Five simple questions. Somebody should be able to answer them.

1. What fraction of the tax base of local folks work in small family businesses, DBAs, individual contractors, consultants, and ad hoc for-profit partnerships are there in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County? [Best you don't step across the line into the neighboring counties, just for this particular question.] I don’t mean people collecting unemployment insurance, nor people on the rolls as W-4 employees; I mean actual self-employed and contract workers. What fraction?
2. What proportion of the people generating useful, lucrative work in the region give a damn about more startups? In other words, what is the proportion of actual human beings involved in your “entrepreneurial” ventures, compared to what one might call, oh, I don’t know… going ventures maybe?
3. What is the median rent paid by a company in Ann Arbor for office space, per square foot, as a function of company size (in real people)? I’d like to see charts or tables, at least, and not some list of lowest possible prices in the airport light industrial ghetto. Downtown is where people talk to each other.
4. Where is one supposed to host a fucking business conference, if you [SPARK, the Economic Development People in the Address of Fucking "Innovation"] don’t have room for a paltry 120 people in your damned “headquarters” downtown in the County Fucking Seat? You think the basement next to the bums is too crowded, you should try a damned restaurant balcony sometime.
5. What have you done, recently, to inform people who are (strangely) starting or running businesses in town? I don’t mean pimping for angel investors and fucking landlords, or even starting folks “meeting and greeting” one another in the appropriate khaki attire. I don’t mean trying to pick up sexy young programmers next to the park. I mean what have you actually done to help people understand how to produce a 1099 for a friend, or file trademark applications, or protect intellectual property, or set up a website for themselves?

Bonus question: What use are you? Not to me. To the actual community.

Here’s what I think, frankly: I think you believe in the sad, inbred population of “successful” entrepreneurs around here, who for the most part sold their companies just before economic downturns, or surfed their way to success on University-funded research spinoffs, or who come here to rent cheap office space subsidized by ridiculous tax credits without ever planning on interacting with the actual community. I think you believe the middle-aged white men who made their bucks did it because of “skill” or “diligence” or maybe even (among the more literate of you) “acumen”, instead of being lucky and ruthless and warming a corner office seat while actual people did actual work down the hall in their cubicle warrens. I think you believe that the local hyena’s pack of angel investors and coast-connected VC are the way to foster “innovation” around here (just like back in the early 1970s), the way to “bootstrap the economy” around here (just like the commercial realtors “bootstrapped” on the back of dying family businesses), the way to “transfer” “innovation” somehow to “local” businesses, just like Larry and Serge might do someday.

In other words, I think you believe their stories, the mythology concocted by normal people whose rewards were won because they stood in the right place at the right time, or told the right sucker the right story under the right economic conditions, or just looked right. I like the cut of your jib too, but I’m not stupid enough to think you have a better chance of running a real company than that ugly fellow over there.

And you know, I don’t mind you falling for that claptrap. I don’t mind you believing things informed more by survivorship bias and received wisdom than actual facts.

What I mind is you passing that crap on to useful, earnest, diligent, kids, and leading them to believe they’ll be the next Google if only they work harder. That they need to find somebody to borrow money from, to leverage their ideas so they can grow and launch a startup and execute their exit strategies.

Why, instead, aren’t you teaching them to have reasonable, comfortable lives? To work no more than eight hours a day, to invest wisely and foster collaborations widely, to speak respectfully with their elders and seek insight from their peers, to share and build persistent and supportive social and cultural networks locally and abroad?

I know why. Because you don’t value them. You value your investors, your angels, your landlords and insurance agents. You count the number of asses warming chairs in properties other people own, the number of dollars moving up the hierarchy and into the measurable tax base.

What gets measured gets done. The problem is, you measure a myth.