1) New (not small, new) businesses are the engine of job creation and
2) Democracy works best in a population of Jefferson's yeoman farmers or Barère de Vieuzac's "nation of shopkeepers"
(he meant it as an insult to the British but he stole the idea from a Scotsman*)
From Quartz:
We’re supposedly living in the age of startups when people can create new businesses, enrich themselves, and employ their fellow Americans. That narrative, like much economic optimism these days, is now mostly a tale for coastal cities, and a tenuous one at best.Fewer new businesses were created in the last five years in the US than any period since at least 1980, according to a new analysis (pdf) by the Economic Innovation Group (EIU), a bipartisan advocacy group founded by the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Parker and others. Businesses that did form are also far more concentrated than ever before: just 20 counties accounted for half of the country’s total new businesses. All of them were in large metro areas.
“It’s hard to put into scale the collapse of new business formation. We have no precedent for that rapid and steep of a collapse,” said John Lettieri, co-author of the report and co-founder of EIU, in an interview. “It will have a ripple effect in the economy. You‘re going to feel that impact five, 10, and 15 years in the future.”
The analysis of census data revealed two grim economic stories playing out in America. The first is that prosperity (at least in terms of new businesses) is consolidating in a few predominately urban places, mostly around large cities such as Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, New York, and San Francisco. Just 20 countries accounted for 50% of the new firms created during the post-recession recovery—a sharp break from previous years when new company creation was far more distributed.
Particularly hard hit were sparsely populated, rural areas. In the last post-recession recovery, counties with 100,000 or fewer people generated one-third of the country’s new firms (net) between 1992-96. By comparison, those counties lost 1.2% of their businesses between 2010-2014.The second story is that the majority of new companies look more like tech companies than the construction firms and restaurants that have typically anchored middle-class prosperity. New business formation over the past five years tracked very closely with access to capital, particularly venture and other forms of risk capital, says the report. Of the top 20 counties, 13 were in just three states (California, New York, and Texas) with ample access to such money....MORE
*"To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people
of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation
of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation
of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is
influenced by shopkeepers."
— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
See also: One More Time: It's Not Small Businesses that Create Jobs...
The Slow-Motion Collapse of American Entrepreneurship
A Puzzling Fall In Start-up Jobs
As our smart, loyal (and good-looking) readers know, it's not small businesses that create jobs it's small new businesses that do so...
