Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser explains why entrepreneurs are important for our struggling economy:
In every year since 1989, new companies have created more net jobs than the economy as a whole, which means that older companies are, on average, destroying more jobs than they create. In 2009, the latest year for which we have data, new businesses created 2.33 million jobs, while older businesses destroyed, on net, more than 7 million jobs. The share of Americans working in startups has fallen to 2 percent in 2009 from 3.8 percent in 1979.
[. . .]
My own mantra is that the best way to encourage local entrepreneurship is to attract and train smart people and then get out of their way.
