Fertile Ground

Unemployment is not a good thing. I don't think anyone will tell you otherwise. Certainly, as we hear consecutive updates about job losses and the unemployment rate creeping higher and higher, nobody is rejoicing.

Last week, though, The Economist Magazine published a special report on entrepreneurship that I found to be uplifting. With the kind of economy we have right now, a lot of people are losing their jobs through no fault of their own, and a lot of recent graduates are struggling to get their first jobs as well. Not only that, there are tons of people who find themselves underemployed, working at jobs that don't fully utilize their potential. A colleague of mine recently told me a story about a lawyer friend working shifts at a gas station. In economics-speak, we might call all this "labor displacement." It isn't that the growing hordes of the jobless are unemployable or lazy or stupid, it is just that the ground beneath the economy as we know it is shifting.

How to put a positive spin on this dismal reality? Well, with so much displaced labor, there has got to be something that is now in surplus. But what is it? For one thing, there is a lot of excess, underutilized talent floating around. And when you get a lot of free-floating, talented individuals from just about every industry, a likely byproduct is the creative recombination of skills into something novel, something innovative. All of the brainpower that has recently been laid off, after it has exhausted the thrill of severance pay and newfound freedom, well, it has to find something new to feed upon. I find this not only highly comforting but also greatly exciting. High unemployment rate = fertile ground for entrepreneurship! It's just like science! (That's why I used the "equal" sign.)