I love research because it is the tool of science, which seeks to observe the world and to measure and explain what it sees.

But, of course, science is only as useful as the degree to which it remains connected to the real world. That is the real significance behind the phrase “fact based policy.”

On the one hand, it is possible to spend a lot of time and energy studying things that don’t matter. Except, of course, why would you? What would be the point?

A couple of weeks ago, when we looked at how the economy was doing, we saw signs of recovery that did not seem to have penetrated to the level of the small business economy. That state of being persists, according to a new set of numbers released over the last couple of weeks by almost [...]

When the House got finished with her, SBA Administrator Karen Mills faced a somewhat friendlier panel on the Senate side of Capitol Hill. The Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship finally held its second budget hearing of the 111th Congress last week. Very naturally, Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-LA) was full of praise for President [...]

SBA Administrator Karen Mills had a busy day last Wednesday. Before she appeared before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship to defend her agency’s fiscal 2011 budget request, she joined SBA Inspector General Peggy Gustafson at an oversight hearing before the House Committee on Small Business. Recent House rules require quarterly oversight hearings [...]

In other words, microbusinesses are small and that’s why we don’t get what we need.

Except for those microbusinesses that are not small (in revenue, if not in head count). The high earners “prove” that success is possible with what’s already there, which is why we still don’t get what we need.

And, if we point out that those few high-earning microbusinesses are the exception that prove the rule, and that microbusinesses may be too low-revenue to care about but they are too numerous to ignore, we get vague promises that somebody will look into it.

Most mainstream American whites like to indulge themselves with the comfortable belief that we, as a nation, have long since conquered the ugly scourge of racism. That is why, when minorities complain of the racially-based challenges they continue to face, those complaints are often chalked up to hypersensitivity and dismissed. Sadly for them, the numbers [...]

I suppose it’s possible that all sorts of Americans in different circumstances and different walks of life might have different ways of “celebrating” April 15th — Tax Day — in addition to a dramatic wipe of the brow and a declaration that it’s Miller Time®. On Capitol Hill, where it probably should not be expected [...]

It’s fairly important for entrepreneurial development programs to find some way of measuring client outcomes so that they can say with confidence that what they do accomplishes good things for clients, communities and public welfare programs. That’s particularly true of SBA partner networks because they constantly have to establish to the satisfaction of Congressional appropriators [...]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced the release of its National Broadband Plan a few weeks ago, accompanied by as much hullabaloo as could be spared from health care reform. Whatever else this plan is, or is supposed to be, the FCC had a clear Congressional mandate to get certain things done here. The agency [...]

Nobody cares about microbusinesses but me, I tell myself. I don’t even know why I bother.

Of course, I know better than that. Some people do care about microbusinesses, quite a few of them in fact. On days when I’m feeling less whiny, I know that.

But I am as subject to those feel-sorry-for-yourself days as the next guy, days when it seems like my newsletters are a complete waste of time and when I start to think that between them the large corporate interests and the lawmakers they’ve bought will somehow manage to keep the meek from inheriting the earth — or, at least, the economy — as scheduled.