Every one of those companies is someone's dream. Don't dismiss them for not being tech. Domino's Pizza ($2.5B revenue) was once one of those new pizzerias that you wouldn't call a startup (read the History section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino%27s_Pizza).
The same mentality is why universities graduate more students in the visual and performing arts than computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined(1).
It's not enough to let people follow their dreams, if their dreams lead most of them off a cliff. You have to either catch them when they fall, or help them find better dreams.
Not everyone has the desire or ability to do STEM. I'm not sure why you'd not encourage them. You do appreciate having someone cook your food and create the art and media you consume, right?
The best part is paying minimum wage for it, because there are so many of them. :)
Except not. These aren't people going on to be visual artists. These are people frittering away their college opportunity, and then going on to careers were the degree doesn't help.
>"There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology, and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math. Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don't require college degrees, and those graduates don't get a big income boost from having gone to college."
These aren't people successfully chasing their dreams - these are people avoiding adulting for four more years. It's not appropriate to encourage kids to go to college "for the love of something," unless they already have the means, or at least a plan, to pay for the rest of their life.
I agree with you that not everyone has the desire or ability to do stem, but the poster you are responding to accounted for that. We have to catch them when they fall if the open market does not value those people, but we as a society do value them. We shouldn't continue on our current path of telling people to follow their dreams or that all careers have some value and then throw them to the wolves when it comes to paying to live in our society. This applies mostly to the US
I'm sure there are plenty of people who have successful careers based on visual arts degrees: my SO is one. Their sibling, however, is the counterexample: her degree was just a vague attempt to put off adult work, and she now lives back at home with her parents, doing nothing.
FTA I posted:
> "There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology, and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math. Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don't require college degrees, and those graduates don't get a big income boost from having gone to college."
They aren't, as far as I can tell (my wife is a successful visual designer). They tend to be started by individual designers who find a successful niche, or (less often) design collectives that band together to hire business staff.
That's not the point though. The bulk of these people are getting majors they never use. I would argue they should never have been pointed in the direction of an industry they don't have the aptitude for, no matter what their 'dreams' are.
I'm not saying that small businesses are somehow worth less than startups. I'm saying that they are different in many ways: intent, team, sector. And because they are different, increases in the rate of their creation mean different things.
My family includes people who run small businesses. I respect them and their place in the economy. Collectively, they employ more people than the mega-corporations. Those that are privately owned have the leeway to maximize values other than shareholder value; i.e. act morally. I'm into it.
But most pizzerias don't want to grow to be Domino's Pizza. They're founded by people who like to build something at a certain level, be directly involved, and would rather not manage a billion-dollar company.
When we say "startup" in SV, SF, or YC, the word means something, and that something is not a pizzeria -- right? But the New York Times is using the word in a different way than the community here. That's largely because startups are sexy and small businesses are not. Startup is a short word that fits in a headline, and small business is not. So the headline is misleading to readers here, even if the misdirection wasn't deliberate.
It may be difficult to distinguish startups from SMBs in the statistics the NYT reported. But we all know that startup creation is pegged to things like VC funding. It might even be inversely proportional to megacorp engineering salaries, for all I know.
But those factors have almost zero to do with the pizzerias, which are probably tied to banks' willingness to make loans, the growth of cities, the price of supplies and employees, etc.
I'm not saying that startups are better than SMBs, just that conflating the two is not very enlightening.
What makes something a startup though is if it's arbitraging some temporary economic disequilibrium. How big the business ultimately becomes is unrelated to whether or not it would qualify as a startup.
