New Strategies

I have become increasingly convinced that the old strategies for economic revitalization simply do not work. Everytime I read a story about how much money is spent per job to lure large companies to a community the practical side of my nature has me wondering if it wouldn’t be a lot more efficient to just give the cash to the same number of unemployed or underemployed people.

The Kaufmann Foundation has just released a new study on job creation. They start out by saying:

“The oft-quoted American sports slogan, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing!” could well be attributed to the economic importance of firm formation in creating jobs. A relatively new dataset from the U.S. government called Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) confirms that startups aren’t everything when it comes to job growth. They’re the only thing.”