Are Entrepreneurs in Short Supply?

By Jacqueline Verrilli

Because of the news of wildly successful start-ups, it’s easy to get the impression that there are lots of good jobs being created around the globe.  But a few disparate pieces of evidence add up to a much different picture.

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Underemployment is still a huge problem. The Pew Research foundation gauges underemployment by looking at the wages and salaries of college graduates. A person is considered underemployed if their level of education exceeds that required for their job, like a college graduate working the counter at a car rental agency, or if the job’s wages are substantially below what the average person with that level of education is earning.  According to Pew’s research, the good news is that underemployment in the US has been dropping steadily for the past 15 years.  In 1990, fully 65% of college graduates were underemployed in “Good non-college jobs”, and “Low wage jobs”. That figure had fallen to 50% by 2012.  But that, of course, still means that 50% of college graduates are underemployed. Shockingly, over 20% percent of college graduates are now ending up in jobs that earn less than $25,000 a year; 5 percentage points higher than back in 1990.


Given that studies show that underemployed individuals are far more likely to be dissatisfied with their lives, not just their jobs, this statistic has larger implications. Job dissatisfaction is the number one stressor cited in polls and large scale studies of US workers and is a major contributor to poor self-confidence and behaviors that lead to health issues.  So underemployment is not merely a financial issue, it has more far-reaching welfare implications.

Go Generate a Job, Will Ya?!


Just last month several news outlets reported that the major banks, including J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank, were turning away their corporate clients’ cash deposits and, in some cases, charging fees to hold the cash.  The Wall Street Journal reported that the ostensible cause was the new regulations being put into place to lessen the likelihood of another banking crisis making these large deposits more costly for the banks. But if we look more closely, there is also another reason. The October 18^th Wall Street Journal article entitled “Big Banks to America’s Firms: We Don’t Want Your Cash” states “the globe is awash in cash”.  The article cites soft economic growth and limited corporate investment as causative reasons for the excess of cash.  The article goes on, “Many businesses have large sums on hand and opportunities to profitably invest it appear scarce.”  It appears that big companies literally have more money than they know what to do with. They aren't purchasing other companies, engaging in mergers, or even spending on R&D.

This boils down to a perceived lack of quality investments in the marketplace and no new good ideas coming from internal sources.  If this trend continues, an economic slow-down is all but inevitable.

Where is My Real Iron Man?

Elon Musk has gotten a lot of attention for taking on gigantic projects and succeeding. From PayPal to Tesla Motors to SpaceX, Musk has set his sights on making the internet more efficient for transactions, disrupting the fossil fuel industry, and colonizing Mars in our lifetime. Well, that’s all well and good, but I still don’t own a robot.  And I want one. True, I do own a little automatic vacuum that is, as I write this, scampering around the house sweeping up my children’s crumbs and the dirt my husband tracks into the house after a run, but I don’t have a personal servant that can get into a self-driving car to run errands, cook fresh, nutritious meals for my family, and give me a neck massage when I’ve been sitting at the computer too long. Okay, okay… My stiff neck may not qualify as a big enough problem that a fully functioning cyborg needs to be created to solve it, but burning buildings and tedious menial labor jobs abound. My point is that there are many, much larger problems in the world that need to be addressed and it takes people who are willing to take big risks in an effort to create a particular vision of the future to solve them. Right now there is an abundance of educated individuals and cash, and not enough visionaries to put these valuable resources to good use.


It’s always great to hear about a new flavor of snack chip, and I am always super-geeked to hear the news from CERN about the search for dark matter. But the world is in desperate need of people who can look just over the next hill and create something truly useful for society’s present problems. To all you readers, I call for you to take up the glove, pick a problem, and start running the entrepreneurial gauntlet.  The world needs you.