Ferreting Out The Facts About Nonemployers
Dec 15th, 2008 | By Dawn Rivers Baker | Category: ResearchData is fairly intractable stuff. You can learn quite a lot from it but, in the end, it only tells you as much as it tells you. That means that a given data set can raise dozens of new questions even as it answers the first dozen questions the researcher asked. Case in point: the monthly employment situation releases from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the way it counts the self-employed, under-counts the self-employed, and doesn’t count them at all - all at the same time. Because of that, there is a growing discrepancy between the number of nonemployer businesses and the “official” number of the self-employed, prompting all sorts of questions that cannot be answered with the data currently available.
The bottom line here is that there are simply too many nonemployer businesses (77% of all U.S. firms back in 2005) and simply too many people involved in starting and running them (29.4 million, roughly 13% of the adult population) to make sense of the notion that they don’t matter to the overall economy. At the same time, there are too many unanswered questions about nonemployers for either researchers or policy makers to assess how they matter, what their contributions are and how they fit into the big picture. Clearly, more research is needed. Possibly more to the point, lawmakers need more information about this segment of the economy. It, too, is “too big to fail.”
