Entrepreneurship as a way out of poverty

Great Debates
61

If that was a serious question to me, then the answer is that postulating a seasonal lawn-care startup run and staffed by a poor individual with no pre-existing customer base or capital isn’t in fact the most optimistic of scenarios. Even if we assume that lawn-care guy catches a lot of breaks in terms of good weather and getting a lot of gigs, etc., it’s still a very precarious way to make a living.

Which is why most of the folks Starving Artist sees pulling down that sweet sweet $30 per mowing gig are either casual labor such as schoolkids earning pocket money, or employees of various types of landscaping firms with typically much larger and more diverse operations. There simply are not a lot of individual entrepreneurs living a secure middle-class life off of lawn-mowing.

62

No, all you need is a lawn mower, an edger, a weedeater and a blower. A small pickup truck large enough to hold these items is all that’s needed, not a flatbed truck. Or alternatively a small trailer to pull behind a car. I’ve seen guys operate mowing service out of a car, toting everything in the trunk. Not the easiest or most elegant way to go about it, but doable nonetheless until enough money’s coming in to buy a small used pickup truck.

Sure you can. I can mow, edge, weedeat and blow the concrete areas clean in a little less than an hour. Anyone with the desire to do so and in reasonably good health can easily mow and groom 8 lawns a day. Given travel time, break time and so forth he (or she, I’ve seen women doing it too) might be looking at a ten hour work day or a little more, but most people who are self-employed work more than eight hours a day.

Again, you don’t need a large truck and you don’t need to be particularly strong, and especially not if you’re using a self-propelled lawnmower.

I’ll clue you to what goes on another step up the lawn mowing ladder. Some guys hire a crew of three other guys and they go out mowing all day long, knocking out three lawns an hour (or four if their route is tight enough). The guy who owns the operation grosses about $90 to $120 an hour, and by paying his workers $10 an hour or so, nets $60 to $90 an hour for himself, less a small amount for gasoline and incidentals.

There are a couple of guys in Houston (or at least there were a few years back) with an operation mowing 2,000 lawns a week. They hire workers from Mexico here on H1B visas (I think that’s what they are, but I may be wrong) and provide cheap, more or less assembly line mow and blow service for $20 a pop (may be more now, like I said the information is several years old). Last I heard they were netting a couple hundred thousand a year each.

63

:dubious: And how, exactly, do you pretend to be able to determine what the best “growth friendly” policies are if you consider quantitative projections about them to be literally unknowable?

Yeah? I thought Republicans were supposed to be the hardheaded fiscal pragmatists who don’t just endorse pie-in-the-sky ideological prescriptions with no fucking idea how to quantify their actual real-life impacts?

Oh. Well, that would explain it.

64

Here let’s put the burden of proof on you. What do you propose and what are the exact effects? See why your questions are absurd?

65

There are a hell of a lot more than you think, and many of them are making more money than the people they mow for. And some make enough during mowing season to live on the entire year.

You really need to stop making proclamations about businesses you know nothing about. People like you are a huge reason most people are negative about the idea of trying to make money on their own. All they hear from their family and friends is discouragement and negativity, so they become convinced of failure before they even try.

None of this stuff I’ve been talking about requires anyone to quit their jobs, invest a lot of money, and leap off into the unknown hoping for the best. Each of the services I’ve mentioned can be started part-time and grown from there. In the case of lawn-mowing a person can start out mowing one lawn a week, then two, then four, and so on and so on until they reach the point they can go into it full time. Or they can just use it part time as a way to supplement their income. None of these types of work are much more complex or difficult to manage than a newspaper route. Yes, in the case of mowing weather is a factor, equipment breakdowns are a factor, etc. But they’re far from deal breakers and are rather minor in the overall picture. Success in these kinds of work is practically guaranteed as long as a person is willing to work for it and doesn’t suffer from an unlikeable personality of some kind, and depending on their circumstances and capabilities they can work their way into it slowly or start off and do well almost immediately.

