In arms' way: Gaza-deal sticking points

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• 00:03

  The Economist.

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  Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.

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  I'm Jason Palmer.

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  Today on the show, the small business entrepreneurship boom in America,

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  and why radio remains so popular in Africa.

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  But first,

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  One version of the American dream has always been being your own boss,

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  going all the way back to colonial days

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  when New Yorkers borrowed the word boss from the Dutch.

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  But for a while there, fewer and fewer Americans actually did start their own businesses, until recently.

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  So America is experiencing a boom in small businesses.

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  Shera Avi-Yonah is a business correspondent for The Economist.

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  One way you can see that is that full-time self-employment reached its highest level this century in 2025.

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  So about 16.8 million Americans worked full-time for themselves.

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  And we've also seen a huge boom in the number of new business applications,

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  and a lot of those are concentrated in things like retail, healthcare, and professional services.

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  Okay, when did this big uptick actually start?

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  So we first saw a huge rise in the number of new business applications

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  during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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  And we think a lot of that was related to either people losing their job

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