Are the feds finally getting it?

The Miami Herald ran an interview this week with Treasury Secretary John Snow (thanks to RM Cornwall for the heads up on this fascinating article). In this interview, Snow gave me hope that maybe, just maybe, someone in the federal government actually is beginning to understand that our hope for the future lies in the entrepreneurial economy that has emerged over the past twenty years. This economic transformation has created the first entrepreneurial recovery we have experienced in modern American history.


Snow said, ?The top priority is education, making sure young people of America have intellectual skills. By that I don’t mean just operating a computer. It’s another level of intellectual attainment — how to think through and solve problems?.We need to keep entrepreneurs and the spirit of [entrepreneurship] strong. You’ve got to let people fail, and don’t make failure a lifelong stigma, which it is in Europe. I can’t tell someone what the future holds, but it’s going to be pretty good if we do the right thing.?
Unfortunately, Snow only partially gets it. He still is still somewhat baffled by what he sees as a lack of job growth. But, Snow is utilizing the old economy metrics that look only at the employer survey of jobs rather than the more robust, and accurate, household survey that captures the explosion of new business development and self-employment that is fueling the entrepreneurial recovery we are experiencing. (See HobbsOnline for more on this issue).
According to Snow?s view of this recovery, ?There isn’t as much hiring as you’d like to see. We do see existing establishments not reducing jobs. What we haven’t seen is the other side [hiring]. Frankly, it’s a little bit of a mystery. Whenever we’ve seen a recovery this strong, we’ve seen a pickup in jobs.?
Let?s hope that Snow is simply stuck in the outdated economic theories he studied while a doctoral student at Virginia. I?d hate to think that the relationship between the federal government and corporate America is so duplicitous that it can?t, or won?t, embrace the entrepreneurial revolution that has already taken place.