Lost Your Job? Maybe You Should Make Your Own

Hey, have you heard? Lots of people have lost their job in the last two years!

...okay, so that opening is facetious as all hell, but it's actually very apt. A recent announcement said that forty eight thousand people in New York were about to completely lose their unemployment benefits because they'd simply outlasted them.

But for a growing number of people, their solution is not to find a new job, but rather, to MAKE THEIR OWN. And this development is going to do lots of interesting things to the world at large for some time.

Perhaps the biggest one is to the unemployment rate. There are several different levels of unemployment--the base one that we usually hear about, all the way up to the U6, or the layer that factors in EVERYBODY, including the "discouraged workers", as in the ones who ran out of unemployment checks. The self-employed, meanwhile, don't count in the base rate, but DO count in the U6. With more people self-employed, the base unemployment rate will fall. But the U6, meanwhile, will actually go UP as a consequence because the self-employed aren't counted as "part of the labor force".

Second, this is going to affect wages paid--the more people who are working for themselves, that means more money will be coming in. People running their own businesses, and seeing them doing well, aren't going to be too concerned about discretionary spending. This in turn will require businesses to hire more to meet increasing demand...but raw manpower will be in short supply. So businesses will have to offer higher wages than people are making at their small businesses to get people to hire in the first place.

Lastly, there's the general issue of sheer satisfaction to consider. More people will be more satisfied with their own job. That's not so much an economic consideration as it is a general consideration, though it'll have economic ramifications. People who enjoy their jobs and are doing well in them are more likely to use discretionary income, which in turn adds to that effect I just talked about.

So it may be a good idea, if you're looking for work, to consider making your own.