
Start-ups tend to flourish following a downturn - matstc
http://www.economist.com/theworldin/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12494659
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skmurphy
The title is taken from this quote in the article and feels like a legitimate
summary of the tone of the article, which is upbeat.

"Carl Schramm, the head of the Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit organization
that promotes entrepreneurial activity, points out that start-ups tend to
flourish in the year that follows a sharp downturn."

I think flourish in this context means "many are started" not "many are doing
well three to five years later." I am a committed entrepreneur but I think too
many blog posts and articles are encouraging folks who are not fundamentally
entrepreneurs to try something that will likely fail and leave them worse off,
not better. The penalty for this in your forties and fifties is much higher
than in your twenties. Many of these laid off folks might be much better
served to wait out this worldwide recession over the next year to 18 months by
frugal living and part time work, not by spending any funds trying to start a
business.

I blogged about this in "We Don't Encourage Individuals to Form a Start-up"
[http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/12/04/we-dont-encourage-
in...](http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/12/04/we-dont-encourage-individuals-
to-form-a-startup/)

~~~
petercooper
_The title is taken from this quote in the article and feels like a legitimate
summary of the tone of the article, which is upbeat._

There are 8 paragraphs in the article. The concept of startups or starting a
company is not introduced until the fifth paragraph. Since the focus of the
article is not startups, the title of this HN post is a poor summary to me -
it feels worded just to get modded up.

~~~
skmurphy
If you look at the last two dozen articles matstc has submitted over the last
nine months (<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=matstc> ) none of them
substantially modify the original title, and in fact this title is taken from
a subtitle in the article. If it was "worded just to get modded up" it would
be unusual behaviour on matstc's part. The subtitle starts the section of the
article that HN readers would be interested in.

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petercooper
The title of this item is not the title of the actual article - and the title
here doesn't summarize the article very well at all :( Only the last few
paragraphs talk about startups.

It'll be interesting to see if this time is different. The drop in securities
right now is significantly sharper than in 2002, so these "older workers" are
less likely to take flagrant risks this time around.

~~~
mattmaroon
Ha, I've clicked this 3 times because firefox clears my history and I saw the
title and thought "hmm, I don't remember reading that." This sort of title
changing for editorializing is the main reason I can't read Reddit.

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matt1
Yeah, misleading title, but still a good article. I especially liked the
heading "Hire Yourself" before the startup portion of it.

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irrelative
I'm not trying to discourage startup founders, but in the face of much
contradictory evidence and the general audience here, this seems like a case
of confirmation bias: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias>

