If you are interested in job creation—and who isn't this days? —you should talk to someone like Morris Panner. In 1999, Panner and some others started a Boston software company called Ope-nAir. By 2008 they sold it for $31 million. The firm had then grown to about 50 workers. It turns out that entrepreneurship (essentially, the funding of new companies) is crucial to the job creation. Of course, Panner' s success is often a slog. What' s the frustrating and perplexing about the present job dearth is that the US economy has long been a phenomenal employment machine. Here is a record: 83 million jobs are added from 1960 to 2007, with only six year of declines. Conventional analysis blames today's poor performance on weak demand. Because people aren't buying, businesses aren't hiring. Though true, this omits the vital role of entrepreneurship. In any given year, employment may reflect the ups and downs of the business cycle. But over longer periods, almost all job growth comes from new businesses. The reason: the high death rate of exiting firms. Even successful firms succumb to threats: new competitions and technology; mature market; the death of flinders; shifting consumers' tastes; poor management and unprofitability. A company founded today has an 80% chance of disappearing over the next quarter century, reports a study by Dane Stangler and Paul Kedrosky of the Kauffman Foundation. True, some blue-chips firms endure. Four fifth of the Fortune 500 were founded before 1970. But they are exception, and many blue chips have died. The debate over whether small or big firms create more jobs is misleading. The real distinction is between new and old. American workers are roughly split between firms with fewer or more than 500 employees. In healthy times, older companies of all sizes do create a lot of jobs. But they also lose jobs, as some businesses shrink or vanish. On balance, job creation and destruction cancel. All the network increases occur among startups, finds a study of the 1992—2005 period by economists John Haltiwanger of university of Maryland and Ron Jarmin and Javier Miranda of the Census Bureau. To be sure, entrepreneurship has a downside: booms and busts. Remember the dotcom "bubble", but more damaging are widespread popular misconceptions about what it isn't the engine of job adding. Although the entrepreneurial instinct seems powerful and American ambition and creative, venture capital for startups is scarce and that political leaders seem largely oblivious to burdensome government policies. This needs to be addressed. Entrepreneurship won't instantly cure American job deficit, but without, there will be no strong recovery.