Category: Covid-19

Entrepreneurs Re-Purpose Old High-Ceiling Mills as Well-Ventilated Restaurants That Reduce Virus Spread

(p. B7) On a typical evening at the Wool Factory, a renovated textile mill in Charlottesville, Va., guests savor local wine and hors d’oeuvres in a spacious courtyard decorated with festive string lights. Between bites and sips, their eyes might gaze at the factory, a 100-year-old red brick building where as many as 200 workers once made military uniforms, but which now houses a fine-dining restaurant, a brewery and an event space.

. . .

The Wool Factory is part of a larger effort by developers to convert grain, textile and water mills that came of age during the Industrial Revolution.

. . .

“They’re incredible spaces to be in, with 15-foot-high ceilings and huge windows with great views, which makes them a desirable place to develop,” Catherine De Almeida, an assistant professor in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington in Seattle.

. . . the ample open space makes them easy to configure and attract guests who want to socially distance during the pandemic.

. . .

Terra Nova recently transformed a 19th-century flour and cotton mill into the $25 million Whitehall Mill, which attracts diners to its 190-seat oyster farm and seafood restaurant, True Chesapeake Oyster Company. Its 200-seat food emporium, Whitehall Market, features eight tenants, including a cheese seller, Firefly Farms Market and a nationally renowned pastry vendor, Crust by Mack.

When Whitehall Mill’s events venue couldn’t open last year because of the pandemic, the developer could use that space to allocate an additional 75 seats for the restaurants, bringing in more business at a time when they were forced to operate in a limited capacity, Mr. Tufaro said. Guests cautious about indoor dining can sit in the mill’s substantial outdoor space, with 125 patio seats between the restaurant and market.

“I think it’s partly the attraction for the old that inspires people,” Mr. Tufaro said. “The other is, it turns out, they’re very adaptable to new uses.”

For the full story, see:

Julekha Dash. “Turning Old Mills Into Vibrant Destinations.” The New York Times (Wednesday, December 22, 2021): B7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 21, 2021, and has the title “Renovated Mills Offer a Perk in the Age of Social Distancing: Space.”)

Most of Supply-Chain Delays Occur in U.S.

(p. A17) Mr. Levy, 53, says he doesn’t see the supply chain’s “unprecedented crisis” ending before 2023. He’s chief economist for Flexport, a San Francisco-based tech company for global-logistic services.

. . .

The typical transit time for a container in pre-pandemic days was 71 days, Mr. Levy says. That’s how long it took for a full container to depart from Shanghai; discharge in Los Angeles; proceed to a warehouse near, say, Chicago; get trucked empty back to California; and then return to Shanghai. The current transit time is 117 days or more. The greatest delays are in the U.S., owing to port bottlenecks and trucking shortages. The Los Angeles to Chicago leg, for instance, now takes 22 days, 12 more than before. It takes 33 days for the empty container to return to California, compared with 20 in the old days.

Not only does it take much longer to import goods, it’s also become eye-wateringly expensive. “Where it might have cost $1,500 to move a container across the Pacific,” Mr. Levy says, “you’re seeing them go for more like $15,000 per container.”

This surge in transport costs has hit lower-value goods hardest and made quick restocking all the more of a challenge. Mr. Levy talked to a company that sells office supplies. “They were moving a container whose contents were in the order of $15,000 in value. Well, if that now costs $15,000 to move, you have a problem, right?”

. . .

The key question: “When will we start seeing people behave the way they used to in their consumption?” It’s possible we won’t. “People are creatures of habit,” Mr. Levy observes, and the pandemic has led them to take on new habits. So far, at any rate, “we have not seen a reversion to the previous patterns.”

The supply-chain crisis, Mr. Levy contends, has no parallel in history. We’ve had shocks before, such as the oil crisis of 1973. But “global-trade liberalization and distributed specialization,” allied to an ease of shipping and transport, fueled by ideas like “just-in-time inventory”—that’s all new.

. . .

There are specific short-term measures that governments can take, such as liberalization of trucking rules, traffic control, land-use regulation for stacking containers and port-opening hours. But Mr. Levy is “loath to put a small subset of these forward as a panacea.”

