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Comment by john_horton | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article, but one quote from the sociologist was way off the mark:

"The historical decline in self-employment and the concomitant rise and dominance of large oligarchic corporations (including chains and franchises) have created barriers of entry for starting and sustaining small businesses and sharply reduced the entrepreneurial path to mobility."

I don't know what time period he's talking about, but self-employment has grown dramatically in the US between 1969-2006, by about ~244% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-employment

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I think what he means by 'historical decline' is that in centuries past the vast majority of people were either farmers or what would be considered small business owners. Only around the time of the industrial revolution did there start to be mass employers in the private sector.

Also it's probably a bit misleading to throw out the 244% statistic without giving the overall relation of self-employment to regular employment.

"In relative terms, the share of self-employed within the labor force grew from 14% in 1969 to 21% in 2006 in metropolitan counties, and from 11% to 19% in non-metropolitan counties."

So while there has been a 244% growth, the self-employed still make up around 1/5 of the total work force. Historically I'd assume more than 60-80% of the work force would have been considered self-employed. Ignoring certain circumstances such as slavery, the only historical mass employers would likely be governments/military. Perhaps in times of war a large portion of the work force would be conscripted into military service, but most of the time the majority of the population would be farmers or local tradesmen.

Agreed about the 244% - apologies. I glossed over the relative part which is kind of important here. There's still been growth, but it hasn't been that dramatic.

http://bls.gov/opub/mlr/2004/07/art2full.pdf indicates self-employment has fallen a lot over the last few decades.

It doesn't have any data after 2003, so maybe there was a massive spike in self-employment, caused by casualization (fake self-employment, to avoid giving benefits to workers) and retrenched workers setting out as "consultants".

Maybe he means the rise and dominance of large oligarchic corporations are at the expense of self-employment, even though there's an overall increase in self-employment. Although if that is what he means, it's badly phrased.

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