An
economy where most people work for the state or a global corporation
is an economy that has lost its knowledge of the key entrepreneurial
building blocks.
The
decline of small business has numerous long-term consequences. One
is the decline of the middle class, as entrepreneurial enterprise is
a key pathway to generational wealth-building and prosperity.
Another
is the loss of employment opportunities. As U.S.
businesses are being destroyed faster than they’re being created,
there are fewer sources of employment.
Since many people get their first job at small
businesses, the decline of small business has an outsized effect on
entry-level employment opportunities.
Correspondent
Kevin K. identified a third long-term consequence: the erosion of
opportunities to learn basic skills with economic value. As
low-skill work is increasingly replaced by software and robotics,
work with a future requires not just higher-level skills but a
spectrum of building-block skills and values–what I call the
eight essential skills of professionalism in
my book Get
a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.
Many of these skills are fundamental
life-skills that are not taught in classrooms; they are learned on
the job. If the kind of jobs that enable the learning of these basic
building blocks of economic value go away, so do the opportunities to
gain these skills.
Here
is Kevin’s commentary:
In The
Decline of Small Business and the Middle Class, you wrote:
It
is not coincidental that the middle class and small business are both
in decline. Entrepreneurial enterprise and small business have long
been stepping stones to middle class incomes and generational wealth,
i.e. wealth that is passed down to future generations rather than
consumed.
For me the big take-away is that as fewer
people in America work for small business owners who often share with
employees what they did to create “middle class incomes and
generational wealth”, we will have fewer people who know how to do
this (or even imagine it is possible).
My first “real” (as defined by a job paid
for by a non-family member) was pulling weeds for a neighbor (at
$0.60/hour a.k.a. “a penny a minute”). I later made $1/hour when
I started mowing his lawn then $2/hour until I had to stop at 14 when
I started working all day every Saturday at the grocery store making
$3/hour.
Unlike today where most gardening jobs have a
guy that does not speak English working for a guy that speaks a
little English, I was working for a contractor that owned his own
business and a home and was into cars (my Dad knew nothing about
cars).
He came over and gave us some pointers on
turning a corner of our basement into a new room for me (and let us
his hammer drill to make holes for the Red Heads to hold the wood to
the floor). When I turned 16 he accompanied me a couple times to look
at used cars (and saved me from buying a car with major rust/rot).
Working in the little grocery store (owned by
two butchers born in Italy), I not only learned about the retail
grocery and meat business but how to patch a leaking flat roof with
Henry wet patch and how to maintain HVAC systems and commercial
refrigeration systems. Today in a WalMart grocery store you typically
have a kid working for minimum wage doing what his “manager”
(that was probably making minimum wage a year ago) doing what the
latest corporate memo told them to do.
When I spent a winter in Lake Tahoe getting
vacation homes ready for renters, I not only learned a lot about the
rental market and the real estate market, I also learned how to do
low-cost home maintenance from owners that have been doing it for
years and got to work side by side with them. Kids today working for
a giant corporation don’t have that opportunity and as a result
don’t learn nearly as much.
Thank
you, Kevin, for describing the process of learning entrepreneurial
life-skills.In
a neofeudal economy dominated by the government-corporate
partnership, the erosion of small business goes hand in hand with an
erosion of building-block skills, opportunities to learn these
essential life-skills, and the cultural knowledge of how to start and
operate an independent enterprise.
An
economy where most people work for the state or a global corporation
is an economy that has lost its knowledge of the key entrepreneurial
building blocks and its opportunities for independence from the
neocolonial Company Store: Is
Small Business a Threat to the Status Quo?)
Want
to give an enduringly practical graduation gift? Then give my new
book Get
a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy,
a mere $9.95 for the Kindle ebook edition and $17.76 for the print
edition.
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