Assertion Contradicted AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Hargreaves: US business creation is at its lowest since the Great Depression

Brad Hargreaves · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · Aug 11, 2017 · at 18:17

Brad Hargreaves, founder and CEO of Common, highlights a historic decline in U.S. small business formation driven by regulatory barriers.

0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.1s

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“Fewer businesses are getting started today than have been started at any point since the Great Depression.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

The claim, plainly

Fewer businesses are being started in the United States in 2017 than at any point since the Great Depression.

a quote alone can be ambiguous, so this restates it with the references and context of the conversation around it resolved. AI-written; the tape below the player is the source.

Assessment

The claim states that fewer businesses were being started in the U.S. in 2017 than at any point since the Great Depression. However, economic data from the U.S. Census Bureau Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) contradict this assertion. According to BDS data, the absolute number of new employer firm startups in 2017 was approximately 430,600, which was higher than the post-Great Recession low of 394,000 recorded in 2010, as well as higher than counts in 2014 (403,900) and 2015 (414,000). Furthermore, the U.S. startup rate (share of total firms less than 1 year old) reached its lowest point in modern recorded series between 2009 and 2014 at 7.8%–8.0%, whereas by 2017 it had risen to 8.4%. Because 2017 figures were higher in both absolute count and rate than years earlier in the same decade, the claim is false.

U.S. Census Bureau BDS data shows ~430,600 firm startups in 2017 compared to a post-recession trough of ~394,000 in 2010.
The U.S. startup rate in 2017 was ~8.4%, higher than the historic low of 7.8%–8.0% recorded during 2009–2014.

Checked against

[1] marketplace.org [2] nber.org [3] census.gov [4] census.gov [5] unece.org [6] census.gov [7] austinchamber.com [8] kauffman.org

assessed as of 2026-07-23

This assessment is an AI reading of a public statement, made against the cited references with the confidence shown. It can be wrong. The quote, the tape and the references are all on this page; if something is off, use report an error below. full disclaimer →

Mentioned

business formation Great Depression

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