For the full interview, see:

Tunku Varadarajan. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; An Insider Explains the Supply-Chain Crisis.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 18, 2021): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date December 17, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

E-Mobility Devices Offer Consumers “Lower Virus Risk” and More Convenience Than Public Transit

(p. A9) A boom in electric-powered mobile devices is bringing what is likely to be a lasting change and a new safety challenge to New York’s vast and crowded street grid.

The devices have sprouted up all over. Office workers on electric scooters glide past Manhattan towers. Parents take electric bikes to drop off their children at school. Young people have turned to electric skateboards, technically illegal on city streets, to whiz through the far corners of New York.

Though many of these riders initially gave up their subway and bus trips because of the lower virus risk of traveling outdoors, some say they are sticking with their e-mobility devices even as the city begins to move beyond the pandemic.

“I use the scooter for everything, it’s really convenient,” said Shareese King, 41, a Bronx resident who deleted the Uber app from her phone after she started running her errands on an electric scooter.

Electric bikes, scooters and other devices are in many cases made for urban life because they are affordable, better for the environment, take up little, if any, street space for parking and are just fun to use, said Sarah M. Kaufman, the associate director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University.

For the full story, see:

Winnie Hu and Chelsia Rose Marcius. “As Personal E-Mobility Spreads, Safety Challenges Grow.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 28, 2021): A9.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. [sic] 8, 2021, and has the title “As E-Scooters and E-Bikes Proliferate, Safety Challenges Grow.”)

Immuno-Suppressed Patients Take Longer to Clear Covid-19, Allowing Time for More Mutations and New Variants

(p. 14) When people with H.I.V. are prescribed an effective antiretroviral and take it consistently, their bodies almost completely suppress the virus. But if people with H.I.V. aren’t diagnosed, haven’t been prescribed treatment, or don’t, or can’t, take their medicines consistently each day, H.I.V. weakens their immune systems. And then, if they catch the coronavirus, it can take weeks or months before the new virus is cleared from their bodies.

When the coronavirus lives that long in their systems, it has the chance to mutate and mutate and mutate again. And, if they pass the mutated virus on, a new variant is in circulation.

“We have reasons to believe that some of the variants that are emerging in South Africa could potentially be associated directly with H.I.V.,” said Tulio de Oliveira, the principal investigator of the national genetic monitoring network.

In the first days of the pandemic, South Africa’s health authorities were braced for soaring death rates of people with H.I.V. “We were basically creating horror scenarios that Africa was going to be decimated,” said Salim Abdool Karim, an epidemiologist who heads the AIDS institute where KRISP is housed. “But none of that played out.” The main reason is that H.I.V. is most common among young people, while the coronavirus has hit older people hardest.

An H.I.V. infection makes a person about 1.7 times as likely to die of Covid — an elevated risk, but one that pales in comparison with the risk for people with diabetes, who are 30 times more likely to die. “Once we realized that this was the situation, we then began to understand that our real problems with H.I.V. in the midst of Covid was the prospect that severely immunocompromised people would lead to new variants,” Dr. Abdool Karim said.

. . .

. . . a single variant can rattle the world, as Omicron has.

The origin of this variant is still unknown. People with H.I.V. are not the only ones whose systems can inadvertently give the coronavirus the chance to mutate: It can happen in anyone who is immunosuppressed, such as transplant patients and those undergoing cancer treatments.

By the time the KRISP team identified the second case of a person with H.I.V. producing coronavirus variants, there were more than a dozen reports of the same phenomenon in medical literature from other parts of the world.

Viruses mutate in people with healthy immune systems, too. The difference for people with H.I.V., or another immunosuppressing condition, is that because the virus stays in their systems so much longer, the natural selection process has more time to favor mutations that evade immunity. The typical replication period in a healthy person would be just a couple of weeks, instead of many months; fewer replications mean less opportunities for new mutations.

. . .

. . ., South Africa’s efforts to tackle the variant issue, and be transparent about it, have come at a steep price, in the form of flight bans and global isolation.

“As scientists, especially in the kind of forefront, we debate playing down the H.I.V. problem,” Dr. de Oliveira mused in his lab last week. “If we are very vocal, we also risk, again, big discrimination and closing borders and economic measures. But, if you are not very vocal, we have unnecessary deaths.”

For the full story, see:

Stephanie Nolen. “A Variant Hunt on Dirt Roads and in the Lab.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, December 5, 2021): 1 & 14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 6, 2021, and has the title “The Variant Hunters: Inside South Africa’s Effort to Stanch Dangerous Mutations.” The online version says that the New York edition of the print version had the title “A Variant Hunt From the Labs To Dirt Roads.” The title of my National edition of the print version was “A Variant Hunt on Dirt Roads and in the Lab.”)

