New Business Formation is Surging–Again.
New business formation is surging–again.
Business formation first jumped in 2020 as the pandemic reorganized work, shopping and logistics. After the pandemic ended, business formation leveled off, but it did not return to its old path. It remained historically high. Moreover, in the past 18 months or so business formation has surged again. Registered Agents Inc tracks new Articles of Organization or Incorporation filed in the 50 states and they report:
Every month in 2026 has set a new formation record, including March, which stands as the highest single-month total in the history of the Business Formation Report. Through May, 2.9 million new businesses have been formed nationwide, the strongest five-month start on record.
Stripe Economics agrees and calls this the age of the solopreneur. Among businesses using Stripe, recent cohorts are reaching serious transaction volumes faster than earlier cohorts.
The share of businesses (not just solopreneurs) reaching $1 million in cumulative revenue within a year after going live on Stripe was roughly 30% higher for the 2025 cohort as it was for the 2023 cohort, and it was roughly 3x higher for the 2025 cohort than the 2019 cohort.
Furthermore, the trend is not just in the United States. France, where, as the story goes, they have no word for entrepreneur, has also seen business creation reach record levels, driven heavily by micro-entrepreneurs.
The most likely explanation is the devolution of power. A single person armed with Stripe, Shopify, cloud software, automated bookkeeping, and now AI can do what once required a small staff. Dynamism had been on a long secular decline, but we may now be seeing the early stages of an experimental economy—one in which far more people can test ideas, reach customers, and launch firms, some of which will grow very large, very fast.
I am told James Mill is buried there also
Translated from the Chinese
I think this is the Cursor moment for academia.
The Stanford REAP team has made their move, CoPaper.AI is mass-terminating the manual labor of traditional empirical papers. Link: copaper.ai/landing
If using large models to write papers before was just about polishing and compiling references for you, then this Project from Professor Ross Griebenow’s team at Stanford is like dropping a nuclear bomb in the empirical circles of social sciences and economics.
The greatest truth is the simplest; the heaviest sword has no edge. Its functions are straightforward. Feed in the raw dataset, and within 30 minutes, it can generate a complete DOCX paper complete with full Stata/R code and publication-quality charts.
It chains together EDA, variable definition, econometric model building (from OLS to advanced DID, regression discontinuity, causal forests) all using an Agent workflow.
Every chart it produces comes with 100% reproducible Stata, R, EViews source code underneath. How many low-quality paper mills and data drones’ jobs will this smash?
Data drones and paper ghostwriters are collectively facing unemployment countdown. Because from now on, for social science papers, AI handles all the entropy-increasing drudgery—humans only need to define the problem.
Here is the link. Mostly that is not true, so perhaps the Chinese are trying to demoralize us. But will it never ever be true? In two years be true? Less?
What should the UAP Scientific Advisory Board do?
There are more and more frauds, charlatans, and lunatics entering this area of inquiry. It is important to stay disciplined on data-driven questions, most importantly to what extent are released (and unreleased) videos backed by radar, satellite, eyewitness and other forms of confirming evidence? By confirming, I do not mean “confirming they are aliens,” rather I mean “confirming they are real phenomena and not illusions of various kinds.”
Do not focus the discourse on aliens, rather focus on whether the phenomena are real. If they are confirmed as real, as many insiders insist, they we can return to debating what they might be. And focusing on concrete evidence is something a committee can be relatively good at. Trying to find agreement on “aliens” does not fall into that same category.
Wednesday assorted links
1. From my colleague Jonathan Beauchamp.
2. Why is China still exporting T-shirts?
3. Greenspan and Keynes crossed paths in 1944. Clarinet!
4. Robert Shiller opposes AI negativity (NYT).
5. The opportunity cost of Trae is really not that large. Think in terms of opportunity cost here, not “cost.” By the time the Wizards need to up the pay of their younger players, Trae’s contract will be expiring.
GLP-1 drugs and marriage
GLP-1 medications generate large weight loss and may also alter social and economic outcomes. Using the Understanding America Study, I compare women starting GLP-1s for weight loss with matched women who would like to start a GLP-1 but have not. Single women’s marriage/cohabitation rates rise by 29 percentage points and employment among baseline non-employed women rises 27 percentage points after six or more quarters. Existing partnerships do not dissolve, and already-employed women show no upward job mobility. The pattern suggests that part of the female obesity penalty operates at new-match formation rather than only through health or incumbent productivity.
Here is the paper by Rebecca Diamond. And here is a thread on the paper. And not everyone believes the size of these estimates. I do not find them so crazy? Here is Steven’s dialogue with GPT.
