Damon, you have recently written a paper with your former doctoral student Kylie Jiwon Hwang on entrepreneurship among formerly incarcerated persons.  If I’ve got this right, you find that returning citizens are disproportionately likely to become entrepreneurs, and that this likelihood is especially great for Black men.   You call this an employment story as well as an entrepreneurship story.  Can you explain that story for us?

Yes.   For most citizens that pursue entrepreneurship, it’s one chapter among many in our lives.  But for citizens who are released from incarceration, it can be a necessity because good jobs are just not out there.   Now many do of course go into regular formal employment.   But the portion that go into entrepreneurship is higher.  Many go into low-capital businesses like food trucks and hair salons.  In the end, it’s the employment problem that compels the entrepreneurship because the trigger is not being able to get a job.

In an article for Knowledge at Wharton, you describe how you and your co-author, Kylie, are trying to find solutions.  What’s your thinking about how to make progress on solutions?

This is a labor-market problem.  Its powerful for one employer to tell another of the good experiences that they’ve had hiring citizens who are newly released.  

A second solution involves recognizing that this problem is going to take a while to solve, so we can prepare citizens better for entrepreneurship by training them to understand what constitutes a good idea.  

You’ve written extensively about the business of music, and particularly about “Shaping Jazz.”   How did New York overcome Berlin in jazz?   How do jazz standards emerge differently from other genres?   What are you finding about creativity and entrepreneurship?

Three important points come to mind.  The first is that, at the end of the day, you need standards for markets to form.  Jazz standards like the song, “Ive got rhythm.”   This allow the genre to form because it creates a series of melodies around which creative interpretations can occur.  The jazz standards become the key to the cohesiveness of the genre.  Without standards, the genre has no boundaries.   

A second point involves thinking geographically.    Consider NY (and Chicago and LA).   Think about this from a networks perspective.   These cities are nexuses of economic opportunity.  People are from all walks of life.   The entertainment business can fuel that.  In contrast, Berlin’s approach to jazz built on the classical structures that are so prevalent there.   Excellence in classicism became a framework that was constraining in some ways because it is ambiguity that makes jazz thrive.

A third point is that there is a music business that is important.  Music companies have an important role to play.   They shape jazz.   Of course, the history of jazz is absolutely a story about race.  But it’s also a story about the business of music.   Most record companies champion music close to their core competences, such as classicism vs. access to distribution, etc.

What do you want our listeners to be think about as we sign off?

Damon’s pathway has been about products and services that are hard to value.  Our social relationships are rich and complex and important and sometimes awful and sometimes actualizing.  And sometimes economic transactions can play a constructive role, but sometimes not.   Sometimes they play a destructive role.  Anita thinks of Damon’s trajectory as about the broad terrain of all this complexity.  So yes, there’s a thread of products and services that are hard to value but for a lot of different kinds of reasons.

Damon has loved talking with economists over the course of his career.  He sees himself and Anita as fueled by an awareness that there is really no difference between business and society.   We are part of a movement to be our best selves in understanding this.