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They're orthogonal.

You can start and business and get downwards social mobility (lose your personal investment in a bussiness which fails).

And inversely, you can get upwards mobility without starting a business (like with a promotion or getting a better job). Or rather, in the last decades, increasingly you can't. But traditionally, that was the way most people saw it. The "company man" going through the ranks, the immigrant who studies and gets a good job, etc. Building a business was always a thing for a minority.

And since most new businesses fail anyway (and in most fields require capital, not to mention connections and lack, plus a specific set of skills like salesmanship and market savvy), "start a business" as a solution to social mobility at large, is a really bad idea.

Starting a succesful business doesn't even necessarily translate to social mobility for others. In fact, it can happen even in a social mobility wise regressing economy. E.g. many people lose better paying jobs, and end up working on the cheap for some uber (pun intended) successful new business.




This is only true if you consider absolute instead of expected value and cherry pick statistical outcomes.

Successful business people start multiple businesses.

Social class and economic class are different. Few successful welders go to the opera.


????? What does any of what you wrote have to do with social mobility statistics? They don’t measure number of businesses or opera attendance when determining movement from bottom quintile of income to top quintile.


You're talking about economic mobility specifically in terms of income. I am not.


>Successful business people start multiple businesses.

Which is irrelevant to the points discussed, no?

Nobody claimed successful business people don't start multiple businesses.

>Social class and economic class are different. Few successful welders go to the opera

Social mobility in the context of this discussion is about getting better jobs and making more money. It's not about becoming an aristocrat or going to the Opera...


> Nobody claimed successful business people don't start multiple businesses.

Yes they did. Statistics were cited about business failure rates, which were one-shot rates.

> Social mobility in the context of this discussion…

Then you are talking about economic mobility, and the data cited in support of arguments about social mobility is a category error.




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