Unemployment numbers
Last Saturday’s Times had a number if interesting articles. In addition to the one I noted on Monday, there was an op ed piece by Bob Herbert entitled "No Recovery In Sight." The gist of his piece is that until there is a marked improvement in employment, any recovery is a hollow recovery. Of course he is right at least in so far as if people are not working then life continues to be hard even if the economy is expanding.
Paul Tsongas was a Partner in our law firm, and I distinctly remember him telling a story about his hard working parents in Lowell. The moral to the story was that no matter how hard they worked, and they worked hard, they were prisoners of larger economic trends. Unfortunately, I think the same will have to be said of the many many people who have lost their jobs in this recession. A lot of these jobs just aren’t coming back until it is equally cost efficient to build stuff here rather than elsewhere. The time necessary to level the playing field is not going to be measured in months. Also, if the process is just a leveling process, the end result may not be so great. Do we really want to look like a better China?
To state the obvious, this is why all the talk about entrepreneurial effort and new technologies is so critical to the equation. If we can’t bring the entrepreneurial world back in a big way, we are going to suffer for a really long long time. This is why I feel so committed to the Emerging Enterprise Center and why we should all care about the turmoil in the angel and venture world and, ultimately, in the world of exits and the capital markets.