Federal Covid-19 Stimulus Subsidies Reduced Labor Force Participation

(p. A2) . . ., home prices and stocks have soared, in part because of stimulus from the Fed. From the start of 2020 through Sept. 30 this year, U.S. households’ total assets soared 22% to nearly $163 trillion, Fed data show.

At the same time, the labor-force participation rate fell sharply and has remained stubbornly low. At 61.8% in November [2021], it was 1.5 percentage points below its pre-pandemic level. Many older workers retired early. But even among prime-age workers—those between 25 and 54—participation remains down more than a percentage point.

Some economists believe the extra cash is one reason for this. In part, that is based on research showing declines in wealth seem to have had the opposite effect. Falling housing and stock values from 2006 and 2010 led many who otherwise would have fallen out of the labor force to stay in, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The study found that participation was 0.7 percentage point higher than otherwise as a result.

Families that win at least $30,000 in the lottery tend to earn less in the next five years, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper released in July by four University of Chicago scholars. The more a person wins, the bigger the effect that the award has on earnings and employment, the paper found. Upper-income winners are more likely to reduce their hours, while lower-income winners are more likely to drop out of the labor market entirely, the paper found.

In Austria, workers who received severance payments worth two months of pay were far less likely to find a job within 20 weeks compared with those who received no such lump sum, according to a 2006 paper released by the NBER. The researchers also found a similar effect among workers whose unemployment benefits were extended from 20 weeks to 30 weeks.

For the full commentary, see:

Josh Mitchell. ” THE OUTLOOK; New Hope for Easing Labor Shortage.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Dec. 20, 2021): A2.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 19, 2021, and has the title ” THE OUTLOOK; Vast Household Wealth Could Be a Factor Behind U.S. Labor Shortage.”)

The July 2021 NBER working paper mentioned above is:

Golosov, Mikhail, Michael Graber, Magne Mogstad, and David Novgorodsky. “How Americans Respond to Idiosyncratic and Exogenous Changes in Household Wealth and Unearned Income.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper #29000, July 2021.

The published version of the 2006 NBER working paper mentioned above is:

Card, David, Raj Chetty, and Andrea Weber. “Cash-on-Hand and Competing Models of Intertemporal Behavior: New Evidence from the Labor Market.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 4 (Nov. 2007): 1511-60.

Ross Douthat’s Self-Doctoring Was “Intensely Empirical”

(p. 12) The early chapters of “The Deep Places” unfold like the first act of a horror movie. Feeling the pull of home and burned out by life on Capitol Hill, Ross Douthat (a New York Times columnist) and his wife buy a 1790s farmhouse on three acres of Connecticut pasture.

. . .

Something is lurking in those woods. Back in D.C., Douthat has a swollen lymph node, a stiff neck and strange vibrations in his head and mouth. The urgent care doctor he sees first diagnoses him with a harmless boil. A few weeks later, he is in an emergency room at dawn with an alarming full-body shutdown, “as if someone had twisted dials randomly in all my systems.” The E.R. doctor suggests stress as the culprit — as do, in subsequent visits, an internist, neurologist, rheumatologist and gastroenterologist. A psychiatrist, his 11th doctor in 10 weeks, disagrees.

Only after Douthat completes his move north to Connecticut, namesake of Lyme disease, does it seem obvious to local doctors that he is suffering from something tick-borne.

. . .

He makes his case that tick-borne disease needs more research and its sufferers deserve more respect.

The trouble is that Douthat also wants to present his reckless journey as a road map. His revelation: “Given a stockpile of antibiotics, the array of over-the-counter medications available on Amazon and crowdsourced data from hundreds and thousands of Lyme sufferers sharing their experiences online, I could effectively become my own doctor, mixing and matching to gauge my body’s reaction to different combinations, like a Lyme researcher working on a study with a sample size, an ‘N,’ of only 1.”

This self-doctoring, he adds, “was in its own way intensely empirical and materially grounded — the most empirical work, in fact, that I have ever attempted in my life.” (Comparing this approach to Khakpour’s introspective memoir, I kept thinking of the couples-therapy trope that women prefer to talk through their problems while men leap to solve them.)