And why you seem to think none of this has any merit unless everyone who’s poor gets taken care of somehow is anyone’s guess. You’ve had a bee in your bonnet about all this since the thread first started. It’s like you have a real hate on for the whole idea. And your continued insistence on dismissing the idea of these kinds of jobs in favor of bemoaning the fact that they don’t work for everyone is not only puzzling but way beside the point, which is that anyone who truly wants to and is in reasonable enough good health and has enough of a personality to be able to hold down a job at McDonalds can offer service work of some type that will pay them a good deal more than they’re making now. $30 for an hour’s work mowing a lawn is damn good money and probably more than the majority of this board’s posters make. Such a service isn’t to be scoffed at or given up on lightly. Same with the other types of work I mentioned. You don’t need to be a privileged college student with connections to find work cleaning windows. The pessimism and defeatism you’re displaying in this thread lead me to believe you have issues of some kind that keep you from wanting to see anyone succeed unless everyone can, and we all know that’s impossible. So what’s wrong with encouraging the relative few who want to work to achieve a better income to do so? You aren’t doing yourself or anyone else any favors in this thread.

66

What? You don’t have quantitative analysis to 45 decimal places of precision of first, second, third, fourth, and fifth order effects on the total economy!?! How can we trust that your so-called “work” produces wealth?

67

Exactly!

68

Here’s the thing: unlike your shoveling enterprise, which is pretty much a one time thing, once you have a customer for your mowing service, they are reliable money week after week as long as you do a good job. Even if it takes you all day to find one customer, 30 days of that will provide you with 30 lawns a week that you can mow and collect on just like clockwork. That’s a $900 a week income produced by a month’s worth of solicitation. Worth the trouble don’t you think?

69

This seems to be a common theme. Why COULDN’T Ralph Kramden be rich if he worked a little harder? Did he go to night school? Did he try to get a degree? Master’s Degree? MBA? Any sort of degree? Did he look for any better jobs? Try to get promoted in HIS job? No, he just drove a bus all day and tried to get rich “quick” and then complain about it when it didn’t work out.

70

But this thread isn’t about my proposed strategies for a general “way out of poverty”. This is about analyzing a strategy that other people—specifically, Starving Artist with some occasional backup—have declared is an effective “way out of poverty” for anyone who’s “truly willing to work”.

[QUOTE=octopus]
See why your questions are absurd?
[/QUOTE]

They aren’t. If I came around with a different kind of proposal for alleviating poverty, such as “the government should maintain a jobs bureau and make sure to give everyone a job who doesn’t have one”, it would be perfectly legit to ask me similar questions about what I expected the effectiveness rate to be, what adjustments the economy would have to make to cope with it, and so on and so forth. As I’m sure you agree.

But you expect your policy preferences to be adopted without “worrying about numbers” that you’ve arbitrarily decided are “unknowable”. And then you wonder why nothing gets done:

And that’s because both sides are overcrowded with ideologically dogmatic number-shy airheads (although it’s the ones on your side who happen to be overrepresented in this particular thread), who will spend all day spinning folksy stories about how wonderful and SUPAR EFFECTIV their policy ideas are, but run screaming in fright as soon as somebody asks them for even a first-order approximation of the actual quantitative impacts.

Which is how we end up with butthurt bullshit like this:

45 decimal places my ass. Neither Starving Artist nor you is apparently willing or able even to estimate the nearest quintile of the total poor population for whom you claim entrepreneurship constitutes an effective way out of poverty.
Like I said, this subject isn’t rocket science, but it’s not just fortune-cookie maxims either. If you don’t have any kind of quantitative rationale backing up your policy idea, then in realistic terms, you don’t have a policy idea. All you’ve got is a comfortable fantasy that you can despise your opponents for not believing in.

71

The series aired in 1955. Assuming it takes place the same year and he’s been married 15 years, that means he graduated HS in 1940 at the earliest.
Grad. rate 1939-1940 50.8 %
Grad rate 1929-1939 29.0 5
From here.
So Ralph might not even be a HS grad. No GED, either.
Was there even a night school in those days?

72

Been reading this whole thread with mixed thoughts. Mostly others are saying what I might’ve wanted to add, and probably saying it better. Maybe further downthread someone will comment on this, too, but I just can’t let it pass. You’re missing a major qualifier: SOME people can move anywhere in the 48 contiguous states pretty easily. Lots of others can’t.

SOME people can’t even move from one side of town to the other “pretty easily.” I’ve personally been in all these subgroups and know whereof I speak. It is wildly inaccurate to suggest that even most people have such ease of major geographic mobility, let alone the (I guess?) entire population you seem to suggest by way of including no qualifiers. The blitheness of the comment bothers me more than I care to admit.

