Federal and state officials, often under pressure from major corporations seeking to stifle competition, have adopted a regulatory regime that makes the creation of new businesses more difficult.

Many, if not most, of the reforms proposed by economists and other analysts require political action. At the federal level, this would require bipartisan support, an achievement often out of reach in a polarized system.

Contemporary American politics have become an economic hindrance. Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T., put it this way in an email to me:

It’s becoming more and more difficult to run a successful business in the United States without doing lobbying, campaign contributions and other deals with politicians. This I think is the most dangerous, I would even say nefarious, trend for the creativity of American business in general, and young and new businesses which we badly need in particular.

The drop in new business start-ups should be seen in the context of other key indicators — for example, a lack of labor liquidity, which is a measure of “the rate at which workers leave one firm to go to another,” according to Acemoglu.

“The reason why it’s so central is that this is the method via which the economy puts more of its resources into more productive areas,” Acemoglu wrote.

New firm creation feeds into this big time. If you don’t create new firms, then workers are likely to remain locked up in their previous jobs or just go to unemployment because there aren’t new, higher productivity jobs to which they can be reallocated.

In a widely cited September 2014 paper, “Labor Market Fluidity and Economic Performance,” Steven J. Davis and John Haltiwanger, professors of economics at the University of Chicago and the University of Maryland, respectively, wrote:

The U.S. economy experienced large, broad-based declines in labor market fluidity in recent decades. Long-term declines in job and worker reallocation rates hold across states, industries, and demographic groups defined by gender, education and age. Fluidity declines are large for most groups, and they are enormous for younger and less educated workers.

The authors conclude:

If our assessment is correct, the United States is unlikely to return to sustained high employment rates without restoring labor market fluidity.

There are disputes over both the causes of and the possible remedies for the decline in business creation and labor fluidity. Politically, proposed reforms run the ideological gamut, from making it easier to fire workers to limiting the political power of big business.

The consequences of the decline are enormous. Litan points out that:

Business dynamism is really not a choice. If other economies exhibit more dynamic firm structures and thus faster innovation than we do, our firms will either gradually lose out or move their facilities abroad. Either outcome would augur poorly for mobility at home.

Clifton, the Gallup C.E.O., is more dramatic:

I don’t want to sound like a doomsayer, but when small and medium-size businesses are dying faster than they’re being born, so is free enterprise. And when free enterprise dies, America dies with it.

In December, Haltiwanger told a conference on The Future of U.S. Economic Growth at the libertarian Cato Institute that the United States appeared to be suffering “death by 1,000 cuts.”