The guy trying to mow lawns in a saturated market is doing something also. You just have to be somewhat smart about doing it.
There are plenty of little restaurants near me which go under in no time. When I’ve gone into them, when they were still open, the owners and family were not sitting on their butts. Work is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success.
If you’re afraid of having a quantitative estimate nitpicked to assess how reasonable an approximation it is to the real world, then you don’t belong in any serious discussion of any economic topics (or any physical- or social-science topics at all, for that matter).
But it’s clear we can’t trust octopus to come up with any realistic evidence-based policy strategies, or to defend with quantitative estimates any policy strategies that he supports.
So fine, we’ll come to you if we need any handy superficial snippets of fortune-cookie economics (such as “money isn’t wealth” or “labor adds value”) that we all know already.
In the meantime, the struggle continues to find a debater in favor of this “bootstrapping” anti-poverty strategy who’s able and willing to discuss the policy issues on a substantive level.
Suggesting that economically struggling people should sink money and labor into a microbusiness launch without having any realistic idea of what it involves or what factors impact their chances of success is not doing them a favor.
Informed and realistic encouragement of small-scale entrepreneurship is a very valuable and beneficial contribution. Ignorant and superficial encouragement of small-scale entrepreneurship is not.
I meant in contrast to those who just sit around complaining about how poor they are and don’t have any chance to get ahead, while making bad decisions and doing nothing to change their condition. And those who make excuses for these people by saying “it’s too hard, there’s no opportunities, people can’t move, etc”
A guy trying to mow lawns in a saturated market is at least TRYING to do something. Maybe it doesn’t work out and he tries something else. At least he’s trying.
I mow my own meager lawn in front of my townhouse, and it takes me longer to get the stuff from the shed around back than it does to mow it. But I would pay someone $20 every two weeks to mow it to my standards. I see a man, woman, and child outside of Home Depot sometimes with a “give us money” sign. I would gladly pay him $20 to mow my lawn, but they would rather just sit around under a tree in the parking lot doing nothing hoping people just GIVE them money.
Out of curiosity, why do the little restaurants near you go under in no time? Bad food? Bad location? Bad research?
Well, the thread title is “Entrepreneurship as a way out of poverty”. The OP identified this as the proposition that “the poor can offer their services independently and thus make a considerably better living for themselves”.
AFAICT, making it “out of poverty” to “a considerably better living” implies significantly more than just crossing the earnings threshold of “more than minimum wage”.
Plenty of people who already earn slightly more than minimum wage are still poor. It would probably not be worth it for them to take on all the risks and uncertainties of self-employment just to go on earning slightly more than minimum wage.
I’ve never really understood the libertarian/conservative opposition to this particular type of micro-entrepreneurship. I mean, here’s a family who have identified a potential market for a very minimal service that they’re willing to provide: namely, receiving charitable donations. So they’re out there offering that service.
If there are consumers who are willing to pay them for their efforts in sitting outside a Home Depot with a sign saying “Give us money”, then who are you to criticize that mutually consensual transaction between provider and consumer? Surely you agree that it’s better than passively sitting at home watching TV on the proceeds of a government check?
I mean, I know why I don’t think it’s a good idea for people to earn their living by begging for money, but then I’m one of those meddling liberals who keep interfering with individual responsibility and the freedom of commerce, you know. 
If beggars are managing to earn money at begging then there must be some kind of market for it, so I don’t see why libertarians/conservatives are so outraged at their successfully participating in that market.
Probably much the same, as no one would read beyond the first word of the title before starting with the "But what about people who CAN’T WORK? What will you do with your four kids? What if there are NO JOBS? What if you’re homeless and have to wear flour sacks instead of socks? Besides, nobody in Sweden works and they get along just FINE!
Besides, poor people all work 26 hours a day at six different jobs ALREADY!"
Absolutely classic - trying to discredit entrepreneurship by redefining begging. Next step would be to blame the people who give them money for not giving them enough to buy health insurance on their own, like Wal-Mart does.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, I’m not a libertarian or conservative so I wouldn’t know about their opposition to people participating in the “begging on the street” market.
I don’t care if someone wants to earn a living doing nothing but sitting under a tree in the parking lot of a home improvement store. If they can afford to do that, more power to them. I don’t see how they can complain about being poor when that is their only effort into NOT being poor. I’d love to see a MPSIMS thread titled “I beg for money for a living, it’s awesome!!!”
I’m not in the least trying to discredit entrepreneurship. As I’ve pointed out numerous times in this thread, I think entrepreneurship is great. The fact that many people ignorantly indulge in fact-free fantasies about entrepreneurship and willfully refuse to consider realistic contexts for it doesn’t mean in any way that entrepreneurship itself is bad.
But I just don’t see why conservatives/libertarians arbitrarily exclude begging from the category of entrepreneurship altogether, since they’re supposedly so devoted to the freedom of individually chosen consumer transactions. If the beggar told donors a joke in exchange for their contributions, would that be enough to count as “entrepreneurship”?
Seems like our conservatives/libertarians are all eager to have poor people get out there and offer services that others will give them money for, but are inexplicably getting all riled at the poor people who are getting out there to offer a “service” that some people demonstrably do give them money for. :dubious:
[QUOTE=Shodan]
Next step would be to blame the people who give them money for not giving them enough to buy health insurance
[/quote]
But I’m not in any way blaming the people who give beggars money. Not for giving to them at all, not for “not giving them enough”, not for any reason.
Are you blaming the people who give money to beggars? Surely not, if it’s a freely chosen transaction on their part?
Paging Mr. Neville St. Clair! 
