America just posted a record number on the entrepreneurship scoreboard. The New York Times reported last week that Americans filed 5.7 million applications to start new businesses last year, the most in the two decades the government has tracked it. The story calls it an entrepreneurial renaissance. Economists in the piece call it super good news, a sign the economy is vibrant and dynamic.
Let me say this clearly. I am not against this news. I am excited by it. I have spent my career championing entrepreneurs, and five million Americans deciding to build something is a remarkable expression of human agency. But I read the article twice, and something is missing from it. As a professor and as President of the International Council for Small Business, my job is not only to celebrate the numbers. My job is to ask the hard questions the numbers do not answer.
Every expert quoted measures success the same way. By volume of entry. More applications, more founders, more dynamism. The scoreboard goes up and we celebrate. Not one voice in the piece asks the other question. Are these five million founders flourishing?
That question is not a soft add-on. It changes how you read the data.
Start with what the article itself tells us. The surge in applications is driven mostly by businesses unlikely to hire anyone. Solo ventures. One person, a laptop, and now an AI collaborator. Some of that is liberation. Technology has collapsed the cost of starting, and people who carried an idea for years can finally act on it. The Pilates founder who opened three studios and employs 65 people is a genuine success story, and there are many like her.
But the article also tells us where much of this energy comes from. Pandemic layoffs. A labor market that is not hiring. Workers turning to other sources of income because traditional work is not there. In my field we have a name for this. Necessity entrepreneurship. People who start businesses not because they saw an opportunity but because they ran out of alternatives. On an application form, opportunity and necessity look identical. In a life, they are opposites.
There is a third caution in the data. Applications are intentions, not businesses. The most recent year of actual business formation shows roughly half a million firms formed, a fraction of the applications filed. We are counting the tickets, not the journeys.
None of this diminishes the renaissance. It means we are measuring it with an incomplete instrument.
Counting business applications is GDP thinking applied to entrepreneurship. It counts activity and stays silent on the people behind it. For most of the last century that was how we measured everything. GDP told us what economies produce. In 1990 the Human Development Index corrected part of the picture by adding health and education. I wrote recently about what both still leave out. Whether people are flourishing in their daily lives, and whether they have the freedom, agency, and opportunity to build.
My recent paper in the Journal of the International Council for Small Business measured exactly this tension. The Human-Centered Entrepreneurship Index brings together two global datasets, the Gallup World Poll on human flourishing and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor on entrepreneurial dynamism, across forty-three economies. The finding was sobering. The two rarely rise together. Societies flourish without creating. Societies create without flourishing. The comfortable assumption that more entrepreneurial activity automatically produces better human outcomes does not hold.
So here is how a human-centered reader looks at America's record year. The dynamism is real and it should be welcomed. But the question that matters is not how many businesses were started. It is whether the people starting them are building lives or escaping them. Whether the solo founder with an AI copilot is gaining agency or absorbing risk that institutions used to carry. Whether five million applications represent five million opportunities seized, or some large share of necessity wearing the costume of ambition.
We do not know, because we do not measure it. That is the gap.
This is the question Ki-Chan Kim and I are working on now with the International Council for Small Business. Whether flourishing and entrepreneurship can be captured together in a single headline measure of human-centered progress, one number standing beside GDP and HDI. The work moves from Washington to Seoul to the ICSB-OECD SME World Forum in Paris this October, where the beyond-GDP conversation lives at the level of policy.
America's enterprising spirit is booming. The headline is true. But a booming scoreboard is not the same as a flourishing people, and the difference between the two is the most important thing we are not yet measuring.
The human is not a constraint on the economy. The human is its purpose. Five million founders deserve a number that sees them.