Author Archives: JanessaChubb

Raw Data: America Is Still Producing Lots of Inventive Young Companies

by JanessaChubb Posted on May 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a quick follow-up to my post last week about the decline in new business startups over the past few decades. Does this suggest that America is getting less entrepreneurial? In one way, yes: some of it is probably due to big national chains making it harder to start small family businesses, and some of it is probably due to an aging population. Economically, however, the triumph of gigantic chain stores isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the aging of the baby boomers should be thought of as a separate demographic issue, not a business startup issue.

Still, economists all agree that the key to a healthy economy is young, growing companies (not small businesses pe se). So how are we doing on that score? Over at Slate, Jordan Weissman points to a study by Paul Kedrosky that tries to quantify the number of startups that grow to $100 million or more in a fairly short period. The chart on the right shows his results. There’s a spike during the dotcom boom of the late 90s, and a dropoff during the Great Recession—a period too recent to have yet produced very many $100 million companies anyway—but there’s basically no secular decline at all. Roughly speaking, America has been producing about 150 small, fast-growing companies per year for the past three decades.

This is just a single data point, and Kedrosky warns that his data is necessarily pretty rough. But it does suggest that although America might be producing fewer new coffee shops and boutique clothing stores, it’s not necessarily losing its inventive edge.

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Raw Data: America Is Still Producing Lots of Inventive Young Companies

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Bush-Appointed Judge Rules that No-Fly List Makes Some Americans "Second-Class Citizens"

by JanessaChubb Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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A Virginia man who claims that as a teenager he was detained, interrogated, and abused in Kuwait at the behest of the Obama administration (a story I wrote about here) has won a key victory in his lawsuit against the government. A George W. Bush-appointed judge allowed Gulet Mohamed’s case to move forward on Wednesday, ruling that by putting him on the no-fly list (and thus infringing on his right to return home to the US), the government made him “a second class citizen.”

Judge Anthony Trenga of the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled that the no-fly list’s “impact on a citizen who cannot use a commercial aircraft is profound,” restricting the right to travel and visit family, the “ability to associate,” and even the ability to hold down a job. Inclusion on the list also “also labels an American citizen a disloyal American who is capable of, and disposed toward committing, war crimes, and one can easily imagine the broad range of consequences that might be visited upon such a person if that stigmatizing designation were known by the general public,” Trenga added. Here’s another key excerpt:

In effect, placement on the No Fly List is life defining and life restricting across a broad range of constitutionally protected activities and aspirations; and a No Fly List designation transforms a person into a second class citizen, or worse. The issue, then, is whether and under what circumstances the government should have the ability to impose such a disability on an American citizen, who should make any such decision, according to what process, and by what standard of proof.

Trenga ruled that the government, which argued that Mohamed should go through the Department of Homeland Security’s notoriously Kafkaesque no-fly list redress process before suing, had not made its case. “The current record,” he wrote, “is inadequate to explain why judicial involvement before a person is placed on the No Fly List is either unnecessary or impractical, other than perhaps within the context of an emergency.” In other words, the government should let the courts review placements before they happen—not wait for citizens to exhaust every avenue for complaint.

“We applaud this decision as a clear rebuke of the government’s use of the no-fly list as applied to Americans,” Gadeir Abbas, Mohamed’s attorney, said in a statement released Wednesday evening.

Wednesday’s was the second no-fly list ruling in as many weeks: on January 15, a court in San Francisco ruled that a former Stanford University doctoral student was not a national security threat and should be removed from the list.

You can read the whole Mohamed decision here:

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Mohamed v Holder (PDF)

Mohamed v Holder (Text)

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Bush-Appointed Judge Rules that No-Fly List Makes Some Americans "Second-Class Citizens"

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