America is experiencing a sustained startup boom.
Prostock-Studio/Getty Images/iStockphoto
hide caption
toggle caption
Prostock-Studio/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Back in 2020, when the world was navigating the hellscape of the COVID-19 pandemic, economist John Haltiwanger discovered something really strange happening in the U.S. economy: Americans were creating new businesses at a record rate.
Haltiwanger is one of the top experts on new business creation in the United States. He even helped the U.S. Census Bureau set up official statistics that track it. A surge in new businesses, Haltiwanger says, tends to be a great sign for job creation, innovation and productivity growth in the economy. But, up until 2020, the data painted a sort of gloomy picture. Haltiwanger was writing research papers with titles like “Top Ten Signs of Declining Business Dynamism and Entrepreneurship in the U.S.“
And so, in the summer of 2020, when Haltiwanger first saw the data suggesting there was a startup boom, he and his colleagues were gobsmacked. “At first we thought, ‘There’s got to be something wrong,'” Haltiwanger says.
By November 2020, when I first…
