Why I think micro businesses and small businesses are so important now

Technology is taking over human jobs.  Lots of them.  I'm the taxi driver falling down the hole.  I lived through the technological disruption of the taxi industry in 2003, though I struggled through 4 more years of it, before becoming fully homeless.  In my case, I went directly from working 80+ hours a week to living on the streets the very next day.  I, quite literally, became homeless from working too much.  We live in weird times.

Six years ago, a couple of researchers from Oxford University, in England, looked into the problem of how many human jobs would likely be replaced by new technology in the future. The study, which concluded that 47% of jobs will likely be replaced by new technology.  Here's the link to their research paper.  When?  In the next 20 to 25 years, so by 2033 to 2038, by their reckoning.  We're six years into that 25 years now, and yes, a lot of jobs are disappearing.

Now I know most of your eyes just glazed over, thinking "what does this mean to me?"  In the United States, I looked it up a few months back, and that "47% of jobs" works out to around 92 MILLION JOBS, 47% of the actual working population. That's a lot of jobs, and yes, they are already disappearing.  Many people might ask, "are they sure 92 million jobs will disappear?"  No, it's an estimate.  My thinking is, let's say the researchers are off, and it's 20 % less jobs that disappear, that's still 73.6 million jobs going away.  If the researchers are off, and 20% more jobs disappear, that's over 110 million jobs disappearing.  My point is, whatever the actual number turns out to be it's an astronomical number.

Now a lot of new jobs will be created, but nowhere near enough to put all these people back to work.  Looking forward, this is a huge societal issue, and it has already wreaked havoc on society, with the loss of tens of millions of good paying factory jobs lost in the 1970's through the 2000's.  Right now we have over 7 million American men of working age who are just not working.  They don't get counted in the "unemployment" statistics, because they're not looking for work.  Don't believe me? Here's the guy who wrote the book about it.  It appears that about 2/3 of these men get Social Security Disability checks, and/or other government aid.  So now, your tax dollars are not only supporting the whole government, the massive federal debt interest payments, but also 7 million guys, and a large number of women, many just too lazy to work.  Really.

This is just the beginning, most of the jobs haven't been lost yet, this problem will only get much, much worse.  A very small number of people are looking for answers and ideas to deal with this huge and looming social issue.  Most of those people are high tech people, who have a good idea where technology is heading, and how it will affect the job market.  Right now, there are two main thoughts on how to handle this issue of tens of millions more people losing their jobs to technology.

Idea #1:  This comes from economic development researcher and professor, Richard Florida, who wrote the epic work, The Rise of the Creative Class.  His research, among other things, discovered the wide gap in income between the growing "Creative Class" group of workers, and the also growing number of service sector workers.  His idea is to work with government and business to make service class jobs better paying jobs.  Companies like Whole Foods and Costco figured out how to pay their workers better than many similar companies, so it's possible many other companies could follow suit.  That's a really good idea.  Florida's work has many other facets, and he continues today to research and write on this and related ideas. 

Idea #2 comes from the high tech sector.  The idea now being pushed by many on that front is Universal Basic Income.  This is the concept of giving every single person, or at least every single adult, a check from the government each month.  The thinking is that, with this basic amount of money, poverty will be largely eliminated, people will not have to live in poverty, and will be able to buy the basic necessities with their government check, and can work part time or full time to make more money.  Obviously, the money paid out by the government to pay 330 million Americans $1,000 a month (or whatever amount), has to come from somewhere.  That's $330 billion a month, a third of a trillion dollars, a ludicrous amount, even in today's world.

I don't think this is a good idea, even if it could, somehow, be financed.  Just look at the people on living on Disability, and particularly the areas with huge numbers of people on Disability, like West Virginia and Kentucky.  Those areas are also the epicenter of our opiate crisis.  That's not a coincidence. 

Here's my main problem with both of these ideas.  Richard Florida's plan to raise pay for service workers would most likely require Congress to raise minimum wage quite a bit, and encourage the federal government to provide strong incentives to big business to pay workers more.  Those ideas require our federal government to make really controversial plans, and actually take action, in the near future.  Right now, our government barely functions at all.  Smart ideas, no matter how helpful they could be, will not happen anytime soon in a big way, simply because our government won't be able to accomplish what is required, in a reasonable time frame.

The same is true of Universal Basic Income, it would require higher taxes somewhere, along with astronomical amounts of debt, and it would require smart and timely action by Congress and other parts of the federal government.  That's just not going to happen soon.

So what does that leave us with as options?

My idea.  Encourage and help individuals to create their own jobs, by starting micro businesses and small businesses.  A micro business is generally a one person operation, whether it's an ebay store operated from a spare bedroom, working gigs like Uber and Lyft full time, or providing a needed service for local people or businesses.  A small business is just a slightly larger operation, usually involving one or more employees, like opening a cupcake bakery, or a landscaping business, for example.

