It's because the risk ratio has changed for different people. If you're poor, there's much less to lose - you just become in debt, but you'd be there anyway.

America also has the megacorporations. Trillion dollar companies which can hire hundred of thousands of people and pay them what a medium-sized business owner would make. They have the economy of scale; they can pay a single engineer to increase profit by 0.01% and it would be more than a startup growing stuff by 3x.

The odds of me joining a megacorp is nearly nil due to immigration restrictions, so businesses are still more sensible. It's probably the case for most of the world.

Well publicly is a question of where. There's still a lot of startup talk on startup focused reddits / twitter / hn. The main trend I have seen with AI tooling is the dialogue shifting to indie / small teams rather than the VC rush of the 2010s.

Hey! You’re right!

I was just thinking about this the other day. Once, it was frequent to see resources for starting small businesses and while they still may be “available”, it is not prominent.

Starting a small business is an advancement of personal power!