North Carolina’s economic development policy has focused on the former (Dell, Google, etc.) at the expense of the latter (high tax rates, overregulation, etc.).
Kevin D. Williamson‘s latest National Review article adds more fuel to the fire of those who question the elephant-hunt style of economic developemt:
Job losses were pretty rough over the course of the recession, but we are not shedding jobs very quickly anymore. The number of job losses in recent months is, in fact, down around our historical levels. But there aren’t new jobs. During normal economic times, there’s a fair amount of churn in U.S. employment, with older firms shedding workers and new businesses picking them up. But the startups have gone missing, and that’s bad news for American workers ? worse, even, than they might think. The Kauffman Foundation recently ran the numbers and concluded that almost all of the net job growth for the United States in recent years has come from startups: “Until 2005, we knew that from 1980-2005, nearly all net job creation in the United States occurred in firms less than five years old,” the authors write in Where Will the Jobs Come From? “This data set also shows that without startups, net job creation for the American economy would be negative in all but a handful of years. If one excludes startups, an analysis of the 2007 Census data shows that young firms (defined as one to five years old) still account for roughly two-thirds of job creation, averaging nearly four new jobs per firm per year. Of the overall 12 million new jobs added in 2007, young firms were responsible for the creation of nearly 8 million of those jobs.” No new firms, no new jobs.
