Uniqueness and Alt Cause – Small businesses growing now unrelated to trademark rules

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 spoke to Haltiwanger for the Planet Money newsletter, it was clear that the startup boom was real. But it was unclear whether the surge in new businesses was just a pandemic-related blip that would quickly fizzle out. Much of the boom could be seen in the online retail sector. But then the startup boom kept … well, booming. We saw a second surge of new businesses beginning in 2021. So I spoke to Haltiwanger again in June of that year. By then, he was more optimistic that the surge of new businesses was a harbinger of great things to come for the economy. He was particularly struck by the revolutionary changes to business life created by widespread remote work. But, to be honest, I was still a bit cynical about the boom. Lots of small businesses were devastated by the pandemic and closed up shop. Many people lost their jobs. Maybe a lot of them were creating new businesses in a desperate attempt to pay the bills or to get more federal relief money, or just out of boredom. Most plausible to me: Maybe this surge in new businesses was just a reflection of the wild swing that we had been on to a weird pandemic-related economy and then back to normal again. The first swing created one-off business opportunities, like selling hand sanitizer or masks, or delivering cheeseburgers and fitness equipment to our front doors, or whatever. Then, as we swung back to normal and consumers began spending money outside again, that created new opportunities for the revival of face-to-face businesses, like bars, gyms and restaurants. These were the same types of businesses that had been devastated by the pandemic. Maybe, I figured, this was all just one long, arduous journey that ultimately brought us back to where we began, with limited long-term benefits for the economy. But we're now well past the pandemic crisis and even the pandemic recovery. It has been almost exactly four years since the startup boom began — and there's still a bonanza of new business creation in the United States. It's harder to be dismissive about it. "I'd say we're on a new plateau that started in 2021," Haltiwanger says. Comparing the three years before the onset of the pandemic with the three years after it, the data suggests there are now, on average, almost 60% more new businesses being created each year. The boom is real. It's sustained. It's visible in both businesses that are just a single person striking out on their own and, importantly, businesses that are likely to grow and employ people. It's seen in traditionally underrepresented minority communities. And, Haltiwanger says, this boom could be a sign that something fantastic is about to happen to the American economy: a long-awaited boost in productivity growth, which is the magic sauce for making society richer.