Maybe it’s because I’m from a fringy, blue-collar background in NYC, but I’ve always been very familiar with the informal economy, people earning a few extra dollars selling loosies or trinkets or food, handing out betting cards for bookies and other stuff that may or may not be legal. Such low-level entrepreneurship is becoming more common in the West during these desperate times, with the help of digital tools. A succinct explanation of the informal economy by Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times:

“One of the differences between rich and poor countries is that in the latter, people seldom wait for the government to ‘create jobs.’

When times are hard, they buy packs of cigarettes and sell them as singles; they find houses to clean through cousins of a cousin; they rent out bedrooms to students; they stock up on cellphone credit and peddle sidewalk calls by the minute.

It’s called the informal economy, and in much of the world it is bigger than the formal one. But it has been pushed onto the sidelines in the West, the refuge of criminals and the poor, because of labor laws, taxes, health and safety regulations and the like, which emerged to protect workers and consumers from the market’s vicissitudes and companies’ whims.”