Until the late nineteenth century, people in the United States were not acquainted with the word “unemployment.” The failure of able-bodied people to find work in a largely agricultural country with so much plentiful land was usually regarded as an indication of laziness, not misfortune. During the booming industrialization of the latter half of the nineteenth century, about one-half of the native-born population and nearly all immigrants got jobs in manufacturing and transportation industries. Then a financial panic in 1873 generated thousands of business failures, and many thousands of workers found themselves without gainful employment.

Statisticians conducting the 1878 census in Massachusetts decided that they had to come up with a category for all the people who had become jobless so abruptly. They settled on the term “unemployment,” which they ultimately defined as working-age individuals “out of work and seeking it”—the same definition used today.

Would unemployment as we understand it exist today if everyone was self-employed?