. . .

A subsequent bout of undiagnosed Covid-19, and scientists’ stumbles as they’ve worked to understand the new virus, have only hardened Douthat’s distrust of institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. “From the beginning of the pandemic to its still unfinished end,” he writes, “there were weirdos on the internet who were more reliable guides to what was happening, what was possible, and what should actually be done than Anthony Fauci or any other official information source.”

For the full review, see:

Sara Austin. “Darkness Invisible.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, November 28, 2021): 12.

(Note: ellipses, added; italics, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the Updated Oct. 30, 2021, and has the title “A Transporting and Cozy Biography of a Pottery Pioneer.”)

The book under review is:

Douthat, Ross. The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. New York: Convergent Books, 2021.

“Americans Think the Economy Is in Rough Shape Because the Economy Is in Rough Shape”

(p. A12) Offices remain eerily empty. Airlines have canceled thousands of flights. Subways and buses are running less often. Schools sometimes call off entire days of class. Consumers waste time waiting in store lines. Annual inflation has reached its highest level in three decades.

Does this sound like a healthy economy to you?

In recent weeks, economists and pundits have been asking why Americans feel grouchy about the economy when many indicators — like G.D.P. growth, stock prices and the unemployment rate — look strong.

But I think the answer to this supposed paradox is that it’s not really a paradox: Americans think the economy is in rough shape because the economy is in rough shape.

Sure, some major statistics look good, and they reflect true economic strengths, including the state of families’ finances. But the economy is more than a household balance sheet; it is the combined experience of working, shopping and interacting in society. Americans evidently understand the distinction: In an Associated Press poll, 64 percent describe their personal finances as good — and only 35 percent describe the national economy as good.

There are plenty of reasons. Many services don’t function as well as they used to, largely because of supply-chain problems and labor shortages. Rising prices are cutting into paychecks, especially for working-class households. People spend less time socializing. The unending nature of the pandemic — the masks, Covid tests, Zoom meetings and anxiety-producing runny noses — is wearying.

For the full commentary, see:

David Leonhardt. “The Economy Looks Healthy, but Americans Know It’s Rough Out There.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 11, 2021): A12.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 10, 2021, and has the title “Covid Malaise.”)

“Unanticipated Tragedies Are Unpreventable, No Matter How Many Regulations”

(p. A15) Dr. Offit acknowledges the limits of regulatory fixes, noting that, while regulatory guidelines are important, “unanticipated tragedies are unpreventable, no matter how many regulations, training programs, fines, and penalties are put in place.” He contrasts the tragic death in 1999 of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger in an early gene-therapy study—aimed at remediating a rare enzyme deficiency—with the triumphant experience of Emily Whitehead, a girl with leukemia treated 11 years later at the same university with genetically manipulated T-cells. Gelsinger’s death has been ascribed to protocol deficiencies, conflicts of interest and inadequate regulation, but “a closer look,” Dr. Offit writes, “shows that the only difference between the outcomes of Emily Whitehead and Jesse Gelsinger were luck and timing.” The specific supportive approach used by Whitehead’s doctors to address a life-threatening complication of her T-cell infusion stemmed directly from the lessons learned during Gelsinger’s ordeal. We recognize successes, Dr. Offit laments, but “never the failures that made those successes possible.”

One anxiety suffusing every page of “You Bet Your Life” is what to make of the Covid-19 vaccines. Dr. Offit, a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, has been described in The Wall Street Journal as “an outspoken advocate of the science and value of vaccinations,” including the Covid-19 vaccine. He has described its clinical-trial data as “enormously reassuring” and has seen little evidence of “a very rare, serious side effect that would be something that would cause a long term problem.” Yet his review of the history of vaccination and of its complexities evokes surprising empathy for the vaccine-hesitant. He recounts the early days of the Salk polio vaccine, which saved lives yet also tragically transmitted the disease to some patients when the product was inadequately prepared by one of its manufacturers. He notes that “the first vaccines aren’t always the best, safest, and last” and regrets the “disturbing show of hubris” by the Covid vaccine developers.

Ultimately, Dr. Offit emphasizes, we need to come to terms with the fact that all medical technologies carry risk—as does the decision not to avail oneself of them. “A choice not to get a vaccine is not a risk-free choice,” Dr. Offit notes. Either way, he says, “you’re gambling”—so “choose the lesser risk.”

