There's a good essay in the psychological/social condition (rather than just the direct economic position) of smart upper middle class young adults, and why Altman observed founders disproportionately coming from that background
Obviously by definition there are very few "super successful" people so it could still be that their offspring have an even bigger advantage than the UMC kids and it's obscured by their scarcity, plus thanks to homophily Altman is gonna know more UMC people anyway but
It does seem like UMC kids have some unusual advantages in building new things even beyond what you'd expect given their economic status (can afford to risk a career year on a new biz, likely to have savings, not supporting parents financially, good education to fall back on etc)
Founding anything is often the product of years of abstract thinking with no immediate payoff which most people cannot afford to do, and in many social worlds is seen as a wasteful indulgence
UMC kids are secure enough and even encouraged to spend some slack thinking about 'useless' things in the short run until they notice a market gap in the longer term (obvs this is downstream of economic position but it's not as direct as 'rich parents invest in your business')
They get exposed to a lot more information by osmosis, see other countries more, and get to think at a larger geographical scale early on. The pandemic illustrated just how rare it is for even senior people to notice what happens in other countries- more UMC kids get this early
IME the least-noticed UMC asset is their status budget: a lot of people feel huge external social pressure from family, media, etc to work somewhere people have heard of, they need to worry about not looking poor, and they don't have a network outside their job
UMC kids start with a bigger network (encouraged early on to meet new people) which isn't dependent on their job/income, and have social status (and more contacts) via their education and experience, so the social costs of trying a new thing are much reduced
Founding new things is weird, a challenge to the existing order, people will be hostile to you or look down on you. Much easier to deal with from the UMC starting position, which is an additional reason that UMC people seem to disproportionately do new or strange things
Tldr: UMC kids are more likely

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More from @MWStory

23 Apr
15 months apart
The border belief described here was incredibly powerful and wormed its way around institutions the world over. The pandemic preparedness index ranked you *less* prepared if you had previously closed borders in the event of disease outbreaks
The WHO had measures to *prevent* border closures in the event of disease outbreaks written into the international health regulations, and even built tools to track outbreak-related border restrictions, so they could lobby to get them removed
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
Read 4 tweets
12 Apr
We're emerging from a pandemic where we learned that national science teams can make bad calls due to groupthink and cultural baggage, and we've put in place mechanisms (banning "anti-science" people from social media) to make it *harder* to disagree with them in the future
In April 2020 twitter and FB started banning accounts which encouraged people to break virus rules or (more loosely enforced) challenge established virus science. It's been escalating a bit since then with youtube joining in too
Some of the ideas they are penalising now were the established Western consensus early in 2020, like encouraging people to get infected for herd immunity or saying masks don't work- both presented to UK ministers as "the science", now memory-holed thanks to medical sacredness
Read 6 tweets

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