Here's the good part of my idea, Congress and government is not involved at all.  It's D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself), grassroots economic development.  When people need extra money, they'll start looking for gig work, part time work, or some "side hustle" to help make ends meet.  That will happen naturally.  In today's world, with all the technology available to most people, it is easier than ever to begin a wide range of money making and small business ideas.  It's still not easy, and it takes a little thinking and a lot of work, but it is entirely possible to find ways to make money outside the traditional job market.

Rather than go to government officials and spend months or years pushing for large scale social plans, my drive is to go right to the people looking to make more money, and help them actually do that.  That's what I want to make this blog about.

Yes, I know many of the posts so far are about Big Picture thinking, and the economy writ large.  I'm into those things, those big ideas and futuristic thinking fascinate me.  That's why I'm the guy writing this blog post.  But at the same time, I got hit by technological disruption as a taxi driver several years ago.  I know how much it sucks.  I know what happens if you ignore new technology like I did.  Right now I'm exactly what I'm writing about.  I'm a former writer and video producer turned "content creator."  I'm an artist and writer using these new media skills and tech platforms to promote and sell my artwork.  So I'm right in the middle of all this myself.

As this blog moves along, I'll throw in my own ideas, things I've learned working with several entrepreneurs, or as a taxi driver or manager, and how I'm dealing with all the things I struggle with.  But I'm also going to show people who are building micro and small businesses, and doing it successfully.

I'm definitely not against Richard Florida and other people working to make service jobs better jobs.  That needs to happen.  I just think it will happen slowly, compared to the massive loss of jobs happening as we speak.  I'm not against the tech people toying with the Universal Basic income idea, and seeing if there are functional ways for that basic idea to work in some way.  But personally, I like the simple and direct method, help people create micro and small businesses.  And help that happen RIGHT NOW.

That's why I see this as my main focus these days, and why I started this blog, separate from my personal blog, to dive full bore into this idea.  Personally I think the U.S. will need millions of small businesses to be built in the next 10-20 years.  So that's where I'm putting my effort.  I hope some of you find things that will help you in your life.

Why I think highly creative small businesses are the future of America

These two are old friends of mine, and BMX freestyle pioneers from the NorCal scene, Mike Golden and Chris Rothe.  They are flipping through the brand new, second edition, of The Birth of the Freestyle Movement, a catalog-sized book chronicling the rise of BMX freestyle, now a worldwide  series of recreational and competitive sports.  In the background, you see huge photos, iconic in our little world, from 1980's BMX magazines.  Mike, Chris, myself, and a few hundred other weird kids in the mid 1980's, were drawn into the obscure new sport we expected to go nowhere.  Thousands more joined us over the next few years.  By learning and inventing tricks on "little kids bicycles," we inadvertently became part of the action sports movement, one of many sprouts that have grown into worldwide sports and industries, in about 35 years.  We are a part of the huge cultural changes that have shaken and reformed human society in our lifetimes.

The biggest changes over the last 40 or 50 years are due primarily to new technology.  As we all know, this technology now allows an average person access to most of the information collected in all of human history, at any time, with a small device we carry in our pockets.  With this same device, we can instantly communicate, by text, by voice, and even by live video, to much of the human population, anywhere in the world.  This technology, and all the associated technologies, have changed everything in our world... in our lifetimes. 

The original Apple computer, shown off at the Home Brew Club in San Jose, and the birth of Microsoft, were 44 years ago.  These massive changes in human society have happened in the lifetimes of The Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and most of Generation X, my age group.  We've watched this happen.  We've seen massive disruption spawned by these technologies and related social changes.

Think about going to a financial advisor back in 1989, just before the 90's recession.  He (it was a traditionally male industry then) would have advised investing in the blue chip stocks, mutual funds, and maybe real estate.  All of those things crashed in price in the few years after 1989.  What he would not have advised investing in was a BMX or mountain bike company, a snowboard company, a tattoo and piercing shop, a custom-built motorcycle business, or even Google.  Google didn't exist for several more years, and the other things were weird, fringe activities then, not something a person should invest in.  Yet any one of those businesses, properly run and managed, could have made you wealthy in the time between 1989 and now.  And those "blue chip" stocks?  There is a single person, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, worth more than many of those entire blue chip companies are now.  Think about that one for a minute.  That's serious change.

But, a huge number of people, well over a hundred million in the United States alone, are being left behind, by the changes to everyday life, to work, to business, to social norms, to housing, to education, and to our world at large.  Most people use their smart phones to communicate, yet most don't use that same technology to anywhere near its full potential to earn a living.  Whether shackled by insurmountable college debt, or balancing family with two service jobs, MOST of our population is struggling to survive day to day.  Poverty and homelessness are soaring, at a time where there are grade school kids making million dollars a year with a YouTube channel, and high school age millionaires in the social media influencer, entrepreneurial, and high tech worlds.

