The Invisible American
The author posits that three metrics have to be turned around in order to save the middle class: (1) the full-time job rate, (2) the number of publicly-listed companies trading on the US exchanges, and (3) the number of new &quot;startups&quot; (which author seems to use as a blanket term for all small businesses)<p>You can&#x27;t expect the number of small businesses to increase if the vast majority of people in the country have no idea how to run a business.<p>The cultural norm in America is to entrust the doing of business to the elites of major corporations and aspire to be lifer employees for them. This worked until these companies started buying each other up, blowing their profits on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends, and laying their experienced workers off in the 1990s.<p>The reality changed very dramatically, but the culture did not change with it. Our education system is very much biased towards STEM and liberal arts, not business and trade. It is very, very odd contrasting with such an aggressively pro-capitalist foreign policy.