That’s my point - you should blame them, because they aren’t giving the beggars the equivalent of $15 an hour and thus forcing them to use public services, like liberals always claim that Wal-Mart does.
Regards,
Shodan
That makes no sense at all. Liberals in general don’t want people to earn money by begging, as I noted (because of course we’re such party-poopers when it comes to individual freedom and unshackled commerce). So we’re definitely not expecting or wishing that people who give to beggars should make begging a living-wage enterprise.
What I want to know is, why are libertarians/conservatives so angry about people earning money by begging, if there’s a market for it? Individual freedom, unshackled commerce, all that good stuff? 
Is it sad that I can’t tell if this is a parody? 
Cool story, bro.
I don’t know, **Shodan **had a good response too. Can you tell if that is a parody?
Here’s an actual response up thread to a study that shows many low-income entrepreneurs make it out of poverty after 5 years:
“What works for a 22 year old college graduate who can’t find a job isn’t necessarily going to work for a 65 year old with lung cancer and custody of two toddlers”
Is that parody?
Why not? What if they told you a joke? Would liberals still not want people to do that? What if they played music? Liberals still say no to that?
It’s “reliable” in that, overall, policy should be written to support entrepreneurship and small business.
Because it’s an activity that produces nothing, not a business. It’s also annoying and makes the neighborhood look like shit.
No. It’s clearly a debate tactic used to nitpick non provable and incalculable numbers in order to discredit the general principle that wealth generating activity such as entrepreneurship generates… wait for it… wealth.
All nonsense. You know as well as I know that complex systems that are non-linear such as economic, climate, biology all have multiple inputs that don’t neatly correlate with the output. Do a bit of reading on chaos theory. It will help. Even a problem such as 3 bodies orbiting can’t be solved analytically and whatever you model will diverge significantly over time. The economy is surely more complex than 3 bodies. You are knowingly asking for something that is irrelevant. And it’s a silly debate tactic and trap. Why would I waste 1 second of time calculating a useless number?
Now of course your tactic will be to discredit what I say based on an unwillingness to play your game. You can’t honestly think I am going to be influenced with your arbitrary debate constraints. Octopus didn’t just fall off the pickleboat.
The general idea that increasing the net wealth of society by producing valuable services and goods doesn’t need a formal proof. But just for fun here’s one. Person unemployed producing 0 goods or services decides to grow tomatoes. Society is now richer X amount of tomatoes. Proof that labor generates wealth.
Now with regards to fortune cookie wisdom, it’s much better than left wing wisdom that an entitlement check = poor votes. And yes, it’s necessary to teach people that money and wealth are different concepts. The fact that we have dummies asking for a $15/wage as a solution to widespread poverty is an example of that.
If the poor weren’t such useful idiots for the left we could solve the worst problems of poverty.
But these are liberal arguments, not conservative/libertarian arguments.
Kimstu’s point–if I may be so bold–is that conservatives and libertarians often argue that we know the social value of something by whether and how much people pay for it. Hence, CEOs are worth all that money because they can command that salary. It follows from that perspective that if people are paying others for beggars, the beggars must be providing a valuable social service. The same argument is largely true about externalities (like the bad aesthetics resulting from a particular business practice). That is, conservatives/libertarians tend not to care, or tell you Coase will take care of it.
The logic of your position requires that you should.
Liberals believe that no one in America who works should ever be paid less than $15 an hour. By your definition, begging is work. Ergo, those who pay those who work as beggars less than $15 an hour are violating this principle.
Since you don’t believe they are violating the principle, then either you recognize that begging isn’t work, or you don’t believe that everyone in America who works should be paid at least $15 an hour. QED.
Poe’s Law strikes again.
Regards,
Shodan
It is, isn’t it?
And nobody’s disagreeing with the basic premise that “doing something” to improve your lot is a good thing.
But what this debate is about is whether we can assess how realistic various forms of “doing something to improve your lot” are, as a large-scale solution to poverty.
No, you’re not “telling EVERY poor person to do the same thing”, and nobody here is accusing you of that. What we’re trying to get a handle on is more or less the following:
*What are realistic approximate odds of success in following a particular micro-entrepreneurship strategy?
Approximately what percentage of a poor population in general could their economy support in following such a strategy, without decreasing those odds of success?*
A lot of the people vaguely boosting entrepreneurship efforts in this thread seem surprisingly facts-averse when it comes to figuring out what the realistic prospects of such efforts would be.
You can’t just tell poor people to “DO SOMETHING!” if you don’t have any clear idea of what that something should be or how likely it is to pay off for them.
If somebody told poor people in general “Just go buy a lottery ticket, plenty of people have made good money that way!”, you’d rightly think that was crappy advice, because the odds of winning anything substantial on a lottery ticket are vanishingly small.
If somebody told poor people in general “Just become a pro basketball player, they make TONS of money!”, you’d rightly think that was crappy advice, because the odds of an average person being good enough for pro sports are tiny.
If somebody told poor people in general “Just get married to somebody well off, that’ll give you a very comfortable life!”, you’d rightly think that was (perhaps slightly less) crappy advice, because the percentage of poor people that well-off people are likely to find appealing as marriage partners is pretty small.
So when you tell poor people in general “Just start your own business, there’s lots of money to be made that way!”, isn’t it reasonable to consider what are the realistic odds of success of the strategy you’re recommending?
The sloganeering entrepreneurship-boosters in this thread are trying to duck that question by shouting “Negativism!” and “Defeatism!” and “Liberal!” whenever it comes up, but it’s still a very reasonable and prudent question.