The title of this blog should be ‘I apologize’. But it is hard to apologize for the end of a great boom that I helped cause.
I have caused several great changes in my society.
* I and only I had the knowledge and was in the right position to have created the modern international credit card. The first international money.
* I and only I had the math skills and was in the right place to raise bank savings account rates which a decade later brought down the savings and loan industry. Its gone now.
* The greatest force I helped unleash was the economic boom from 1984 to 2006.
I am ironically apologizing for the collapse of American economic growth from 2008 until today; as well as the global impact of the American failure to grow. I caused the great boom that preceded it.
It is very simple. From 1974 onward I provided business advice to hundreds of small businesses starting out. I wrote books, taught classes and travelled the country giving lectures. In the San Francisco Bay Area I organized the Briarpatch which had over 1000 small businesses including some members in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis. This created the greatest boom in small businesses in history. Here is a chart going back to 1981.
It was my approach to business that spread the enthusiasm for new business and generated a 90% success rate for small business survival (the opposite of the normal 10% survival after three years rate).
This chart for the U.S. shows that it was my work and the apprentices that I trained that created the economic boom of 1984 to 2006.
Small businesses create vast employment that is half the total of all jobs. Many of these small businesses ultimately grow to be the big businesses that provide the other half of the jobs.
The proof of my role in this business explosion is that I was invited to create small businesses in Sweden and I created 4,000 new businesses from 1978 to 1985. My approach was copied in Germany a short time later. I replicated my success.
The chart comes from a paper by Steven J. Davis U. of Chicago. Data is from the U.S. Census.