2017 Commencement Address by Joe Ricketts

The following is the address given by Joe Ricketts at the 2017 Commencement for The King’s College.

Good morning, and congratulations to the graduating students and your families. This is a great moment for you, so look around and take it all in. Keep it for the rest of your life because it is such a special moment.

I have a commencement speech entitled “Faith, Family, and Careers.” But for this audience, it might be a little repetitive so I decided to talk about something else. For you graduates, I’m going to talk about something that is probably near and dear to your hearts: jobs. Where do they come from?

Last year, I paid close attention to all of the candidates that were running for President. Governor Kasich made a comment that he had created so many jobs, and I’ve heard other politicians say the same thing. But I know that these politicians don’t pay the wages. I was curious about the intersection of what the politicians were talking about and what the wage payers do. So that led me to the question, “Where do jobs come from?”

All the new jobs created in our society every year come from new businesses. Based on a Gallup study, businesses that are established maintain the number of jobs. An old business might hire a thousand new employees, and another old business will rehire or fire a thousand employees. But the new jobs come from new businesses, from entrepreneurs. I describe entrepreneurs as people who take money out of their pockets and ideas out of their heads to start new businesses.

As I talked to Gallup, they told me that entrepreneurialism is a talent. You can acquire skills, but you are born with a talent. The entrepreneur must learn the skills of running a business, but the urge to start a business is already there. This applies across all demographics of our society, and what is interesting is that the people with the entrepreneurial talent number less than five percent of our population. So it’s a very small and unique group of people that have the desire to start their own business. From those people that have this desire, less than one percent of our population has the ability to create a business that will develop more than 50 million dollars a year in revenue. And less than one half of one percent will have the ability to create a business with more than 100 million dollars in revenues. As you can see, this is a very small part of our population upon which everybody is dependent for new jobs.

Most economists agree that we need to have a three percent increase per year in our Gross National Product or Gross Domestic Product in order to accommodate all of the new people who come into the workforce. If we have below three percent a year, we have a disaster for a large number of people. If we cannot accommodate the new people that enter the workforce, those people who are not accommodated cannot start families, cannot buy a home, and cannot buy a car. They remain living with their parents. For those people that is not a happy situation.  If our growth is below three percent year after year, we are increasing the population of people who are not happy. These people look to the government to provide some method of resolving their unhappiness, but of course that’s impossible.

I’d like to tell you my idea of why this country became rich and powerful. We are a land of immigrants. Immigrants are bold; they’re imaginative. They’re not afraid to take a risk. And no matter how comfortable or uncomfortable their situation was or is, they’re willing to risk coming to a new country and establishing a new life for themselves. These people are unique. We are all immigrants or descendants of immigrants. So the kind of people we had coming to this country were the best. You know, the dullards stayed home. We were populated by a people that had high aspirations and big dreams. Many of these people were entrepreneurs, because it takes some of the same characteristics to be an entrepreneur as it takes to be an immigrant.

Recently, we’ve had economists say that the new norm of growth in our economy is two percent and they give all kinds of reasons. That’s a disaster. We really can’t let that happen. You probably remember Tom Brokaw came up with a phrase and a book called The Greatest Generation. This was about the young men and women who grew up during the Great Depression in the 1930s and then, in the early 1940s, went off to war to protect our country, many of them paying the ultimate price. When they came back, there weren’t jobs available. Our economy had gone from a peacetime economy to a wartime economy. The factories had to convert from making munitions to peacetime products, and there were not enough jobs for all the people who came back from the war. These people had to start businesses. They started a plumbing shop in their town. They started a hardware store. They developed the businesses that would hire the people who were out of work. So our country flourished after the Second World War.

If we have an economy that continues to throw off only two percent growth, we’re continuing every year to increase the number of people who are not able to start families, buy houses, buy cars, or follow their own inclinations in what it may take to make them happy. That is a dangerous situation. So I say to you folks, the graduating class, you need to pay attention to the people that we elect in our local, state, and federal offices. We need to have people that understand that we’re big dreamers, and that we can do whatever we set out to do, regardless of what the most astute economists may say to us.

As we think about the generation that Tom Brokaw referred to, we can think about all the generations that have grown up in the United States of America. For most of the time, we’ve had opposing ideals and opposing sides on certain issues. In fact, as you well know, one time we had a Civil War. It’s very important for this generation to be actively involved in making sure that we have the kind of leaders that will give us at least three percent growth in our economy to maintain our power and our happiness.