For the full review, see:

David A. Shaywitz. “BOOKSHELF; The Dangers Of Finding a Cure.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Nov. 09, 2021): A15.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 8, 2021, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘You Bet Your Life’ Review: The Dangers of Finding a Cure.”)

The book under review is:

Offit, Paul A. You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation. New York: Basic Books, 2021.

Covid-19 Raised Our Blood Pressure

(p. A12) On Monday [Dec. 6, 2021], scientists reported that blood pressure measurements of nearly a half-million adults showed a significant rise last year, compared with the previous year.

These measurements describe the pressure of blood against the walls of the arteries. Over time, increased pressure can damage the heart, the brain, blood vessels, kidneys and eyes. Sexual function can also be affected.

“These are very important data that are not surprising, but are shocking,” said Dr. Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, president of the American Heart Association, who was not involved in the study.

“Even small changes in average blood pressure in the population,” he added, “can have a huge impact on the number of strokes, heart failure events and heart attacks that we’re likely to be seeing in the coming months.”

The study, published as a research letter in the journal Circulation, is a stark reminder that even in the midst of a pandemic that has claimed more than 785,000 American lives and disrupted access to health care, chronic health conditions must still be managed.

. . .

“We observed that people weren’t exercising as much during the pandemic, weren’t getting regular care, were drinking more and sleeping less,” said Dr. Luke Laffin, the lead author, a preventive cardiologist who is co-director of the Center for Blood Pressure Disorders at the Cleveland Clinic. “We wanted to know, was their blood pressure changing during the pandemic?”

The researchers found that blood pressure readings changed little from 2019 to the first three months of 2020, but increased significantly from April 2020 through December 2020, compared with the same period in 2019.

. . .

The new study found that the average monthly change from April 2020 to December 2020, compared with the previous year, was 1.10 mm Hg to 2.50 mm Hg for systolic blood pressure, and 0.14 to 0.53 for diastolic blood pressure.

The increases held true for both men and women, and in all age groups. Larger increases in both systolic and diastolic blood pressure were seen in women.

The average age of the study participants was just over 45, and slightly more than half were women.

. . .

The causes of an overall increase in blood pressure are not clear, Dr. Laffin and his colleagues said. The reasons may include an increase in alcohol consumption, a decline in exercise, rising stress, a drop in doctors’ visits and less adherence to a medication regimen.

The researchers dismissed a possible effect of weight gain, known to raise blood pressure, saying that the men in the study had lost weight and that the women had not gained more weight than usual.

For the full story, see:

Roni Caryn Rabin. “Does the Pandemic Have Your Blood Pressure Rising? You’re Not Alone.” The New York Times (Tuesday, December 7, 2021): A12.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 6, 2021, and has the title “The Pandemic Has Your Blood Pressure Rising? You’re Not Alone.”)

The study summarized above is:

Laffin, Luke J., Harvey W. Kaufman, Zhen Chen, Justin K. Niles, Andre R. Arellano, Lance A. Bare, and Stanley L. Hazen. “Rise in Blood Pressure Observed among Us Adults During the Covid-19 Pandemic.” Circulation (2021) Published online: https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.057075.

Pandemic Results in “Historic” Increase in Free-Agent Entrepreneurs

In my book Openness to Creative Destruction, I distinguish between free-agent entrepreneurs and innovative entrepreneurs. Free-agent entrepreneurs work for themselves mostly doing what has been done before. Innovative entrepreneurs work for themselves mostly doing something new. (The dividing line is not sharp.) During the pandemic we have seen a large increase in free-agent entrepreneurs. The number of innovative entrepreneurs is hard to measure, but I believe that the loss of health capital, the increase in transaction costs, and the growth of government regulations and lockdowns has reduced their number.

(p. A1) The pandemic has unleashed a historic burst in entrepreneurship and self-employment. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are striking out on their own as consultants, retailers and small-business owners.

The move helps explain the ongoing shake-up in the world of work, with more people looking for flexibility, anxious about covid exposure, upset about vaccine mandates or simply disenchanted with pre-pandemic office life. It is also aggravating labor shortages in some industries and adding pressure on companies to revamp their employment policies.

The number of unincorporated self-employed workers has risen by 500,000 since the start of the pandemic, Labor Department data show, to 9.44 million. That is the highest total since the financial-crisis year 2008, except for this summer. The total amounts to an increase of 6% in the self-employed, while the overall U.S. employment total remains nearly 3% lower than before the pandemic.

