Comment by thelastgallon

I fully agree that only experience creates a forcing function to learn, most kids who were 'dull' kids in school ends up learning how to make good decisions for themselves after a decade of work experience. The 'smart' kids who fall for crypto/nft scams probably aren't that smart.

It might be slightly illegal for kids to enter into contracts, which is a prerequisite for running a business. There is also the small matter of child labor laws (also intersects with minors not allowed to sign contracts?). I'm not arguing from a moral standpoint, but just the bottlenecks to make this happen. But we live in interesting times, looks like most of the regulatory authorities are gone, perhaps this bottleneck to enterprising child entrepreneurs and big businesses looking for cheap labor will be removed?

I also wonder, child labor was commom for pretty much most of human history, but we have a decent history of child labor during industrial times. How many of them became enterpreneurs? Or were successful financially (better than their peers who weren't child laborers) because they got early experiential learning?

2 examples from that time, Andrew Carnegie (experiential learning) and Rockefeller (School).

Andrew Carnegie (I guess he was 12?): Soon after this Mr. John Hay, a fellow Scotch manufacturer of bobbins in Allegheny City, needed a boy, and asked whether I would not go into his service. I went, and received two dollars per week; but at first the work was even more irksome than the factory. I had to run a small steam-engine and to fire the boiler in the cellar of the bobbin factory. It was too much for me. I found myself night after night, sitting up in bed trying the steam gauges, fearing at one time that the steam was too low and that the workers above would complain that they had not power enough, and at another time that the steam was too high and that the boiler might burst.

John D. Rockefeller: He attended Cleveland's Central High School, the first high school in Cleveland and the first free public high school west of the Alleghenies. Then he took a ten-week business course at Folsom's Commercial College, where he studied bookkeeping. In September 1855, when Rockefeller was sixteen, he got his first job as an assistant bookkeeper working for a small produce commission firm in Cleveland called Hewitt & Tuttle.[