[spikels]

Seem like good ideas but none of the explain the decline of new business formation.

1. Despite EBay and freelancing self-employment has steadily declined from at least the 1970s[1]. I read somewhere once this has been go inning on for more than 100 years.

2. As shown in the main graph of the original post this has been going on since themid-1970s. So it's secular not cyclical.

3. The graph in the original post shows business "less than a year old" so they don't need to make it to the one year anniversary. So this is not caused by survivorship bias.

I also have a very technology focused worldview but we need to keep in mind while awesome and very important it is only a tiny fraction of US employment and GDP.

[1] http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/02/where-are-all-the-self-employed...