Employment rates have their own problems, but they're useful as a spectrum of measures that tell you something about the labour market. Is the higher US employment rate among older workers a good thing or a bad thing? Why? Is taking early retirement inherently a bad thing?
Employment is ill-defined as well: when is someone considered employed?
There is no single statistic that allows us to carry out comparisons between differently structured local economies.
And I already said on ET what age/sex/hour worked/self-or-employee/public-private employment:population table I consider minimal to have an honest picture (this table is available to professional but not to the public AFAIK).
I'm just saying that unemployment stat is currently totally useless in OECD countries at least.
Employment can be cheated by saying "self-employed", but there's vastly less incentive (= none) to do so.
And as Dean said, I'm feeling less and less alone here.
Where exactly does the growing band of "self-employed" sit in all of this?
Certainly in Scotland we see a major statistical "black hole" in this area which I refer to as "micro-enterprise".
Networks of "self-employed", and maybe the re-emergence of something not a million miles away from "guilds" is what I see on the horizon...
It leads to what Marx called the "Abolition of Labour" ie people working WITH people rather than FOR them.
"Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
As I said when ET did talk about cooperative, we have zero data or studies on cooperative (small and big) vs current "normal" corporations.
Even something as simple as the share of value-added or number of employees is not available AFAIK.
