Pressbeater on Start-ups and Job Creation

Dear Dr. Bones,

Start-ups and Job Creation Sunday, 17 June 2012 07:57 There was a lengthy and pointless debate that began in the early 90s over what sized businesses created the most jobs. The original story was that small businesses created the most jobs. This turned out not to be true on more careful investigation, since small businesses also lost the most jobs. (( ... )) We now have the sequel to this silliness with the claim that it is new businesses that create jobs. This claim emanates most prominently from the entrepreneurially oriented Kauffman Foundation. It was picked up in an Ezra Klein column yesterday. The argument coming from this direction is that all the job growth in the last three decades came from new businesses. Employment in firms that existed in 1980 has just stayed roughly even. The reason this claim is silly is that.... (( ... )) The long and short is that new businesses are wonderful, but policies that go overboard to push people to start new businesses are likely to ruin many lives and lead their promoters with lots of egg on their face.

¿Cui bono? (( fold here )) "Policies that go overboard to push people to start new businesses are likely to ruin many lives and lead their promoters with lots of egg on their face," says Dr. Pressbeater of the prestigious Seeper Institution.. And he says it accurately. However this particular accuracy may not have much bearing on what is really going on. How if the pushing is not in fact intended to help the pushees, or "create jobs," but rather to make sure there is a reliable supply of tolerably likely horses on the track for the gentlefolks of our Gamin' Class to specuvest in? It's not a secret that our financial Betters are sitting on piles and piles of capital they can't think of anything much better to do with than buy Fedguv Treasury notes--no kind of sport for a gentleman! Foreigners are wildly unreliable nowadays, and, as Pressbeater points out, here at home "the vast majority of new businesses fail within a decade," which amounts, as it were, to far too *much* sport for the cultivated palate. What the devotees of Ms. Tyche need, it seems to me, is to have a preliminary winnowing of the field by persons of a lesser station whose plebeian faces do not look quite so bad with egg all over them. With ninety-nine percent of the field pre-winnowed before the start at Hialeah and Belmont, the problem is reduced to manageable proportions. Moreover, after this thorough pre-winnowing, almost all of the nags that make it into the paddock will already have created *some* jobs, and few will be so unlucky as to go belly-up altogether before a decent interval has elapsed. Assuming that these Kaufmann Foundation touts are not just flat-out fibbing, they must be referring to the jobcreational track record only of those candidates who make the final couple of cuts. Fibbing or not, their sincerity is not worth writing home about, however, because jobcreationism, real or imaginary, is entirely incidental. They do have to tell some such story to the lower orders, though, or else risk having the unemployed picket the Gamin' Class at their accustomed pleasures. Why, Class War . . . ! In the old days, I believe the cover story was National Defense instead of Full Employment, a spirited breed of cavalry horses being highly desirable back in the Middle Ages. That story, too, was only a cover. In fact, a day at the races has always been its own reward--for those bred to appeciate the finer things. Happy days.