73

Moving isn’t the smartest decision for everyone.

I’m a huge fan of maximizing one’s geographic mobility. I think sentimentality is a curse for the poor, since being easily attached to places and things makes it harder to pick up and move to greener pastures. I have to fight the reflex to roll my eyes when people refuse to leave towns that are obviously dying.

But then again, I can easily afford a $250 plane ticket to visit family whenever I want to.

If you’re poor, having a supportive family network can really be the difference between surviving and not surviving. You get laid off from your job? Maybe Mama can’t give you any cash to pay rent, but her living room couch is always waiting for you. Your car broke down? Well, Uncle Leo can loan you his car until you can get it fixed. You don’t have enough money to pay the babysitter? Well, Cousin Marie will help you out for free (as long as you watch her kids the next time she asks you). Leaving these folks behind means saying good-bye to their safety net–one that can take years to develop from scratch.

74

I’m not making any “proclamations” about any of this. If you show me evidence-based estimates and data that support the idea that some particular version of your policy proposals is realistically feasible, I’m perfectly willing to believe it.

But you’ll have to stop pulling unsupported anecdotes out of your ass and expecting them to be treated like evidence-based estimates and data.

[QUOTE=Starving Artist]
People like you are a huge reason most people are negative about the idea of trying to make money on their own. All they hear from their family and friends is discouragement and negativity

[/quote]

But as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m not at all negative about the well-established fact that some people, even if poor, can do quite well making money on their own. What I want to know is what you think the probability is that the average hard-working poor person will actually be able to transition from poverty to financial security by their efforts at making money on their own.

We’ve established that everyone’s pretty much in agreement that that probability’s not 0%, since some industrious poor people do succeed in their entrepreneurial efforts, and also that the probability’s not 100%, since some industrious poor people don’t succeed in their entrepreneurial efforts.

So, great! There are 99 other integers in between those excluded extremes. Which one of them, or let’s say which group of ten or twenty of them, in your opinion best represents the probability of entrepreneurial success for a poor person starting a business? And what facts are you basing that opinion on?

And when you’ve got an estimate for that, what’s your estimate for the percentage increase in such businesses that a local economy could absorb without overcrowding the market and driving down the individual probability of success? Note that this too can be quite a rough ballpark estimate (and it can be restricted to an example of a particular local economy, as I did in my original back-of-the-envelope figuring about microbusinesses in Kansas City).

I’m just trying to get an idea in quantitative terms of approximately how these individual entrepreneurship launches would scale up to significant sectors of the poor population.

Why are you so virulently opposed to considering this? Seems like a pretty important issue to me, if we want to assess how viable such a strategy is as a large-scale antipoverty measure.

[QUOTE=Starving Artist]

And why you seem to think none of this has any merit unless everyone who’s poor gets taken care of somehow is anyone’s guess.

[/quote]

But that isn’t in the least like what I said. I think there’s plenty of merit in an anti-poverty strategy that successfully takes care of even a significant fraction of people who are poor.

I’m just trying to find out, to a very rough approximation, how big you think that fraction could realistically be, and why. Again, why are you so resistant to attempting any kind of realistic quantitative assessment of the actual effectiveness of the ideas you’re endorsing?

75

How much impact does 20 coal fired electrical plants have on climate change? No one can answer that. The most one can say is it adds CO2 to the atmosphere.

Same thing with people hustling for work. We know that it adds wealth and income. How much? No one can know. And you know that.

Your ideological cohorts want to raise minimum wage to $15/hr. What impact will that have on all the poor?

76

Sure people can answer that. It’s known how much coal one power plant goes through in any given span of time. It’s known how much carbon dioxide is produced by burning coal. It’s known how much carbon dioxide humans have already added to the atmosphere, and how much global warming that’s already caused. The radiative transfer models are also known, which incidentally agree with the observed past warming, and can be used to predict future impact of that amount of carbon dioxide. Yes, there are some error bars in there, but we can calculate those, too.

77

No you don’t. No one knows what portion of warming is due to CO2 vs how much is due to methane nor how much from natural fluctuations or sun cycles etc.

78

No one can answer it precisely or with absolute certainty, but we can at least make quantitative estimates about some of the impacts. (Lorry knose, nobody’s requiring any precise or absolutely certain answers from you or Starving Artist in this thread either.)

