

The Myth of an Ever-Expanding Entrepreneurial Youth - physcab
http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/the-myth-of-an-ever-expanding-entrepreneurial-youth/?hp

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pyre
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.

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

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ZachPruckowski
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.

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cwan
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.

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

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ZachPruckowski
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.

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mylifeforaiur
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.

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trjordan
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.

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bitslayer
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?

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ABrandt
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.