Emergent Ventures winners, 55th cohort
Aliaksandr Melnichenka, Belarus/Kentucky, to support science and math writing.
Guilherme Pinho, Sao Paulo, real estate titling and transactions in Brazil.
Diyar Zhakpelov, Astana, Kazakhstan, 17, exam prep app for Kazakhs, general career support.
Randy Chang, AI policy writings, Ontario/Chapel Hill.
Jesse Casana, Dartmouth, archaeology tranche, “Drone-acquired synthetic aperture radar (SAR), a novel and experimental technology, reveals remarkable perspectives on buried archaeological landscapes in the desert southwest.”
Gia-Bao Dam, New Haven/Yale, longevity research.
Sasha Lempers, Annecy, France, 15, math and AI.
Ali-Mansur Valiyev, Harihar Rengan, Dubai, high school, general career support, educational testing.
Raiani Romanni-Klein, Boston/Cambridge, a non-profit on the implications of biological innovation.
Clara Collier, Oakland, Asterisk magazine.
Scott Ellis, Mississauga, science education tranche, biographies of scientists on YouTube.
Jim Olds, northern Virginia, writings on science policy, science education tranche.
Tuesday assorted links
1. This paper was presented 57 different times!? Is that good or bad?
2. Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton doing “I Got Rhythm.”
3. Claims about advancements in cancer testing.
4. Reconstructing Welles’s Don Quixote?
5. The obesity penalty in political elections.
6. Zvi on GLM-5.2.
7. New work by Mozart. And more information here.
Two Roads to Fast Clinical Trials, and the US Takes Neither
The HHS (FDA, NIH, ARPA-H and related agencies) is moving to speed clinical trials in what they are calling Operation TrialBlazer (kudos on the pun). The motivator, of course, is China:
China has made biotechnology a strategic national priority, systematically expanding its clinical research infrastructure with government backing, streamlined regulatory pathways, and sustained investment. In 2021, China’s global share of Phase 1 trials surpassed the United States’ share for the first time, a milestone that would have seemed unlikely just a decade earlier. And in 2024, China surpassed the United States in the total number of clinical trials registered, with over 7,100 registered, representing 39% of global trials…. For certain cutting edge modalities, including cell and gene therapy, radioligand therapy, and stem cell therapy, China uses investigator-initiated trials to provide additional flexibility, though with some tradeoffs around oversight and quality control. This means that drugs can move into human testing if a researcher has an interest and funding. In the U.S., comparable trials might wait years to start.
I am also pleased to see that they mention Australia, another advanced democracy, as a leader in clinical trial regulation:
Australia’s Clinical Trial Notification System allows trials to begin in fewer than 70 days after a final protocol is submitted, with regulatory approval granted in as little as 21 to 28 days and sites activated within 6 to 12 weeks.
Keep those comparisons in mind. Operation TrialBlazer proposes some good reforms such as CMC clarification. CMC is Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls–and it deals with the basics of manufacturing a drug. The FDA, however, is very risk averse and companies know that so they have often gone overboard in CMC: for example, proving stability of a formula at 6+ months when the trial is to last only a few weeks or documenting their full commercial manufacturing process before they even know if the drug works and knowing full-well that the process will be changed many times before a drug actually gets to market. In short, a lot of cost for very little benefit. The FDA is now clarifying that this kind of thing is not necessary. Good, that is low-hanging fruit. There are other good ideas as well.
But note what they are not proposing. Despite using China and Australia as exemplars they are not going down either path. Where China is fastest is in cell therapy, gene therapy, radioligand, and stem cell work and in these areas, China lets trials proceed on an investigator-initiated basis: as the TrialBlazer document puts it, a drug can move into humans “if a researcher has an interest and funding.” China then combines this open (or lax) front end (for these products) with an all-of-government industrial policy to accelerate winners.
The US is declining to go down that path. Ok, not my call, but I get it. But they are also declining to follow Australia. In Australia there is also no government prospective regulatory evaluation of most early-phase clinical trials. Under the Clinical Trial Notification (CTN) scheme, the sponsor submits their protocol package to a Human Research Ethics Committee (HRECs)–Australia’s IRBs–and once the ethics committee approves, the sponsor notifies the regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), and pays a fee. The TGA does not read and clear the package before the trial starts. The roughly 21-to-28-day “approval” and sub-70-day start figures in the document are fast precisely because the regulatory step is not an evaluation. The government regulator stays out of the front end for most clinical trials, although in direct contrast with China it does step in for the highest risk biologicals. China has decided, high-risk, high-reward.
