PE Obama’s 1st Big Mistake

Amazing post - perfectly posited imo. The most powerful lines for me:

"Entrepreneurs that start and run small businesses will be the propellant in this economy. PE Obama needs to have the counsel of those who will take the real risk inherent in creating companies and jobs. Those who put their money and lives on the line with their business...Your current group has no one with 100pct of their networth on the line. I promise you that the possibility of losing it all will provide a completely different perspective than any of the “knowledge” the esteemed, learned members of his current advisory team offer."

The danger of advice from somebody with everything on the line is a lack of objectivity.

Personally, I don't think we need to make any sweeping changes to encourage entrepreneurship directly. The United States is already a great place to start a business. The key making sure that is true 20 years from now by continuing to invest wisely in education, research, energy...etc.

I don't think he, or any politician at that level, for that matter, can help it. The only people they rub elbows with are the established, credentialed, and connected. If he knew the right startup/entrepreneur people he would be a VC or angel, not a politician.

I had the same thought as Mark Cuban. A PhD in Economics, even winning the Nobel Prize (see my critique of Krugman) doesn't give you the real world feel that starting and running a business does. Economics is full of unintended consequences. Couple of examples, which every start-up person here can appreciate: if you make it very hard to do a lay-off, that leads to businesses becoming extremely cautious in hiring. The minimum wage directly leads to entrepreneurs not taking a chance to hire a less skilled person and train them on the job. These are easy enough to see when you run a business.

It would amaze you how many things that are "common sense" for an entrepreneur are hard for someone sitting in their ivory tower.

This is not just a problem in economics. After I got out of Princeton with a PhD in Electrical Engineering, it amazed me just how orthogonal to the real world much of my adviser's academic work proved to be - I happened to land a job that directly dealt with one of his core areas of research, though I wasn't involved in that area during my PhD myself. My realization led me to write a paper that pointed out that his work was dealing in mathematical models that were not very relevant to the real world, which predictably led to our intellectual parting of ways.

I felt experience working as an engineer should be mandatory for anyone aspiring to be an engineering professor, yet you will find that most engineering faculty have never worked outside of academia.

Not arguing your underlying point, but the examples you chose are poor--all economists are well aware of the effects of a minimum wage, and of barriers to hiring/firing. It's people with no background in economics who don't understand those things.