For example, since there are 600-some coal-fired electrical plants in the US already, if we added 20 more, we should expect the addition (ceteris paribus) to produce about a 3% increase in the climate impacts of US coal-generated electricity in general. Now, since coal-generated electricity plants produce about one-third of all US CO2 emissions (or about 5% of global ones), that 3% increase works out to something above 0.1% of global CO2 emissions, which certainly isn’t very big but it’s not zero either. This article in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics discusses the net climate impact of coal-fired power plant emissions, which not surprisingly is extremely complex. If we use the 0.1% of all global CO2 emissions as a rough ballpark figure for the contribution of those 20 power plants, and if total emissions were to continue at present levels into the medium term (which they’re unlikely to be, but unlikely to be orders of magnitude different, either), then we could very approximately estimate that the contribution of those 20 power plants to climate change would be about a thousandth of the total CO2 emissions climate impacts. So, very imprecise approximation, but probably not bad as an order of magnitude.

(And I should note that of course none of that takes into account climate impacts from actually getting the coal, just the CO2 emissions from burning it.)

[QUOTE=octopus]

The most one can say is it adds CO2 to the atmosphere.

[/quote]

Specifically, about 2 pounds of CO2 per kilowatt hour.

See, octopus? Quantitative estimation isn’t really so scary or so unattainable! Come to the dork side and join us in our rational quest for realistic information! :slight_smile:

[QUOTE=octopus]

Same thing with people hustling for work. We know that it adds wealth and income. How much? No one can know.

[/quote]

:dubious: Really? Once again, no one can know with absolute certainty and precision, but that’s not the kind of knowledge we’re expecting to get here. There definitely is plenty of varied information available on the economic impacts of, for instance, “shadow economies” or informal labor and commercial exchanges. Thousands of economists (e.g., at the IMF) earn their bread and butter quantitatively estimating the very sort of thing that you ignorantly assert “no one can know”.

And, of course, if our hypothetical entrepreneurs with their part-time accountants are running legit enterprises with tax status and all, it becomes much easier to estimate their economic impact. There’s plenty of research on the subject of specific and general economic consequences of US microbusiness.
So no, I’m not buying your and Starving Artist’s defeatist pessimistic negative lazy unmotivated irresponsible excuses about being incapable of attaining anything but total ignorance about the economic impacts of the entrepreneurship you’re promoting, if it were to be implemented on a larger scale than just the occasional random striving individual.

You may not have the intelligence or initiative to get off your booty and develop some quantitative estimates about the economic impacts of microbusiness entrepreneurship, but that doesn’t entitle you to say that it can’t be done at all.*

[QUOTE=octopus]
Your ideological cohorts want to raise minimum wage to $15/hr. What impact will that have on all the poor?
[/QUOTE]

Wow, you thought that would be a stumper? :smiley: This is one of the most heavily researched domestic-economy questions of all time. (Of course, as with all these other topics, there’s no hope of getting absolute certainty or precision or universal agreement, but there’s definitely a lot more quantitative information available than your go-to response of “We don’t know anything about that. Nobody can know anything about that. And you know it. Derrrrrrrrp.”) A sizable chunk of such information is available in this summary of research and arguments concerning minimum wage increases.

  • Cue octopus and Starving Artist pouting in unison “Well fine, then you go and find out quantitative estimates of entrepreneurship impact for us if you’re so smart!” Yeah, sorry boys, but it’s your policy proposal, so it’s up to you to back it up with data-based rationales if you expect anybody else to be convinced by it.
79

Yes, god forbid we transition over to perfectly clean and completely renewable energy sources and it turns out global warming was exaggerated.:rolleyes:

80

Interestingly, outside of ideologically driven bullshit sites, no one really knows. The right always revert back to the simplistic Econ 101 perfectly competitive supply/demand graph and talk about price floors. But that’s not an appropriate model because labor markets are actually much more complex. The opposing view is that raising minimum wage acts as a stimulus by giving some low income segments more purchasing power.

The truth is, these minimums haven’t been in effect long enough to measure the data.

I assume he had a sweet union job with the local municipality.

Poverty is really about lack of access to infrastructure and opportunity. Usually such that people have little to no actual choices. Someone living in the Sudan or rural Appalachia will have an extremely hard time becoming successful, even if they do everything perfectly. That’s the difference between poverty and just being a poor person without a lot of money.
Really the question is what standard of living do we think the lowest 10% should have?