An old joke went something like this:
Q. What is a consultant?
A. Someone between real jobs.
Self-employment is no longer a laughing matter in our economy. There are now about 20 million self-employed in the US, and more and more of them have made a conscious choice to work this way. In today's entrepreneurial economy the self-employed are becoming a major force.
But up until recently, the Labor Department has basically ignored the self-employed, viewing them as we did in the last century, as being a group that are just in between real jobs in the work force. It all has to do in how we measure employment. The old way of measuring jobs primarily measures employment in large corporations. It drastically under-counts the self-employed. The Household Survey is a much better measure of the health of the entrepreneurial economy.
Bill Hobbs offers an excellent analysis of this issue, from a first-hand perspective, pointing out that the Department of Labor recently revised employment upward by over 800,000 after reconciling the data from the Household survey with that of their traditional, old economy measurement. As many of us have been arguing, the economy is stronger than Washington policy makers realize. We may soon be facing a true economic crisis if we do not begin to shift our policies away from 1950s economics. Regulation, tax policy and property rights are the three most important tools to fuel an entrepreneurship-based economy. Other parts of the world are catching on faster than we are.
