The Myth of Job Creation by Small Businesses | Hacker News Reader

The Myth of Job Creation by Small Businesses

blog.cutter.com

15 pointss3b9 comments

How bogus. I was expecting him to say "so I dug into the numbers, and this is what I found," and instead he offers the same sort of dataless arguments he attacks the other guy for.

I think if everyone who upvoted this comment also flagged the article, it would be dead by now.* Everyone please remember that flagging is just as important as up/down votes for the health of a community.

* PG, please feel free to correct me if I'm drastically off base on the number of flag it takes to kill a story with 13 upvotes. Assuming that upvotes ~= number of flags kills an article seems to be a safe assumption to me (with some sort of minimum time protection).

You flag articles that are inappropriate for the site. This article isn't inappropriate, just faulty.

The fate, or maybe even the purpose of most small business startups, is to prove an innovation’s merit and then, if successful, be acquired so the entrepreneur(s) become wealthy and can say, “I told you so.”

Here I stopped reading. This is an "expert" at data analysis that can't do basic math, comparing the number of "get-rich-quick" acquisitions to the number of small businesses operating in the US.

Too bad he doesn't have any data beyond supposition to support his claim. Here's research from the Kauffman Foundation that qualifies that it isn't small businesses that create jobs, it's new small businesses: http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/kauffman-foundation-analysi...

Besides... what jobs would meet his definition of "permanent, enduring and non-transitional" other than some government bureaucracies?

> Here's research from the Kauffman Foundation that qualifies that it isn't small businesses that create jobs, it's new small businesses

Right, at some point, if a small business adds enough jobs, it's no longer a small business is it?

General Electric, the Ford Motor Company, Microsoft, Google, etc. all started out as small businesses.

> First of all, the job of the entrepreneur and the cronies he takes with him from the source of the innovation are a job loss to the source and a job gain to small business. This on its own does not represent a net gain in jobs for the economy.

Wait, if someone quits a research job, and makes a new job for themselves, that leaves the original position vacant. So a new job is created.

On the other hand, it is probably impossible to get funding for doing research as a business. So the initial steps in innovation most likely do happen at universities and big companies. Some actual numbers on this would be nice.

Doesn't make sense.

- "vast majority of the oft-ballyhooed jobs created by small business are but transitional" - Which jobs are not transitional ? I would say that jobs should be more transitional and would be so in competitive economies where goverments actively regulate (read bust) monopolistic scenarios.

Infact, I would guess that transitional jobs should increase as an economy becomes more competitive.

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