Communities looking for prosperity have to court startups and entrepreneurs, right?
 
Academic and policy experts have been advocating the gospel of small since David Birch's landmark study appeared in The Public Interest in 1981.  Birch's article, entitled "Who Creates Jobs?", summed up the equation this way:
 
"Of all the net new jobs created in our sample of 5.6 million businesses between 1969 and 1976, two-thirds were created by firms with twenty or fewer employees, and about 80 percent were created by firms with 100 or fewer employees."
 
If Birch was accurate, the U.S. should have seen a metamorphosis in its economic structure over the last 30 years.  The proportion of jobs in the smallest firms should have mushroomed by two-thirds, and two-thirds of all Americans should be working in companies with fewer than 100 employees.  But as Porgy opines so crudely in Gershwin's Broadway hit: "It ain't necessarily so".