I'm a pretty smart guy.  Futurist thinking, real world economics, and big picture social dynamics are the things that really fascinate me.  I've spent most of my life reading about these things, observing what is predicted, and then what actually happens, and working to understand this huge transition period we're in now.  I literally wake up in the morning, even on my worst days, thinking about these things.  Yes, I'm weird, even in today's weird world.  

I've come to the conclusion that our best hope in these fast changing and and highly turbulent times, is huge growth in the number of small businesses.  

We need MILLIONS of new small businesses.  Here are the main large trends I think lead to this conclusion:

-An Oxford study 2013 said 47% of American jobs could be replaced by new technologies by about 2035 or 2040.  That's roughly 92 million MORE jobs that will likely disappear.  Yes, other new jobs will be created in that time, but not near enough to employ everyone who loses a job.

-With the research of Richard Florida and his team, we've learned about the Creative Class, and that high tech businesses are clustering in about ten major metro areas, which causes a couple of huge shifts.
     -The huge salaries and stock wealth in the tech world lead to surging real estate prices in those tech hub metros.  This leads to massive wealth inequality, and a struggle for affordable housing by most of the people, from lower end tech workers, those with massive college debt, and the large number of service workers, in the tech hub cities.
     -In the huge expanses of land where mid-sized cities, small towns, and rural areas are, most of the United States by area, civic leaders are struggling to attract businesses that can create living wage jobs for their populations. 

-The esteemed futurists, the late Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi, described "The Third Wave," (title of their 1980 book), the shift from an industrial-based society to an information-based society.  They describe this shift as being as massive as the shift from hunter/gatherer society to agriculture, or from agriculture to industrial society.  But this big transition is happening much, much quicker than those transitions did.  The disruption, as we can see nearly everywhere, is causing most of the population to struggle on low or mid-level paying jobs.

-The massive wealth inequality, the loss of high paying manufacturing jobs over the last 30 years, the continuing loss of jobs to new technology, and the resistance to new ideas by local leaders, has led to the huge populist movements on both the Right and the Left, and political polarization.  This political polarization has led to gridlock and downright incompetence in the the political realm, at the very time when we most need smart, fast, effective change to help people, and society at large, to adapt to the rapid technological and social change.

-The huge rise in student debt is due, in large part, to the fact that Wall Street has structured, packaged, and resold much of the $1.5 trillion in U.S. student debt in SLABS, Student Loan Asset Backed Securites, nearly identical to the CDO's that triggered the 2008 economic collapse.  In the next major economic downturn, the faucet flowing money into colleges and universities will be hit incredibly hard. That cheap money to enable students will slow down dramatically.  This will mean college towns, much of the U.S., and most of the "Red State" economy, will be hit incredibly hard.  The concept of college itself is about to be disrupted, and will have to be re-invented for the 21st century, over the next decade or so.

-All this is in the economic/social dynamic sphere.  I'm not even talking about massive disruption caused by global warming, and the more intense storms, hurricanes, and floods that will disrupt tens of thousands of lives at a very fundamental level.  Losing your home or business to a major weather event is another massive form of disruption happening at the same time all these other things are happening.

I've been thinking many years about these things, and I'm always looking towards the future.  We're looking at some really intense and really tough challenges ahead.  With all these things in my mind, after many years of thinking, I think a massive surge of people going from an employee mentality to a small business/entrepreneurial mentality, is really our only long term hope.  I'm not talking about having an idea and finding an angel investor whose money you can burn for two years.  I'm talking functional, PROFITABLE, small businesses, high tech and other kinds.  There will not be major top down changes happening quick enough.  The true answer to all these massive changes will have to be D.I.Y. and grassroots responses.

I believe that there are people in every rural area, every small town, and every mid-sized city who already have the ideas needed in those areas.  But those people are fighting against their own personal fears, people resistant to new ideas, entrenched local power structures, and at least a few, powerful local curmudgeons.  If we can empower the people throughout the country, who already  have the good ideas, to make the leap from being an employee to being a FUNCTIONAL small business person, to build what their local area needs, we rebuild America, and the economy, from the ground up.  These millions of new small businesses are the only hope I see to put the remaining employees to work in the future that we're heading into.
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A month ago, I got tapped to use my blogging and social media skills to help promote an old friend's bike business, and help it transition from upscale bike shop to viable online bike business.  At the same time, I'm now back in Southern California, I have to rebuild my own life, and build my own income back up to a reasonable level.  I'm actually doing what I'm talking about here, on a day to day level. 

This is where I'm putting my effort, building my own small business while sharing what I've learned to help other small businesses.  The biggest thing holding back our economy, in my opinion, is the mindset that kids (and adults who've lost jobs) need to learn to "find a good job."  Half of the jobs may be gone by the time today's infants hit working age.  Kids, and all the older people left behind for one reason or another, need to find meaningful work, much of which will not be traditional jobs in the future.