from Hacker News

Job creation: Where are the startups?

by roedog on 9/13/12, 10:06 PM with 44 comments

  • by analyst74 on 9/13/12, 10:46 PM

    The notion of "creating job" is absurd.

    Think about it, you are creating work that someone has to do so they can get paid. If that's the goal, why don't we just pay people without having to go through the hassle of creating job?

    Heck, we have so much machinery and automation that feeding the population is no longer a problem, shelter might be slightly trickier, but in a simplistic view, if it takes 1% of the population to create the basic essentials(food,shelter) for everyone, why can't we just give those to citizens and let them do things they may actually enjoy?

  • by tptacek on 9/13/12, 10:42 PM

    Very important graf at the end:

    The only thing I can think of here is that for all that we think of startups as being largely high-tech things, in reality a huge number of them are in the construction industry, in one way or another. In a word, subcontractors. And no one’s starting new granite-countertop installation companies right now. But still, startups are a decent proxy for the dynamism of an economy. And these charts don’t bode at all well, on that front.

  • by ig1 on 9/13/12, 10:35 PM

    Note that this article uses the term startup for any small company under one year old.

    Also the underlying paper is pretty weak. The first thing the institute should have done is look at the breakdown of new companies by industry/location and see how that's change. Without doing that the claims blaming "outsourcing" and "occupational licensing" are pretty unscientific.

  • by ryanhuff on 9/13/12, 10:28 PM

    So it takes less people than ever to start a company, and that's supposed to be a bad thing? They could have easily framed it as "its cheaper than ever to operate a start-up".

    A more interesting angle would be to compare the total number of people employed in start-ups over the years, as a percentage of the labor force.

  • by kimmiller on 9/14/12, 1:37 AM

    I would have thought this outcome logical and heartening - yet journos have a history of baby/bath-water syndrome.

    If GDP is increasing (just, tick), large corporations are steady (fair assumption) then productivity increases are due to SMEs increasing productivity (ie. capital/labour ratio).

    This assumed equation is qualified in commentary around VC fund size and investments - "it's the easiest and cheapest it has ever been to start a company."

    This doesn't mean more start-ups, but if it were less, means less full-time equivalents for young companies.

    Think SAAS, lean and cloud computing. This along with a new attitude to risk amongst investors post-GFC (no large bets), means this data makes sense yet they've got the story completely backwards.

  • by jaggederest on 9/13/12, 10:39 PM

    You can't start small companies without personal wealth or available credit.

  • by dreamdu5t on 9/14/12, 12:43 AM

    The notion of "creating jobs" is dangerously ignorant.

    Jobs are a means to an end. They aren't a problem to solve, but what you do to solve a problem.

  • by InclinedPlane on 9/13/12, 10:42 PM

    So we are to believe that startups are not magically shielded from the massive worldwide economic downturn in progress right now? Why is this news?