The Small Business Economy

The following two pieces were provided through the courtesy of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

The Small Business Economy: 2006

A new report issued by the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration, "The Small Business Economy for Data Year 2005" examines the economic contributions of small business using data from a variety of
sources.

The report released before the National Economists Club in Washington, D.C, highlights some of the following:

** Business borrowing in 2005 was at an all-time high, and commercial banks expanded lending and eased lending standards in response to competition from non-bank lenders.

** Women’s contribution to business, using multiple data sources, the most recent show that women owned 6.5 million, or 28.2 percent, of non-farm firms. These firms employed 7.1 million workers with $173.7 billion in annual payroll.

** Three economic indicators key to an analysis of the economy’s performance—output, productivity, and unemployment—were up.

To obtain a copy of the report visit:

http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/sb_econ2006.pdf, and the research summary
at http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs286.pdf. Should you need further information, please feel free to contact Chad Moutray at (202) 205-6533 or advocacy@sba.gov .

Regional Asset Indicators

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has recently unveiled an excellent resource to assess regional innovation and entrepreneurship assets. The web site hosts a variety of interesting tools for judging how your region is performingon key economic and demographic factors.It includes spreadsheets and maps that track important categories such as innovation, creative workforce, humanamenities, wealth, infrastructure, and entrepreneurship. It also includes useful articles providing further informationon each of the indicator categories.To access the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s Regional Asset Indicators web page, visit http://www.kansascityfed.org/RuralCenter/Indicators/Indicators_main.htm.

In praise of The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson

Absolutely wonderful read - instructive on many levels.

Most of the reviews of Steven Johnson's "The Ghost Map" have focussed upon the map itself. The strength of the book likes in its exposition of:

• How the 1800s bureaucracy of public health had anchored upon the "miasmic" theory of disease at the cost of not seeing or considering *other* data which could point to the vector for cholera.
• The gritty analytical "hard work" done to identify the sources and courses of the epidemic
• The vivid description of the horrors of Dickens' London. As a contemporary, Dickens presumed a common point of refrence to the squalor. Mr. Johnson makes the despair and filth vivid for the contemporary reader.

What a (gritty) great read which should, I believe, augment courses in Public Health, Management Science, History, and English Literature. The meta book is the profound overall cautionary and instructive impact of his writing.

Suburban Revitalization - Lofts

The St. Louis Post Dispatch recently examined the boom in suburban loft space in the Metro East (e.g., Illinois) bedroom communities. Pray for density and diversity as a result.....

Meanwhile kindred zoning and planning issues drive density with "granny flats" as reported in the New York Times:

"Hundreds of communities across the country have rewritten their zoning rules in recent years, to eliminate longtime bans on apartments in single-family houses and encourage new ones to be built."

Prahalad on Strategy

Planning under constraints is the essence of good planning. C.K. Prahalad covers this well in a recent Strategy + Business report.

Prahalad's also the author of Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (mentioned earlier here).

His style reminds me very much of Victor Papanek's reality-based thinking in Design for the Real World.

Math is hard.