Entrepreneurs applied for federal tax-identification numbers to register 4.54 million new businesses from January through October this year, up 56% from the same period of 2019, Census Bureau data show. That was the largest number on records that date back to 2004. Two-thirds were for businesses that aren’t expected to hire employees.

(p. A14) This year, the share of U.S. workers who work for a company with at least 1,000 employees has fallen for the first time since 2004, Labor Department data show. Meanwhile, the percentage of U.S. workers who are self-employed has risen to the highest in 11 years. In October, they represented 5.9% of U.S. workers, versus 5.4% in February 2020.

The self-employment increase coincides with complaints by many U.S. companies of difficulties—in some cases extreme—in finding and retaining enough employees. In September, U.S. workers resigned from a record 4.4 million jobs, Labor Department data show.

Kimberly Friddle, 50 years old, quit her job as head of marketing for a regional mortgage company near Dallas in September 2020.

. . .

. . . when a friend contacted her the next month, she saw an opportunity.

The friend sold home décor items on Amazon.com from his home in Canada, and Covid-related border restrictions were making it difficult to process returns. When he explained what he needed—primarily, someone to examine returned items for damage and ship them back to Amazon—Ms. Friddle felt the work could be a good challenge and a chance for her older daughter, Samantha, to gain some work experience.

They began processing returns for him steadily. When other Amazon sellers he knew needed help with warehouse-related tasks that were also made harder by the pandemic, he referred them to Ms. Friddle.

. . .

Now she runs an Amazon logistics, warehousing and fulfillment business full time from the family’s home outside Houston and rented warehouse space nearby.

. . .

Though the decision to leave that job was an emotional one, she said, a change after 27 years has given her new energy and confidence in addition to the flexibility.

“I didn’t have a plan when I left,” she said. “I wasn’t giving enough attention to the needs of my family. I wasn’t giving enough attention to the job that needed to be done. I felt like I was failing everywhere.”

Now, “I feel so successful and I wake up every day like, ‘I wonder what’s going to happen today.’ ”

. . .

Through the late 19th century, a large share of Americans worked for themselves, as farmers or artisans. With new technology such as electric lighting, manufacturing expanded, and many people left the field for the factory floor. They landed in an environment of strictly defined work hours and hierarchies—workers overseen by managers overseen by executives.

By the time Covid-19 arrived in the U.S., the advent of apps, websites and companies catering to entrepreneurs and freelancers was already giving employees options.

. . .

Marcus Grimm, a 50-year-old in Lancaster, Pa., worked at advertising agencies from the time he finished college. For years, he toyed with freelancing. “I had always considered it, but literally just never had the guts to make the move,” he said. “I was scared I would lose sleep every night worrying about my next dollar.”

Early in the pandemic, Mr. Grimm, a married father of two grown children, was laid off. He logged onto Upwork, a website that connects freelance workers from a wide range of industries with potential clients. He fielded several assignments doing ad campaigns for big companies, charging a low hourly rate.

Business flowed in. He has steadily raised his rate, to $150 an hour. Mr. Grimm said he now earns more than in his old job, which paid $130,000 a year.

His favorite part is not having to deal with corporate politics or any bureaucracy. He can go kayaking in the middle of the day.

“I’m the one who finds the client, I’m the one who does the work, and I’m the one who deals with any of the problems that come up,” he said.

. . .

Part of the current shift to self-employment might prove temporary. The boom in self-employed day traders during the dot-com hoopla of the late 1990s deflated along with the stock bubble.

A sharp rise in savings—boosted by a federal supplement to unemployment benefits, most recently $300 a week, that was paid for as long as 18 months of the pandemic—provides some individuals a financial cushion to pursue self-employment. As they run down those savings, some might again want a regular paycheck, economists say.

In addition, if labor shortages ease, freelancers could face stiffer competition from companies in landing clients. Finally, if the pandemic recedes, so might one piece of the impetus to leave regular work in favor of self-employment. Five percent of unvaccinated adults say they left a job because of a vaccine requirement they opposed, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey in October [2021].

For the full story, see:

Josh Mitchell and Kathryn Dill. “Workers Quit Jobs in Droves to Become Their Own Bosses.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2021): A1 & A14.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 29, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

My book, mentioned at the top, is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.