It is absolutely fascinating to look at the explosion of books, both self-help and entrepreneurial, that started in the 1980s and continues to this day. Some of

It is absolutely fascinating to look at the explosion of books, both self-help and entrepreneurial, that started in the 1980s and continues to this day. Some of those books are very good, and worth reading (my favorite, is Drucker's 1985 book "Innovation and Entrepreneurship"). Some of the self-help books are useful to salespeople (a good interview technique, when hiring salespeople, is to ask them the last 3 self-help books they've read. If they haven't read any, then they are not serious about sales). Many of these books are complete garbage. But there are a lot of them. The fascinating thing is how much this explosion of exciting rhetoric coincides with a sad and darkening reality, as described in sources such as these: "The Surprising Slowdown in Startups" http://fortune.com/2016/03/18/startup-growth-stagnation/ http://fortune.com/2016/03/18/startup-growth-stagnation/ What if the conventional view of startups and entrepreneurship in the U.S. turns out, like so many conventional views, to be wrong? Substantial recent research suggests that it is. So brace yourself for decidedly counterintuitive findings that may help explain some of our era’s economic puzzles. First surprise: Startups aren’t increasing in the U.S. On the contrary, entrepreneurship has been declining for decades. The startup rate has fallen sharply over the past 30 or so years, from 14% of total companies in a given year to about 8%, say multiple papers by researchers Ryan Decker of the Federal Reserve Board, John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland, and Ron S. Jarmin and Javier Miranda of the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s bad news because the rise of new companies is an important way in which capital and labor get reallocated from low-productivity uses to high-productivity uses. But this bad news gets worse. And also: http://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-businesses-economic-innovation-group-study.html http://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-businesses-economic... Startup rates, or the share of all companies formed within the past year, had exceeded closure rates every year since at least the 1970s — even during recessions. That all came to a halt in 2008 with the economic downturn. While it’s normal for growth to diminish somewhat during economic recoveries, it has been slower than usual: There were still 182,000 fewer businesses in 2014 than in 2007, according to the report. Falling startup rates aren’t just confined to a few industries. All major sectors of the economy experienced gradual declines. The slowdown in the formation of new businesses has led to what the report calls a “golden age of incumbency,” with a larger share of Americans working for well-established companies than ever before.