ABSTRACT
This somewhat perfunctory approach also derives from the absence of an accepted methodology for obtaining individual-level representative estimates of those working informally in the United States that might permit a more particularizing or “idiographic” view (Carrier, 2005: 3). In this chapter, we employ the survey-based informal employment estimation methodology developed during the 1990s by Marcelli and colleagues (1999), and March 2004 and 2006 Current Population Survey data, to generate the most recent demographic profile of informal workers in California. To our knowledge, this methodology was the first to offer quantitatively systematic estimates of the number and characteristics of informal workers in the United States. Further, it is the first such statistical method that permits the possibility of exploring context-specific correlates, and thus interactive determinants, of working informally rather than assuming one pathway to informal work. I explicitly embrace a more catholic view that understanding why people work formally, informally, or both formally and informally is best understood empirically by observing “the activities through which people produce, circulate and consume things, [and] the ways that people and societies secure their subsistence or provision themselves” (Carrier, 2005: 3). This approach is distinctly aligned with the substantivist rather than the formalist school of economic anthropology (Isaac, 2005), and with the century-long tradition of American institutional labor economics rather than popular or neoclassical economics (Marcelli, 2004a). Both the formalist school of economic anthropology
and neoclassical economics, as discussed in the first two chapters of this volume, view human economic activity mainly as emanating from one universal process of optimizing mental calculus. This is very different from the view adopted here: that whether and where one works is best understood by observing people where they live and work and how their circumstances and environment interact with their personal motivations acquired during childhood. Psychological optimization may still be involved, but this alone cannot explain whether one works informally without considering contextual factors. For instance, if education were the most important determinant of whether one works informally, we would expect to find few if any college graduates working informally. As is shown below, this is not the case in California.
