Archives: Reg Murphy Pubs

Entrepreneurship is alive and well in Brunswick

Written by Skip Mounts on . Posted in Reg Murphy, Skip Mounts.

On the first Wednesday of every month at 9 a.m. a group of people gather at Tipsy McSway’s in downtown Brunswick to listen to two entrepreneurs talk about their businesses or nonprofits. We hear it all — beginnings, histories, successes, problems and challenges. Such is the nature of 1 Million Cups, Brunswick. These meetings have been going on for 18 months so it is time to tell the citizens of the Golden Isles what we have learned about our Brunswick entrepreneurs.

In general, entrepreneurs are an interesting lot. Regardless of where one goes, you tend to find them in unexpected places. They value their individuality. And they all have interesting stories that have led them to do what they do. In many cases their calling is so strong they have to do what they do.

Almost 42 percent of our entrepreneurs and presenters and their enterprises can be found in downtown Brunswick. It seems like there is a general impression in our community that not much is going on in downtown. While there is often news of renewed hope of a hotel and conference center development project, entrepreneurs are filling the void. Entrepreneurs will often go where others will not. Opportunity has many different faces and between Norwich and Newcastle streets may offer such an unexpected place.

Nearly 53 percent of our 1 Million Cups entrepreneurs are women. This is very unusual relative to other communities that support a 1 Million Cups forum. Entrepreneurs are, more often than not, go-it-alone, risk-taking pathfinders. Here, success is its own reward where judgment is only found in the ability to please customers. Opinions based on arbitrary characteristics such as gender do not find a home in the world of entrepreneurs.

To affirm these points about our Brunswick entrepreneurs, new freedoms and social liberalizations are being introduced in Saudi Arabia through the influence of reformer Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. One of the first signs of the impact of these small initial changes is the appearance of entrepreneurs and their food trucks in the capital city of Riyadh. One of the most popular, judging by the line of men wanting to buy coffee, is run by a woman and her daughter.

Finally, Brunswick entrepreneurs have some amazing stories. Entrepreneurship is more than just starting a business. It involves the beginning creativity necessary to identify unmet needs of others or problems that need to be solved. In the case of our Brunswick entrepreneurs opportunity and creativity have been found in the napkins of a grandmother, in the hearts of rescue dogs, in the wellbeing of veterans, in the desire to give kids their own places to read at home, to just know that there is opportunity in the vacant buildings in downtown Brunswick and on and on. All are special and unique. Entrepreneurial storytelling is alive and well in Brunswick.

Data from studies of the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City show that since 1980, businesses aged 0 to 5 years show positive net job creation — more jobs are created than destroyed. Businesses 6 to 10 years of age show zero net job creation over the same period while businesses older than 11 years show negative job growth. So, economic prosperity and job creation is found in new firms. The ecosystem that generates new businesses is the land of the entrepreneur. From the experiences presented at 1 Million Cups, Brunswick, our ecosystem is alive, well and very special.

  • Reg Murphy Center
  • Skip Mounts

Economic development requires involving the community

Written by Melissa Trussell on . Posted in Melissa Trussell, Reg Murphy.

Last week, my colleague Dr. Don Mathews wrote about ways in which Hurricane Irma gave us a glimpse of what life is like for millions of folks living in developing countries without electricity or running water. I have spent a good bit of time living and working in developing countries, and I echo Don’s sentiment — thank goodness for electricity and plumbing here at home.

While I am grateful for the ways in which Southeast Georgia differs from countries in the developing world, I have become increasingly aware of the ways in which we are similar. A high percentage of our population live in poverty (Glynn County — 19 percent, Indonesia — 11 percent), though the gap between our richest and poorest households is astounding. We have low labor force participation (Camden County — 49 percent, Nigeria — 56 percent). And residents of our region who are over age 25 are unlikely to have earned a college degree (Charlton County — 11 percent, Ecuador — 14 percent).

