I think it does mean you're likely to get involuntarily unemployed people vs. employed people. Good or bad, I don't know but you are self selecting for people who have less value for their time.
Ease of hire/fire isn't the only factor affecting employment. The easier it is for me to make it without working, the less likely I am to work, no matter how much someone might want to hire me.
More people starting out for themselves can have several causes, and one of those strongly correlates with unemployment. Not everybody that starts for themselves does so because they think that 'working for the man' is no longer for them, as often as not it is that the man has decided that he has surplus employees and kicks them to the curb. That those people then need income and that many of them are then forced to start their own business or perish is a direct effect of this. If you throw that many people into the meatgrinder some of them will succeed but let's not pretend that those choices were made of free will.
The inverse is true as well. If there are people who cannot find jobs, then employers wont have an incentive to be productive, they can afford to waste people on bullshit jobs.
Because you wind up in a position with a large number of underemployed people missing just the right skill and a large number of employers who can't seem to find anyone to hire.
The OP may not become jobless, but would lose motivation to learn more (same as a recent post on HN about a designer demotivated due to their work now centred around midjourney).
As an analogy, people in robot (I use the term in a loose way for machines) assisted warehouse find the work far worse than one without robots, because the job becomes soulless and centred around the robots, making it much less fulfilling.
"soft" mechanisms to remove unemployed people from the labour pool have been used for a long time, to reduce the visible statistics on the rate of unemployment. It leads people to talk about other measures like the rate of under-employment, the number of people seeking work, the number of people in part time work who seek full time work.
But, since many people choose this life to get work:life balance outcomes it shouldn't be assumed all freelance and self-employed are there for nefarious reasons. Just, that quite a few of them are, because there aren't good alternatives.
"I won't give you a job as a bricklayer but I will subcontract to you if you form your own company" for instance...
Anecdote: in the SF bay area in the last two weeks, I've randomly overheard two business owners talk about how they have lots of work but can't hire back any of their workers. One was a roofer, the other the manager of a hair salon who explicitly said that their staff say why would make $1000 / month less if they came back to work than if they stay at home not working. That suggests that as soon as the financial support falls to a more normal level, the unemployment level may drop significantly.
The real answer, individual consultants, and self-run people aside, is that if you DONT work more (to employers standard), you become unemployed.
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