HEADLINES OF THE DAY: ANOTHER 15,000 PEOPLE DIED YESTERDAY BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO POOR TO LIVE. THE RICH INCREASED THEIR WEALTH YESTERDAY BY $0.3 BILLION. THE 21st CENTURY VERSION OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IS ONE DAY NEARER.
“O Ye rich ones on earth! The poor in your midst are My trust; guard ye My trust, and be not intent only on your own ease.”
Bahá’u’lláh
A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis at willisdavid167@gmail.com. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE TO POVERTY (Part 101). This blog is a continuation of the review of HOW THE POOR CAN SAVE CAPITALISM: REBUILDING THE PATH TO THE MIDDLE CLASS by John Hope Bryant, published in 2014.
More Cadillacs were sold than during roaring 1928
A couple of decades after Ford, another automobile manufacturer learned what Ford had already shown. General Motors’ Cadillac division was faltering in the 1930s. In 1928 the company manufactured 41,172 Cadillacs; by 1933 Cadillac sold only 6,736 cars, a decline of fully 84%. Dreystadt encouraged the board of directors to drop its discriminatory policies and begin selling Cadillacs directly to black customers and in 1934 Cadillac sales increased by 70%. During still-depressed 1937, more Cadillacs were sold than during roaring 1928.
The success of the mobile phone industry
The clout of poor and working-class people is no less powerful today. Walmart, founded by a man who drove a pickup truck until the very day he died, was created to provide affordable and quality products to and for the working class and the working poor. In the service sector, restaurants exhibit the same bottom-up support. Even items such as telephones owe their huge success to the massive numbers of people who want to own them. The mobile phone industry has become one of the most profitable industries of the past one hundred years, making countless entrepreneurs and shareholders immensely wealthy while increasing the connectivity and empowerment of communities and individuals the world over. And its success has been driven by the working poor, the underserved, and the struggling classes, both in the United States and around the world.
We must restore hope
I believe that the poor are an untapped, unleveraged asset for the future prosperity of our nation and that America’s inner cities are the last bastion of lost capitalism. We must restore hope and get people moving again by improving their financial literacy and their credit scores, increasing their access to banking and investment, and increasing their self-esteem and access to positive business and personal role models.
Chapter seven: The power of small business and Entrepreneurship
According to Gallup research, 70% of all jobs in America come from small businesses with 500 or fewer employees, and half of all jobs in America come from small businesses with one hundred or fewer employees. For nearly eight years running, America hovered at around 400,000 start-ups per year, and most recently that number dipped troublingly to 350,000 in the last year reported. According to Clifton, we need approximately one million small business start-ups per year to lift our country’s economy, create jobs, and sustain our prosperity. A good number of these businesses can come from populations that have been left behind, ignored, or massively misunderstood and underestimated.
Aspiration is a powerful motivator to changing behavior
Gallup-HOPE Index and Gallup Student Poll results for 2013 showed that today’s low-income youth are more likely than their wealthier peers to develop problem-solving skills. We need a generation of entrepreneurs, small business owners, and self-employment projects which becomes more powerful with each generation. Both failure and success are cultures, and just as failure breeds more failure, success breeds more success. Aspiration is a powerful motivator to changing behavior. Aspiration is tied to hope.
Cultivating entrepreneurs in middle schools, colleges, and universities
To jump-start a stagnant U.S. economy and put the country on a path toward long-term economic growth and prosperity – even global dominance once again – leaders must get their assumptions right. They must understand that entrepreneurship trumps innovation and that finding the next generation of entrepreneurs means cultivating them in middle schools, colleges, and universities, just as surely and intentionally as the country cultivates innovators. But entrepreneurship cannot be fostered by Washington; it must be developed at city level. I urge banks to encourage community entrepreneurship in areas with depressed economies by granting loans that support small business and start-up growth in those areas.