In the late 70s and early 80s I spent time in Sweden helping create thousands of small businesses based on my Briarpatch experience. I also spent time in Western England (Portsmouth area) and Lyon, France.
The Swedes were interested in creating small business because they understood that small business was the key to success in exporting. The French considered small business as a theoretically necessary step in creating new technology businesses. I was asked to lecture at a business school that was adjacent to a technical school.
The English kept asking me to create jobs. I said I didn’t know how to do that. I couldn’t create businesses for the purpose of creating jobs. Businesses are created for a wide variety of reasons, often because the creators hate their salaried jobs.
The table above (click to enlarge) relates directly to that issue. In the past four years, beginning just as Clinton left office, the U.S. rapidly lost 2.5 million salaried jobs and is rapidly creating new payroll jobs to replace the old ones.
Exactly one year into the job decline, Americans took themselves out of the labor market and two million people began working for themselves. We don’t know what kind of work they started doing, but it wasn’t a payroll job.
I presume that people who say they are working (they show up in the Household Survey), but don’t have W-2 income (Payroll Survey) are now self-employed. Some are probably consultants, others make a living selling on eBay and still others have small businesses that employ salaried workers.
Congratulations to our 2 million Americans who left the job market to work for themselves. You are part of modern commerce, my heroes.