Military Transition Preparation Needs to Include Research into Entrepreneurship

Are veterans more entrepreneurial than the general population? That's what I was told and the data supports it...right? Kind of. 7.30% of the US population are entrepreneurs; 7.31% of veterans are entrepreneurs. Boom! Veterans rule! But wait, 3.22% of post 9/11 veterans are entrepreneurs. Whop whop. That's less than half as likely for a post 9/11 veteran to be an entrepreneur than the rest of the population.

Do we care? Entrepreneurs lead stressful crappy lives and are always selling stuff and spamming. They're literally the worst. But, their incomes average 56% higher than the non-entrepreneur population and 30% more than salaried positions; they create jobs, and shape the way we interact with processes and technology. It's kind of a wash. That's why it should be researched as an option. It's not really an entrepreneur, not entrepreneur thing as it's a phase in life for many people, but if a solid opportunity to be an entrepreneur can be created, it's good to be able to see it. Opportunities may be near invisible if your transition research is solely focused on finding a job.

Are post 9/11 veterans doing poorly? Not really. Our incomes are 39% higher than average. Good job head hunters and TAP people; shout out to SHIFT. Demographics skew these numbers a bit as they tend to be more male and are overrepresented in the 25-54 age group. That's true for skewing entrepreneurship as well since entrepreneurs skew older and male. I didn't control for demographics, but leave me alone about it as there were so many observations and I'm working from home on my aging computer and have to remote login to UNR's system because I'm too stubborn to buy a Stata license and my skills with R aren't that impressive yet. Whew. Deep breath.

Anyways, I thought the geographic distributions of where post 9/11 veterans are doing entrepreneurial stuff and making money are interesting and I'll leave them for you to interpret. Where we're making money is pretty similar to the rest of the population, but where more post 9/11 veterans are entrepreneurs looks very different. Cool stuff.

I get that this is all aggregated data and may not speak to your experience. I used to write about my transition experience and connect to the emotions involved, but I got out in 2012 and am not relevant to that conversation anymore. This more removed approach is what I can provide to the veteran transition conversation at this stage in my life.

Notes on data: I used the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2013-2017 which provided 15.7 million observation. Blue is good in the maps (high entrepreneurship rates, high income), red is bad. The colors are based on box plot distributions so look at the legend. For instance, a post 9/11 entrepreneur in a red or orange area is a needle in a haystack whereas the rates of entrepreneurship on the other graph have between 4.5% and 9.3% entrepreneurship for orange. If a county wasn't listed in the data, I used the average score for all unlisted counties in that state. I dropped Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, America Samoa and Guam for the sole purpose of making the maps bigger. Entrepreneurship rates are based on the classwkr variable. Bing classwkr and IPUMS, or ACS to get the nuances including the language for the question that was asked. Haha, I'm not even sure Bing still exists, google it. Post 9/11 veterans are about 1.4% of the population. Veterans as a whole make up about 7% of the population.