Passion Pit, »Take a Walk«
In the summer of 2010, when I took a leave of absence from my PhD program, my dissertation was a helpless non-thing without a subject. In December 2018, I officially got my PhD, because my dissertation was done: written, revised, defended, revised again, approved, copied, formatted, distributed, carefully archived, accepted as an actual work of scholarship. It is arguably my most important professional accomplishment of the decade, and also arguably entirely inconsequential. The claim that 90 percent of academic papers go uncited is mostly untrue, but it is true for my dissertation, and I have the gaping void of a Google Scholar search return to prove it.
Trust me: as bitter and self-deprecating post-graduate students might be about their research (see previous paragraph), none of us start out planning to write something inconsequential. Certainly the subject of my dissertation was not inconsequential at all. “Take a Walk” is not my favorite song of the past decade, but it is the song that kept reminding me that the topic was worth writing about.
My dissertation examined what makes starting and maintaining a business easier or harder for Latino entrepreneurs in different American cities. Take Miami as an example, where 47% of all businesses are Latino-owned. That’s much higher than the national average (12 percent) and higher than the percentage in other cities with large Latino populations: New York, Los Angeles, Houston. So what’s so special about Miami? Is it because the Cuban population that arrived in the 1960s were often landowners or merchants fleeing Castro, and made wealth-building a priority in their new city? Is it the geographic proximity to Latin America and the Caribbean? Is starting a business in Miami easier than elsewhere? Is it something about Miami’s economy in general, or Florida’s? Finally (and more to the point), if policy-makers in another city wanted to put in policies that would help local Latino entrepreneurs flourish, what would Miami’s example offer as guidance?
To make a 295-page story short: it is much easier to turn immigrants into successful business owners if they come to the country with business experience and/or capital already at hand; and if the local immigrant population doesn’t start with those advantages, then policy-makers should focus on providing business education and access to financing, especially the latter. Latino immigrants in the United States who want to start businesses are more likely than native-born white entrepreneurs to use their own cash (which takes a while to accumulate), credit cards (which charge higher interest rates than do bank loans), or loans from family or friends (which means that loved ones, rather than banks with larger cushions, bear the risks). I’d say read the whole dissertation, but in all frankness you’d be better off checking out the research being published by the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative, including this report. (It’s more concise and their data is more robust than mine was.)
This all assumes, of course, that you want to encourage Latinos, or other immigrants, or anyone at all, to start their own business. A lot of us--including me; including Michael Angelakos, the artist behind Passion Pit--have immigrant entrepreneurs in our family lineage. In interviews to promote the album Gossamer, Angelakos described “Take a Walk,” the lead single, as about different members of his family. The first verse’s portrait is a classic rags-to-riches, grateful-to-be-in-America immigrant story: I love this country dearly / I can feel the ladder clearly. But in the second verse, the story shifts to a new narrator, and so does the tone: I watch my little children / Play some board game in the kitchen / And I sit and pray they never feel my strife. The final narrator is eventually undone...
I think I borrowed just too much
We had taxes, we had bills
We had a lifestyle to front
...yet still insists on his participation in the American dream:
Tomorrow you'll cook dinner
For the neighbors and their kids
We can rip apart those socialists
And all their damn taxes
You see, I am no criminal
I'm down on both bad knees
I'm just too much a coward
To admit when I'm in need
Apparently at one point a Fox News reporter failed to hear the irony, and asked Angelakos if the song was anti-socialist. But Angelakos told MTV News, “It's about very specific family members, the male hierarchy, and how the men in my family have always dealt with money.... All these men were very conservative; socially very liberal but for some reason, they all came here for capitalism, and they all ended up kind of being prey to capitalism.” He told a different interviewer, “These are all true stories; this is my grandfather and so on.”
Angelakos’s ambivalence is understandable. (Several of the pieces that greeted “Take a Walk” identified it as a direct reponse to the 2008 financial crisis, an interpretation he rejected.) The idea that anyone can come to the United States, start a business, and work their way to financial security and political freedom is an old one--the history of immigrants employing at higher rates than native-born Americans goes as far back as the Census Bureau has been keeping track of such things. But even for the successful it has its costs. The narrators of “Take a Walk” are estranged from their families, anxious about their ability to keep wealth. The theme of risk runs through the song. No one worries about getting fired; they have market investments, business partners, endless complaints about taxes (as one might if one has to pay both ends of the Social Security and Medicare taxes single-handedly.) The risk allows the narrators to make comfortable lives for themselves and their family, and yet Angelakos isn’t convinced, looking back, that they were better off.
