Hazel Borys

Small entrepreneurs the key

Principal and managing director of PlaceMakers, Jan 31, 11.

Tagged with creative class, economic development, entrepreneur

In the economic development world, we’re always trying to grow our economic base. And by that we mean goods and services that we export, not just what we use in our local markets. That might include university services, tourism, and any products that we pack and ship, or regional retail that we steal from our neighbors.

We see economic development in conventional terms, and we seek only to perpetuate the model, adding more of the same to the end of the chain. Another monkey from the barrel, so to speak.

All I really need to know, I learned in Kindergarten.
At least as it relates to old-skool economic development.

From the MBA perspective, OPM, or Other People’s Money, usually refers to debt. But it’s really also the traditional view of economic development, the Ponzi scheme that Strong Towns articulates so well. It’s how America has run for the last century, and it isn’t working. We can’t spend our way out of this financial situation by boosting consumer confidence so that we “spend” the most recent stock market up-tick, which we, of course, haven’t sold our stocks to really capture and may just turn into credit card debt in the end. It’s the same sort of way we’ve justified the next sprawling infrastructure spending in the hope of future revenue. MORE

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