Over the past several years, even as the national fervor over startups has continued unabated, there has been a string of negative findings about the state of American entrepreneurship. The Economic Innovation Group, among others, chronicled a long-term decline in business creation as well as ever-increasing concentration in where businesses are being created. Only five metro areas, they found, accounted for half of the nation’s increase in new businesses between 2010 and 2014. Other researchers have found similar declines across several indicators of economic dynamism—fewer and fewer Americans, for example, work for new and young firms.
Happily, a recent report by Michael Mandel at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) highlighted a potential reversal of these trends. (Full disclosure: I have a PPI affiliation.)
Using government data, Mandel charts a “revival of economic dynamism” since 2015 that is fairly widespread: by last year, the “growth gap” between tech hubs in Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Austin had disappeared.
Read more at Real Clear Markets.