Australia does certify the certifiers, the HRECs. Europe uses a similar system for medical device approval. It’s a system proposed by former medical officer at the FDA Henry Miller and one I have long supported for the US. China is more laissez-faire.
The US architecture in contrast rests on the “gold standard” FDA reviews and the “FDA will retain full regulatory authority and decision-making.” In short, all of the TrialBlazer reforms are about making the gatekeeper faster, cheaper to prepare for, and less uncertain. None of it is about getting rid of the gatekeeper.
Addendum: Full disclosure, I did some consulting with ARPA-H on related work. See also my previous post on the a radical deregulatory approach, Montana’s SB535 and a Potential Biotech Renaissance in America
Is the UK improving?
From a very credible Labour source:
– Wes Streeting promised the Chancellorship for not running.
– Capital gains raised to match income tax. Possible exit tax.
– Economic focus: devolution, plus state ownership of cost-of-living essentials (energy, water, transport).
– Nothing on AI or tech, bar higher capital gains and an EIS/SEIS-style relief for backing British businesses. (Spoiler: startups now incorporate in Delaware and raise on SAFEs. I’ve done 60+ angel investments; only two were eligible.)
Andy and Wes don’t seem to grasp that tech has been the core engine of growth for 20 years, and AI will only accelerate that.
So why would any founder build here? How does the UK compete with the US and China on AI? Where does growth actually come from?
The world economy is changing fast, and we need to be ready to thrive in it, not just survive.
I really hope this admin appoints some figures who actually get what’s happening. Losing business support early, from a disastrous first budget, was the beginning of the end for Starmer.
So, in a nutshell, no, the UK is not improving.
Dean Karlan has a Substack
He starts his new essay with this:
In 2014 I wrote in The New York Times that if your own team is not in the World Cup, you should root for the one whose victory would do the most good. Add up the happiness a title would create, more where more people care, more where incomes are lower, and more where a win would be a first rather than a habit, and root for the country on top. That year it was Nigeria. With 48 teams in 2026, and more of the world’s poorer and first-time sides in the field, I rebuilt the guide, with more nuance and, thanks to AI, at a fraction of the old cost. It updates itself as the games are played.
At least for now, you should root for the DRC he argues.
Elderly Health and Longevity in the US
Rising elderly life expectancy is a well-known source of fiscal pressure on Social Security and Medicare – but how have declining mortality and morbidity affected the two programs’ relative finances? Using nearly three decades of Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey data (1992-2019), we estimate that these demographic changes raised expected lifetime Social Security spending by over twice as much as expected lifetime Medicare spending: 14% compared to 6%. The slower growth of elderly lifetime health care spending than annuity spending reflects two features of how longevity has increased: the additional 2.4 years of remaining life expectancy were entirely healthy – free of physical or cognitive limitations – while the expected amount of time spent with severe health limitations fell by about 30%, reducing expected lifetime nursing-home and home-health use. We then write down a stylized life-cycle model of a risk-averse retiree facing stochastic mortality and health to illuminate the key forces that affect the optimal allocation of a fixed amount of public funds across Medicare and Social Security.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein. In general I wish to switch resources from Medicare to Social Security, or at least give individuals the option to do so. You can use dollars to buy health care, but it is not always so easy to make the transformation in the opposite direction.
*The Migrants: A Memoir with Manuscripts*
Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is one of the very greatest books of the last twenty years. So I buy whatever else he puts out, and I did not regret my purchase of this one. Imagine an intersecting tale of a boyhood in New Zealand (!), the medieval manuscript collecting habits of Colonial Secretary Sir George Grey, and a Bildungsroman of both aesthetic taste and personal maturation. The back cover notes that “Christopher de Hamel has probably handled more medieval manuscripts than anyone else alive…” That he is such a special person shines through in all of his writings. By the way, I learned that Dunedin is the Gaelic word for Edinburgh.
The new book you can order here.
Monday assorted links
1. John Horton: “The “literature” is going to become a collection of nodes/papers representing temporarily suspended computation with “citations” being contingent edges that describe how they sink uses the source; new data, better models & methodological changes will cause a Makefile-like cascading of update through the literature/graph. AI agents will autonomously add new edges + nodes.”
3. Persistently beneficial AI models. Through general benevolence.
4. “Concerns over therapy ferrets used to kill rats at UK’s largest children’s prison.”
Alan Greenspan, RIP at 100
Here is a NYT obituary. Here is a WSJ obituary.