B) As teens and young adults, they're far more likely than the average American to have partaken in "aggressive, illicit, risk-taking activities," such as skipping class, smoking pot, gambling, and shoplifting.

It does not strike me as a coincidence that a career path best suited for mild high school delinquents ends up full of white men. That, again, is part of white privilege; youthful indiscretions have fewer consequences that might, say, keep you out of a good college.

That said, while Levine and Rubinstein's findings hint at the role race might play in entrepreneurship, they don't flesh it out fully enough for us to draw hard conclusions. So with that in mind, let's wade into some of the details about precisely what this study does and doesn't tell us.

We'll start with the demographic data, shown below based on the census figures from 1994 to 2005. The group we care about here are the self-employed workers with incorporated businesses, at the far right of the table. Why just them? Because they're who we traditionally consider entrepreneurs, as opposed to everyday small business proprietors. Unincorporated businesses tend to be tiny operations -- think of a bodega, or a carpenter who works alone out of a pickup truck -- with little chance of growing. As Levine and Rubinstein find in their study, the people who run them tend to earn less than salaried workers. Incorporated businesses, on the other hand, are actual companies (yep, with 1st Amendment rights and everything). They can be anything from a chain of gyms to an accounting firm to a small tech startup. But the important thing is they're independent legal entities and are often set up to attract investment and grow.

And, as you'll notice, 84 percent of the incorporated self-employed (people who, for the purposes of this piece, we'll just shorthand as "entrepreneurs") are white, compared to 71 percent of the whole prime working-age population. They're also 72 percent male.

So, again, entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly and objectively white guys. What else do we know about them? To gather more info, Levine and Rubinstein turn to the NYLS79, a government survey that began tracking more than 12,000 14 to 22 year olds over the course of their lives starting in 1979. The young folks who eventually became entrepreneurs tended to be from wealthier families with more educated parents. They generally reported higher self esteem, and, importantly, performed better than average on learning aptitude tests. The most successful entrepreneurs, measured by income, also tended to fare well in salaried jobs before making the leap to running their own business.

And, yes, they were frequently rule breakers. In 1980, the survey subjects were asked to fill out a 23 question "Illiict Activity Index" that covered "themes associated with skipping school, use of alcohol and marijuana, vandalism, shoplifting, drug dealing, robbery, assault, and gambling." The future entrepreneurs were turned out to be real louts; if their high schools were "The Breakfast Club," they'd be the Judd Nelsons of the crew. They were more likely to have "used force to obtain things," to have stolen something worth less than $50, and to have been stopped by police. On the combined illicit activity index, they scored 21 percent higher than their average peer. Salaried workers scored 1 percent lower.