(2015-01-06) End Of Dayjob Career Trade Off

There are serious Trade-Off-s in the death of the stable DayJob Career.

Many are conscripts in self-employment rather than volunteers. There’s now even a term for such workers: “necessity Entrepreneur-s” (rather than “opportunity entrepreneurs”). Though not a whole lot of work has been done examining the difference between these two groups, what little there is suggests that necessity entrepreneurs aren’t always as successful—or as happy.

The economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald set out to find the answer in their 1998 paper, “What Makes an Entrepreneur?,” which has since become a minor classic in the field. Their main discovery was not at all what I would have expected. I thought they’d find that the unifying theme among entrepreneurs was an outsize willingness to take risks. No. It was very different, almost the contrary, and much more concrete: “The probability of self-employment depends positively upon whether the individual ever received an inheritance or gift.” (OPM)

Fewer than 40 percent of U.S. workers trust their companies to keep their promises; 52 percent don’t believe what management tells them; 67 percent “do not identify with or feel motivated to drive their employer’s business goals.” If that’s the case, why not break free?

“There are a couple different visions of the future,” says Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard. “One is a disaster: The cognitive elite live in their gated communities, and everyone competes to provide services for them at very low wages.” The other, he says, is more humane: “We invest in everyone.” He says the first arrangement is unsustainable. But he concedes that the second would only be possible if American education looked very different from the way it does now, and the social Safety Net, for which our country is hardly renowned, were a lot thicker. “It may well be,” he says, “that the secure future was a 50- to 75-year blip.”