If there is a regulatory angle, you forgot to mention it. In a tight job market, some employers may have to make do with what is available. While some customers could prefer formal training (sounds like a government contract), others will accept anyone or whoever is cheaper.

When there are lots of people out one the market and some get left behind, employers can be picky. Only people with college degrees, Mets fans, and Finnish speakers can write cell phone apps.

It sounds again like a very bad job market.

I’m a software person and have been all of my life holding positions from developer all the way up to project manager.

Now all of a sudden because I went into the navy instead of college, I am no longer qualified.

Typically a person like myself would be faced with three options

1. Software for 100,000
2. mechanic or small biz owner for 50,000
3. convenience store or wally world for 15,000

Option 1 is no longer available.

So my thoughts are, people will always eat, and maybe it is time to start a bbq/burger joint like you see on diners, drive ins and dives and even though I have 1 acre of land with a couple of outbuildings and two 1,000 gallon septic tanks, I cannot start this up without replacing the septic tanks with some kind of fancy system for an estimated cost of 25,000 to 50,000 or more.

If it took off, I might employ 5 or more people, but it won’t take off if a small guy has to come up with 100,000 to open the doors knowing full well that the odds are stacked against him to start with.

And if you think for one instant that I’m going to give up and be forced or driven into option number 3 just because you think thats all I’m qualified for, well you don’t know me.

So for now, and even though it doesn’t pay the bills, I’m going to keep working on my keep america at work site to see if I can get you educated folks to understand what we are doing to our country and to the world.

Companies won’t hire because consumers aren’t spending. Consumers can’t spend because there are not enough jobs.

The only entity that can break this Catch 22 situation is the US government, through massive hiring for public infrastructure. But the party of Grover Norquist would rather suffer an extended recession than agree to “socialism.”

If you showed up at the emergency room with chest pains, you’s be pretty irritated if the doctor started lecturing you about diet and exercise. “Yoga’s real good for stress relief,” you hear as you’re grabbing your chest. You’d be asking for CPR, defibrillation, maybe a stent or bypass. Later, when there’s enough blood flow to keep your heart muscle and brain tissue alive, you promise to improve your diet and exercise.

Our nation is in economic arrest. The loss of our economic lifeblood, jobs, can lead to the death of vital economic organs and tissue such as companies, mortgages, college educations, retirement accounts, infrastructure, and healthcare. All of these things cost far more to rebuild than it would cost to simply maintain them with the CPR of government stimulus.

(In Iowa, they’re grinding rural roads into gravel, because they can’t afford to maintain them.)

Jobs fix everything. The economy, the budget deficit, Social Security and Medicare revenues, all would be fixed with enough jobs. It’s vitally important that we simply create jobs. It doesn’t matter how, and no method of job creation is worse than the cost of inaction.

Also, I can speak for India but not for China but I am sure it is the same, Americans have nothing to fear from India regarding innovation. I’m speaking as a whole, not individually. India is not a nation of innovators. That is beaten out of them by a school system that makes everyone rise when the teacher enters the room. It is cut down by a university system where you cannot choose your classes. It is reinforced by a work ethic in which the boss is always right even if he’s wrong and the boss is always a he.

This is changing and there are many factors in India’s favor such as being able to discuss politics and religion without fear of bloodshed. Acceptance of science as fact unless it can be proven in a peer reviewed process that it is not at which time it becomes fact again and this does not threaten my belief that Hanuman jumped across the sea to help Rama rescue Sita.

This advantage will disappear, but it hasn’t yet. In China it won’t change until there is free and open exchange of all ideas.

I was working for a small game studio in Seattle when it was bought by Sierra and quickly grew into a huge company called Cendant. I quit and went to a startup in the dot com bubble. At that time getting finance was as easy as handing out a business card. Finance didn’t come with so many strings failure was inevitable. Huge numbers of companies were formed and most of them went under. But, the investors rarely lost money. They pumped and dumped the IPO and walked away with a nice profit and I was off looking for work again.

I went to a struggling startup in Canada who was bound by its investors so tightly it could not raise any more revenue. We were able to negotiate new terms and got the financing. The company turned around and is still in business today.

From there I tried to start my own game studio based on new technology. This was now in the early naughties and financing was near impossible to get. Investors were wary of funding a tech startup especially given how much they could make in housing. The terms would have ensured failure.

I found a startup in India and went there. I managed to get the projects under control and the outlook better. One partner was a major film company and understood the nature of entertainment, but the other was a pure businessman and didn’t understand a game is not a list of features.

I worked for other startups here and have learned the Indian landscape pretty well. It’s the same here as back in the US. Investors want too much for the money. And why not with real estate doubling every year and call centers being a no brainer business.

What I can do here that I can’t do in the US is have partners who live with their parents. Live on almost no money. Take no salary. Take what profits we make and hire other talent. Build a company by bootstrapping. Turn down investors. The company is over a year old and is growing steadily. I still take no salary. My partners still live with their parents. We can take the savings and continue to grow. In short it’s a lot like being in College and look how many dorm room companies there are compared to the financial funding model.

As I see it the barriers to entrepreneurship in the US is funding is very difficult to get, comes with too many strings for too much of the pie, and is a full time job securing and maintaining the relationship. So that’s an MBA I have to share the company with who contributes zero to the product. The US is too expensive and too risky to not have a job.

A decent safety net would allow people to take greater risks for a longer time making bootstrapping a possibility. Financial regulation lowering the price of money would create incentives for investors to invest in national wealth rather than a fictional bubble. Finally, let all government research be available easily to everybody rather than sold quietly to big companies, many of whom sit on it as it threatens their market share. As one commenter pointed out computer OSs do this to drive development for their platform. The US should do it to drive innovation.

Start-ups thrive during periods of strong, steady, growing aggregate demand. You don’t need more firms to make more stuff if people aren’t trying to buy more stuff. New businesses need customers.

China manipulates its exchange rate and takes ours. Then those Americans that would have worked to satisfy those markets cannot afford to be customers themselves and so on. So why start a business when the market is already satisfied?

Seed that falls on barren soil will not thrive.

As one who starting a boutique consulting business in 1999 and finally joined a longtime client as a full time employee in 2009, here are some hypotheses in my head.

First, the thinning middle class with the escalating deterioration of the social safety net, combined with the increased costs of health care for small businesses competing for talent, all may combine to make the risk/reward calculation for startups less attractive.

If the perceived downside risk of failure is buffered by the perception of a more robust middle class and safety net, then innovation is marginally easier to contemplate.

Lack of real social visibility for the top of the wealth population may make it relatively harder for would be entrepreneurs to perceive social opportunity and mobility, assuming most of them are from more or less middle class backgrounds with some education and social capital.

It would be interesting to do a more broad cross-country study of the effects of extreme wealth concentration on entrepreneurship, coupled with a study of the effects if any of types of social safety nets on entrepreneurship. Another way to think about this might be to try to tease out the effects demand side recessions on entrepreneurship, since it’s harder to imagine taking on the risk of building a better mouse trap when existing mouse trap suppliers are seeing weak demand, absent major technological breakthroughs that would confer market advantages sufficient overcome the costs of displacing established brands.

Then of course, there is so much pro-big business regulation and patent/IP law specifically designed to discourage innovators and start ups, that the risk/reward profile of entrepreneurship is ultimately affected.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmOX_L1Txb8&feature=fvwrel