Youth and Entrepreneurship: Arranged or Forced Marriage? A Review of The Dark Sides of Youth Entrepreneurship And Ways Forward

This paper questions the strong association that exists today between youth and entrepreneurship. After showing that there is no solid ground to believe that young people are more suited for entrepreneurship than mature adults, I detail the potential downsides, both at the macro and micro levels of analysis, of pushing young people to venture too early. These downsides include slower and potentially inappropriate learning that may harm the quality of future workforce and the impact of future entrepreneurship activity; a negative impact on individual careers and life courses; and deepened social inequalities among young people who differ in resource endowment. I then discuss the reasons why these downsides are overlooked. Looking at social conceptions of youth as a category, I explain that youth entrepreneurship policies might contribute to maintaining disadvantaged young people into a lasting, precarious state of "social youth." Subsequently, I suggest avenues for research on the evaluation of entrepreneurship at the individual and societal level, as well as ways to reorient entrepreneurship policies so that they do not push people to venture too early.