How to Create Jobs

Dear Friends,
In The New York Times today, Thomas Friedman wrote a great column (here) which discusses some research and conclusions reached by Robert Litan, head of research at the Kauffman Foundation which promotes entrepreneurship.
The substance supports my post yesterday that our education system is failing to educate in the way that we need it to.  Mr. Litan is focused not on morals, but on what our economy needs from the education system.  As background, Mr. Friedman provides the following fun fact:

“Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. “That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.”

Mr. Friedman goes on to provide a road map for how we can create jobs.

But you cannot say this often enough: Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups. And where do start-ups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those? There are only two ways: grow more by improving our schools or import more by recruiting talented immigrants. Surely, we need to do both, and we need to start by breaking the deadlock in Congress over immigration, so we can develop a much more strategic approach to attracting more of the world’s creative risk-takers. “Roughly 25 percent of successful high-tech start-ups over the last decade were founded or co-founded by immigrants,” said Litan. Think Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, or Vinod Khosla, the India-born co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

Mr. Friedman focuses his column on the immigrant part of the equation.  I also see that there is a link between what Chris Hedges addresses in his book discussed in my prior post.  The same failure of our education system that teaches skills and not values also fails to produce "smart, creative, inspired risk-takers".  Our education system lets us down in so many ways.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal