Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Obama Bucket Shop act

Yves Smith  points us to information on our notions of new business and venture capital: Amar Bhide, who has written the classic, The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses, has decisively debunked the idea underlying the Obama Bucket Shop act, which is that public stock offering are an important source of funding for new businesses. […]

Cleveland = The New India?

My Economics Professor in MBA School, Peter Klein, lectured fondly of the Indian (as in subcontinent, not AmerInd) “entrepreneurs” who risked life and limb going through rubbish heaps looking for scrap metal and other items that could be sold. Despite the risk—I’m not writing metaphorically when I say “risked life and limb”—it was the best […]

Economists:Entrepreneurs::Blind Men:Interior Decorators

As part of my continuing series of Analogies that Should Be on the SAT, this is what Famous Entrepreneurs do (h/t Brad DeLong): In the IBM PC era, Steve drove innovation forward with the Macintosh. This, like the Apple II, was squarely aimed at expanding the use of PCs to everyone, the “computer for the […]

What Will We Tell the Doctors?

“The practice of medicine was accepted to be a chancy way to make a living, and nobody expected a doctor to get rich, least of all the doctors themselves.”  – Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science, p. 4 (Penguin, 1995 edition, quote via Google Books) Lost in the discussion of Paul Ryan’s “plan” is the group […]

Infrastructure and Human Capital Interlude

Busy week, so just a couple of things of note. Via Dr. Black, my old neighborhood gets a chance to build a better future: “It’s a great partnership among a number of researchers from academia, the private sector and national laboratories. It’s a great collaboration for a solid project that will help the environment,” said […]

Opower…this is your profile

The Washington Post reports on an interesting development. If people aren’t able to “see” how they personally fit in to the ‘economy’ or ‘carbon footprint’ in a real way, they often ignore the ‘problem’ or keep it so abstract it does not touch them. Three years ago, Dan Yates and Alex Laskey, the co-founders of […]

Conclusion to my Kauffman Institute Presentation

Note: This is “what I believe I said,” not“what I would have said” and is presented here solely to document the confluences that were, perhaps, clearer in my head than they were in the presentation itself.  As such, several references here are echoes of earlier pieces of the presentation. (Links to same will be updated […]

Where are the Household Entrepreneurs?

Glancing through the CBO survey that only checked one side of the ledger, and therefore made Greg Mankiw happy, I came across the data on Corporate Taxes paid, by Quintile of Income. Now, there has been a groundswell of declarations that people aren’t “leaving the job market”; instead, they are supposedly being “entrepreneurs,” starting their […]