Being poor raises the bar on the quality of the business you intend to create, because failure is worse for you than anyone else.

I agree!

Although many years back my preferred business model became developing a business so that I can sell it whole-hog to somebody else, that has never meant that I was OK with burning money (or even using other people's money in the first place).

Coming from a place of poverty is probably why I am extremely reluctant to actually go into debt for a business. My preferred method is to live lean and bootstrap up.

Before I consider selling a business, I want it to be a real, profitable business that is standing on its own. If it's not that, then I don't have anything to sell.

I believe it remains to be shown that "competence" is also correlated with income.

IQ measures the ability to perform abstract reasoning tasks successfully. Conscientiousness measures the willingness and desire to perform one's duties well. Additionally, among people that earned their wealth, the fact that they are wealthy demonstrates that they achieved their goal of becoming wealthy. These all indicate competence to me. Wealth, in general, can also be imagined as a state where one's needs are met, which is (for people that earned their wealth) almost always closely related to having achieved certain goals.

I would have a hard time imagining an argument that rejects these claims and also demonstrates that wealth and competence do not correlate positively.

Bear in mind that this is talking about populations as a whole- correlations are something we can tease out via sociological studies, and experiments are few and far between. There are facts about human nature that we will never prove conclusively, but to be an effective agent in the world, you should try to learn things about people that cannot be proven. Being too afraid to generalize the wealthy as competent causes yourself to miss an personal actionable moral lesson about goal-oriented behavior. It is entirely possible to make this judgement, and learn from it, without demonizing the poor as incometent or subhuman.

The line of reasoning makes sense. My only doubt comes from my own personal observations: I've never personally noticed a correlation between income and IQ.

It's hard to say -- I'm basing this on my lifetime experience. Across that time span, the bulk of the people I knew have ranged (at various times) from "dirt poor" to "the 1%".

Memory can be a tricky thing, of course, and I'm naturally speaking subjectively (and therefore not with statistical significance), but I never noticed a smaller percentage of high IQ people in the dirt poor group, nor a greater percentage in the wealthy group.

The breakdown has always seems pretty constant across socioeconomic levels to me.

But it also depends on what you count as "intelligence". I have noticed that the higher you get on the socioeconomic ladder, the more "socially intelligent" people tend to be. But specifying IQ as a measuring stick excludes most of the other forms of intelligence, including social intelligence.

They are? Do you have studies indicating this?

The scatter plots show a correlations strong enough that they startled me when I saw them. The higher the IQ, the lower the correlation though.

>Being too afraid to generalize the wealthy as competent causes yourself to miss an personal actionable moral lesson about goal-oriented behavior. It is entirely possible to make this judgement, and learn from it, without demonizing the poor as incometent or subhuman.

I wouldn't call your viewpoint evil, but I'd like you to characterize where I'm arguing from in your own words. Seems like you think I've jumped into the looney bin.

Putting too much emphasis on IQ is a bit distasteful, because people can't change their IQ very much. But conscientiousness is worth advocating for. To me, it seems like the left-leaning opinion is so afraid to make judgements between people's measurable differences that they want to immediately shame people for recognizing those differences.

I wouldn't say "distasteful". I'd say "inaccurate". It's not clear what, exactly, IQ actually measures and it's up for debate if it measures intelligence in any meaningful way.