‘The study, “The Com­ing Entre­pre­neur­ship Boom,” found that sev­eral facts have emerged in the course of Kauff­man Foun­da­tion research that indi­cate the United States might be on the cusp of an entre­pre­neur­ship boom—not in spite of an aging pop­u­la­tion but because of it. These fac­tors include the shift­ing age dis­tri­b­u­tion of the coun­try, the con­tin­ued decline of life­time employ­ment, the expe­ri­ence and tacit knowl­edge such employ­ees carry with them, and the effects of the 2008–2009 reces­sion on estab­lished sec­tors of the econ­omy. The study fol­lows research from Duke University’s Vivek Wad­hwa, also pub­lished by the Foun­da­tion, which found that the aver­age age of U.S.-born tech­nol­ogy founders when they started their com­pa­nies was 39.’

“Being a 501©(3) has also made Kiva feel com­fort­able ask­ing its mem­bers to help cover the organization’s oper­at­ing costs, which totaled $5.9 mil­lion in 2009, accord­ing to Fiona Ram­sey, Kiva’s direc­tor of pub­lic rela­tions. Jack­ley zeroed in on the idea of optional trans­ac­tion fees at the 2007 Net Impact Con­fer­ence. She was on a panel with mem­bers of two related nonprofits—DonorsChoose.org Inc., which allows peo­ple to donate directly to United States class­room projects, and the Glob­al­Giv­ing Foun­da­tion, which facil­i­tates direct dona­tions to a wide range of projects around the world. An audi­ence mem­ber asked the panel how each orga­ni­za­tion cov­ered its costs. Jack­ley learned that DonorsChoose sug­gested that users make an optional 15 per­cent dona­tion in addi­tion to their base dona­tion. Glob­al­Giv­ing, in con­trast, auto­mat­i­cally took a 10 per­cent fee out of users’ base donations.”

“New find­ings:

World indus­trial pro­duc­tion con­tin­ues to track closely the 1930s fall, with no clear signs of ‘green shoots’.
World stock mar­kets have rebounded a bit since March, and world trade has sta­bilised, but these are still fol­low­ing paths far below the ones they fol­lowed in the Great Depres­sion.
There are new charts for indi­vid­ual nations’ indus­trial out­put. The big-​​4 EU nations divide north-​​south; today’s Ger­man and British indus­trial out­put are closely track­ing their rate of fall in the 1930s, while Italy and France are doing much worse.
The North Amer­i­cans (US & Canada) con­tinue to see their indus­trial out­put fall approx­i­mately in line with what hap­pened in the 1929 cri­sis, with no clear signs of a turn around.
Japan’s indus­trial out­put in Feb­ru­ary was 25 per­cent­age points lower than at the equiv­a­lent stage in the Great Depres­sion. There was how­ever a sharp rebound in March.”

“As we all, ahem, know, entre­pre­neurs are cal­low twenty-​​somethings. Except, as Dane shows, that isn’t true. Build­ing, in part, on some research by another Kauff­man col­league, Vivek Wad­hwa, he shows that entre­pre­neurs’ aver­age age skew con­sid­er­ably older than is accepted wisdom.”