No, really … why don’t nonemployers count?

Posted on | December 10, 2008 | Comments Off

You know, it can sometimes be surreal to stop and think about the levels of pessimism in the ambient air. That’s especially true for me in light of the fact that I have designated this day as my own personal Breathe, It’s Really Not That Bad Day — as witnessed by my post today at the US News & World Report Outside Voices: Small Business blog.

Meanwhile, I am noticing (finally) that Dr. Scott Shane spent his Monday blog time (well, some of it) going through an intellectual/mathematic exercise that brought him to this cheerful conclusion:

What’s my point? It’s not to depress you. It’s to illustrate an important issue. As valuable and important as entrepreneurship is in this country, the scale of the economic downturn is so large that we can’t offset it just by boosting our level of entrepreneurial activity. We need to do something to fix what’s going on in the big companies too.

Yes, that’s right. Sorry, small businesses, this problem is just too big for you to handle.

Anita Campbell, who got to post the first comment (which is only fair, since it’s her blog), wondered why they never count the newly self-employed in the job numbers.

I have actually been wondering the same thing fairly frequently lately.

So, I did something that I should have done a long time ago. I called the Bureau of Labor Statistics to ask them.

They weren’t home.

If they get back to me, I’ll update this post.

I’ll just add that I think it’s worth noting that, back in 2002-3, when the economy was losing an average of 38,500 jobs a month, the newly self-employed were self-creating 85,000 jobs per month. Granted, the problem is a lot larger in scale right now and Dr. Shane’s fundamental argument — that fixing the big boys matters as much as supporting the little guys — is sound.

But, until we get some numbers on new nonemployer businesses for the data years 2008 and 2009, we won’t know what the real employment situation is.


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