'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(c)(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."