HI.
Walter Block suggested I ask this here:
I've been challenged on a contention I made publicly that self-employed people outnumbered employed (i.e. wage earners) prior to 1900.
As of today I cannot find the original article I read that in, and so I'm in a bit of a bind.
Does anyone here have some good sources for such data?
Thanks in Advance
SD
This is probably not as far back as you wanted, but the bls had this.
Honestly... the vast majority of agriculture jobs are self employed... your opponents have got to be really rude to not accept that kind of data, which should be easy to find.
That isn't conclusive but 50%+ seems safe. source
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.—Karl Kraus.
Thanks. I used that paper, but my challenger would not accept that the trend continued backwards on the same trajectory without further evidence.
C'est la vie.
Trend and trajectory? Huh? 4% of people were employed by government in 1900. Based on what you originally said, that is all we need to know strictly.
Sometimes people just aren't intellectually honest at all, get used to it.
I'm very used to it.
I really wanted to demonstrate it.
Thanks again.
You're welcome. If there is anything else to do I'm sure we'll help. GL
Could not a person work for a farmer?
I think to make the claim that "the vast majority of agriculture is self-employment (source plz) and then to show an unrelated table that shows a lot of people working in agriculture, and to further make the claim that this PROVES that people used to be self-employed more... this is quite arrogant.
In States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. ... In short, a law everywhere and for everything!
~Peter Kropotkin
I know absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence and what-not, but the assumption that pre-industrialized agricultural workers were not "employees" for a factory farm, seems pretty intuitive. You can only do so much when the data you're looking for was never collected.
On the other hand, If the majority of agriculture was consolidated, it seems like that should be a very easy to prove.
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David Z
"The issue is always the same, the government or the market. There is no third solution."
Farmhands go back a very long time, and are not always children of the farmer, nor mostly. Even in feudal times free yeoman would work on a lord's farms. But that is not the issue.
The most basic definition for an employee is the employer has some say over the workers day-to-day operations, while the self-employed are more free in their ability to operate.
To make the claim that all farmhands are and have always been self-employed, then to show a chart saying a lot of people work farms, therefore people were more often self-employed in aggrarian societies, is a fallacy based on an unsubstantiated claim. A valid logical argument, but a fallacy all the same.