Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Small businesses and jobs

re: Small businesses and jobs
Robert — (archived)

Those statistics come from a report released in 2001 which was undoubtedly based on data from no later than 2000, when the economy was still racing along and there were just faint signs of the recession to come (the year 1999 was cited in the quoted part, so I'm being generous).

The statistics by themselves can't reveal that small businesses are in general dependent on the health of big business. Many small businesses are suppliers to bigger businesses in the American equivalent of the Japanese zaibatsu system. Completely indepedent small businesses tend to be in the service sector, and their income comes from the income of people in their area who are mainly employed by the biggies. When the big companies dump their organic machinery small businesses suffer too.

A mess of statistics doesn't address what I observed: Small businesses haven't taken up the slack and provided work for the nine million unemployed. That's pretty powerful and straightforward evidence that the fate of small business is tied to that of big business. It's an interconnected system.

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (69 posts)