The Mysterious Death of Entrepreneurship in America

From The Atlantic online:

For entrepreneurs in America, it is the best of times, and it is the worst of times. It is "the age of the start-up," and "American entrepreneurship is plummeting..."

Tech valuations are soaring, and tech valuations are collapsing, and tech valuations are irrelevant. "A million users" has never been more attainable, and "a million users" has never been more meaningless.

It is the spring of hope. It is the winter of despair...

...researchers studying national entrepreneurship trends aren't caught staring at the tip of the iceberg.

When they describe "declining business dynamism" (at Brookings) and steadily falling entrepreneurship (at BLS), they're looking at the whole block of ice.  And it's melting.

What's melting, exactly? Not the kids' apps, but the mom-and-pop stores.  Derek's Coffee and Thompson's Corner Store would be considered start-ups.

But a new Starbucks or Whole Foods is considered part of an existing franchise. So as chains have expanded by more than 50 percent since 1983 ... start-ups have perished...

The demise of small new companies isn't limited to retail. Construction and manufacturing start-ups have collapsed by more than 60 percent in the last four decades...

So there are fewer new companies, and a lot more Dunkin Donuts.

Why should you care? 

One good reason to care about start-ups in America is that they tend to start ... in ... America...

The vast majority of job creation at big multinational corporations—as much as 75 percent of new jobs—happens overseas, since other countries are growing considerably faster than our 2-percent rate.

One paradox of globalization is that it's localized employment.

Since big companies off-shore much of their job growth (or replace what's left of it with software or smart hardware), the future of work in the U.S. will come from work that absolutely has to be here, like health care, education, and food services.
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Link:  http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/entrepreneurship-in-america-is-dying-wait-what-does-that-actually-mean/362097/