Self Employment Provided NYC's Job Growth

City Journal reports:

In New York City, one of the few municipalities that tracks self-employment carefully, there were 807,750 self-employed workers in 2006, according to new numbers from the comptroller’s office. That’s about a fifth of the roughly 4 million nongovernment jobs that existed in the city before the current financial crisis. (These days, after all the layoffs, the proportion may be even higher.) And of the 773,000 jobs that Gotham added from 1981 to 2006, a stunning 491,000 were people working for themselves, making self-employment the biggest source of job creation in the city.

You'll want to read the whole article because it's not just about NYC.