Historically, if you were running for any sort of higher political office in the United States and were from a major party, you made sure to say nice things about small businesses and entrepreneurship, especially the immigrant kind. To some degree this is still true: Elizabeth Warren’s campaign platform includes a Small Business Equity Fund that would give grants to minority entrepreneurs. That said, I’m not sure the current dominant political energy on either the American left or right favors small businesses, who tend to hate tariffs. If you read the Green New Deal resolution, though it calls for a more equitable distribution of available financing to such smaller-scale lenders as community banks and credit unions, a lot of what it wants it can only get at a certain scale. It’s easier for a larger company to retool its supply chains to lower environmental costs than it is for ten small businesses to do the same. It’s easier for a firm with a thousand employees to absorb the cost of any one employee needing a higher wage to make rent, or a longer maternity leave, or extended absences due to illness, than it is for a firm with five.
And Music Tumblr in particular can be forgiven for not thinking highly of entrepreneurship. Most creative people--artists, musicians, writers--end up as entrepreneurs simply because decent-paying employment in those fields has never been easy to find. (In 2017, Angelakos spoke of dealing with venture capitalists and deciding to run his mental-health-focused initiative, Wishart, as a combination of for-profit and non-profit.) But no loan officer with a nickel’s worth of sense would approve a loan to enter a market so saturated that marginal revenue is typically zero or close enough, or where thousands if not millions of people seem thoroughly committed to proving themselves, in Samuel Johnson’s eyes, blockheads. Upon hearing, “You can do what you love, but the market won’t reward you,” a lot of people will reply, “To hell with markets, then.”
It all comes down to how you feel about risk. For a long time the dominant American thinking was that higher risk was the price entrepreneurs paid to have the chance to succeed on their own terms. (There’s an ongoing debate in the immigrant-entrepreneurship academic literature about whether any one particular group of entrepreneurs is “pushed” into entrepreneurship--as in, they only start businesses as the best of a bad set of money-making options--or “pulled,” starting businesses because they want to.) More recently has emerged the critique that not all experiences of risk are created equal, and that in championing immigrant or minority entrepreneurship we offload risk onto those people with smaller financial or even emotional cushions. The heightened experience of risk, and its attendant anxiety and feeling of constant scarcity, may be what Angelakos meant when he described his relatives as “kind of being prey to capitalism.”
I personally agree with that critique, and would throw in that the general perception of Latino immigrants as not-entrepreneurial denies them a road to acceptance (or bourgeois respectability, if you prefer) that their Swedish, German, Jewish, Italian, and more recently Korean predecessors have been able to walk. That was why I wanted to write about Latino entrepreneurship in the first place, and why I ended up writing about North Carolina’s Latino Community Credit Union and associated initiatives as a promising case study. But I would caution against crossing the line from wanting to reduce risk for vulnerable minorities to regarding asking them to bear any kind of risk as imperialist and offensive. Risk can’t be eliminated altogether, and there are costs to scaling risk to higher levels of human activity and trying to diffuse it. A small business committed to a bad idea does a lot less damage than a government policy committed to a bad idea, even if the latter is more equitable in the range and number of people it effects.
Writing a dissertation is a humbling process. I’ve never written and recorded a song, but I imagine that process humbles too. (When “Take a Walk” came out Angelakos was not shy about disliking it, though he seems to have grown fonder of it as time goes on: “I like that it’s so uncharacteristic of me,” he said in 2017.) You work and work and work, all the while knowing you have no control over how your audience will hear your message, or if there will even be an audience. You can never be sure that you read enough, or chose the right method of analysis, or treated your subjects with sufficient respect. You’ll never know if you’re actually on the side of the angels. If the “angels” are metaphorical--if you don’t actually believe in a god, or God, whose love is greater than your human tendency to error and self-deception and treachery--then the risk is even higher. And yet, without that risk, how would you ever be able to say anything worth saying?