With such similarities to low-income countries, there are things we can learn about ourselves by looking to the literature on economics and policy in developing countries. For starters, one of the greatest lessons in economic development is the need for all actors with a stake in the success of the community to work together toward a shared vision. For long-term, sustainable development to occur, everyone — government entities, business owners, nonprofit leaders and, perhaps most importantly, local residents — must be involved throughout the development process.

There is a classic example of development done wrong: the well-meaning charitable giver who decides to collect shoes from his home country to give away to barefoot children in a village in a developing country. Consequentially, the children are shoed, but the local cobbler goes out of business, and the entire village becomes dependent on outside aid to provide footwear.

The shoe-giver attempts to address an immediate symptom with an unsustainable solution, and the result is to move the village backward, rather than forward in economic development. What made this solution unsustainable? It did not involve all local stakeholders in the shoe market. It was a development project done for the community rather than with the community. Perhaps a better approach would have been to involve the community in finding and addressing the root of the barefootedness. Maybe the real problem is not a lack of shoes, but a lack of job opportunities, leaving parents unable to afford shoes for their children. And the “solution” of providing free shoes adds the cobbler to the list of unemployed.

So, what can we in Southeast Georgia learn from this example of an unsuccessful development attempt in a poor village far away?

Consider our development goals here at home, poverty relief; improved labor force participation; increased education; community revitalization. In working toward these goals, our efforts are best spent first getting to know our poor, our non-working, our young and others in our communities to understand what our needs really are before we start blindly throwing shoes. And as we get to know our neighbors and understand our collective strengths and weaknesses, we will be in a position to work together to capitalize on our strengths to address our weaknesses through sustainable economic and community development.

  • Melissa Trussell
  • Reg Murphy Center

An economic lesson from Irma

Written by Don Mathews on . Posted in Don Mathews, Reg Murphy.

There are certainly more preferable ways to learn economics than suffering a hurricane. But Irma happened, and there are economic lessons that we can learn from it.

One lesson is: Thank goodness we live when we do and where we do.

Life with electricity and water supply and sanitation systems is not just more convenient than life without them. When the power goes out and the water system stops working, life gets unhealthy and dangerous fast. Puddles of stagnant water become ripe sources of illness and disease. And good luck to you if you get sick or hurt or go into labor when there’s no power or clean running water or roads that can be traveled by car.

Yet life without electricity and running water and cars was the way life was for thousands of years, until quite recently. In 1900 — not long ago in the history of human beings — the U.S. was already the richest country in the world. In that year, 3 percent of homes had electricity and 15 percent had running water and flush toilets.

The poorest country on earth today is the Central African Republic. Life expectancy in the Central African Republic is 52. In the U.S. in 1900, life expectancy was 47, and disease from ingesting contaminated water — cholera, dysentery, typhoid and others — was a leading cause of death.

Life without power and a functioning water system for four days after Irma was a worrisome burden. Imagine living your entire life without them. The fact is that we here in 2017 in the U.S. and a few other choice spots on the planet are by far the richest people in the history of the human race.

How did that happen?

Ideas. We are the beneficiaries of a combination of revolutionary ideas that brought about the miracle of modern economic growth that economist Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment.

First came the idea, which caught hold in the late 16th century, that knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, can and should be used to improve the everyday lot of humankind.

Mix that with the humanist ideas of the European Enlightenment — in particular the idea that the world of here and now is important and should be made better — and the revolutionary Enlightenment ideas about economic liberty: that people have the right to offer their labor services to any employer they choose, that they have the right to enter markets to sell goods and services without restraint by government or competing producers and that to engage in such productive economic activity is good for humanity.

The consequence of people living those ideas has been the utterly astounding enrichment of living standards of the past 200 years.

In 1800, income per person in the United States was roughly $1,000 — in today’s dollars. In 1900, it was about $5,700. Today, it’s $46,400. That’s an increase in living standards since 1800 of a factor of 46. There is nothing comparable in human history.

It’s ironic — capitalism is really not about the accumulation of capital, physical or financial. What makes capitalism capitalism is ideas: about liberty, innovation, entrepreneurship and the moral value of creating things that improve people’s lives.

Enjoy your electricity and running water.

  • Don Mathews
  • Reg Murphy Center