A new book, Daniel Pink’s “Free Agent Nation,” advances what is a well-accepted thesis that Americans are increasingly turning to self-employment and micro-entrepreneurship, and that this adds to human happiness. I would dispute the latter. For reasons of security, lifestyle, finance, and, on balance personal fulfillment, I would, all in all, rather work for General Motors.

Taking the most trivial but incessantly repeated reason for self-employment first, “Free Agent Nation” begins with an anecdote about a father-daughter pair where the father finally found liberation as a free agent after 30 years of frustration as a “renegade” within GE, because he refused to wear a necktie. Pink, addressing an audience at the Cato Institute, turned up in blue jeans, looking for all the world as though he’d come to fix the drains.

This is 60’s nonsense. Life itself has a dress code, and liberation does not consist of rejecting a middle-class uniform in favor of a blue collar one. Dress codes do not stifle individualism, they channel it. As a young London merchant banker, I followed the local dress code of a three-piece suit, whose vest was designed to hold in and thereby beautify the spreading waistlines of the more senior directors. As I grew more experienced, I didn’t reject the dress code, I enhanced it, finding a tailor who would make me vests in a magnificent shade of maroon velvet. Likewise Lord Castlereagh, at the Congress of Vienna, won plaudits as the best-dressed representative by rejecting the peacock colors that were then fashionable, and dressing entirely in exquisitely tailored black, relieved only by sparkling lace ruffles at sleeves and collar — thereby was the predominant 19th and 20th century formal color scheme created. Lord Castlereagh, however, did not turn up at the Congress of Vienna in blue jeans, and would not have been effective if he had.

More seriously, advocates for “free agency” claim it increases economic efficiency. Instead of performing tasks assigned to them by a possibly unsympathetic bureaucracy, free agents are able to select their own projects, based on their own assessment of their own strengths, accept or reject clients as they wish, and pace themselves according to how hard they want to work.

This is also mostly bunkum. Adam Smith postulated in 1776 that the division of labor made people work more efficiently, and his insight has not been invalidated by two centuries of industrial progress. Free agents are forced to perform all parts of a task they have taken on, including the parts for which they have little skill. Their ability to pace themselves is severely limited by the need to earn a living. In general, their ability to work at more than 100 percent of capacity is severely limited by the need to maintain health and sanity. Hence, since work assignments are “lumpy” they spend portions of the time grossly overstretched and other portions in enforced idleness. There is nothing whatever liberating about a “vacation” you haven’t planned for, can’t use profitably because your family is otherwise occupied, and whose relaxing effects are wholly undermined by worry at whether it will prove unexpectedly prolonged and lead to financial destitution.

Self-employment calls on other skills not required of the employee, in two areas in particular where many of the self-employed lack the required skills and find the need to deploy them unpleasant. Not all the self-employed dislike both areas equally, but almost all have great difficulty with one or the other.

The first is in bookkeeping, and its associated skill, cash-flow management. Self-employed people have a much more difficult time with the IRS, with their bankers and with state bureaucracy in general than do employees. Their cash flow is frequently erratic, forcing them to deal with late payments and unhappy creditors. The income tax authorities have no readily available means of checking most of their figures, so treat their (inevitably, more complicated) tax returns with suspicion. In addition, in the U.S. injury is added to insult by the self-employed on modest incomes having to pay both employer’s and employee’s Social Security contributions, thus facing a marginal tax rate approaching 50 percent before state tax is even considered. Registration and paperwork requirements for small business are generally complex, and the penalties for ignorance of them are steep.

For many of the self-employed, however, even more unpleasant than state and tax bureaucracy is the need for incessant networking. To get clients, it is essential for small businesses to attend every possible cocktail party, pick up on every possible business lead, and “triage” new acquaintances rapidly into the useful, the possibly useful and the parasitic. Unless the “free agent” has an exceptional client base, huge amounts of time are used in this effort, with consequent damage to family life, “pleasure” social life and intellectual self-enrichment. Further, many people find the process itself intensely unpleasant, and indeed alienating. True friendships are impossible when every human relationship has business-generation strings attached, because the friend is always aware of why he is being cultivated. The result, therefore, for the self-employed individual is emotional impoverishment and eventually isolation.

For most people, the most unattractive feature of self-employment is financial. As many studies have shown, the majority of people are both more confident of their capabilities and more optimistic about their prospects than is justified by objective reality. Consequently, the decision to become self-employed is often lightly taken, and accompanied by dreams of greater wealth as well as personal freedom. The reality is very different.

Because of human optimism, the number of self employed in any field is generally greater than the demands for their services. Consequently, employers are not prepared to pay the self employed at a significantly higher hourly rate than they pay employees of the same skill level. However, the self employed then have two extra costs; fringe benefits (primarily pension and health insurance), which they must provide themselves, generally at a greater cost than through a group plan, and the cost of “downtime” — hours when they are prospecting for new clients, or unavoidably idle, and for which no reasonable client is going to pay a penny.

Only the self-employed, for example, can understand just why Ebenezer Scrooge hated Christmas — as he famously said “a day older, and not a penny richer” — but for the modern self-employed, particularly in Europe, the gap without earning capacity is closer to a month than a day. Thus the net income of the self-employed individual is generally far lower than that of an equivalent employee, and his insecurity higher.

Finally, Pink extols the beauty of not retiring, carrying on working part time as a self employed person into one’s seventies. Pink may wish to do this, but as far as I’m concerned the idea of spending my seventies being given the commercial brush-off by well paid punks 40 years younger than me is extremely unattractive. Self-employment, because of its financial limitations, makes it very difficult to save for old age, so a comfortable retirement becomes an unattainable dream. Ideally, my seventies are going to be devoted to golf, and I’ve no objection to working for a bureaucracy in the interim to achieve this goal.

It is often argued that the move to self-employment is inevitable, because corporate life has become more unstable than it was 30 years ago. Historians in a hundred years no doubt will debate which was cause and which effect. The arrival in the workforce of the egomaniac baby-boomers, loyal to nothing but their own self-actualization, naturally made lifetime employment policies by the Fortune 500 both unattractive and futile. If a corporation gave employees job security it simply lost its best people for higher salaries elsewhere, and was left with the unemployable dregs. Further, the Las Vegas style stock and takeover markets, so beloved of the young and the stock-optioned in the 1990’s, themselves greatly shortened the lifespan of major corporations, as set out in detail in this column last week, thus making it almost impossible for employees to spend their entire career with one company, even if they wanted to.

The result has been a heavy bias in the economy toward transience. At a career counseling seminar I attended in the middle 1990’s there were no cases more pathetic than the former IBM employees who had been cast out into the free market after 20 or 30 years of safe employment in the IBM cocoon. Most of us had at least some idea of how to look for another job; these people had no clue because it never had occurred to them that such a skill might be necessary. They, at least, were the true losers from the transient economy.

For those past 40, for whom self-employment is no longer an exciting prospect full of rich rewards, take heart. Your time is coming. As the great recession now upon us grinds inexorably deeper, the self-employed and the young stock-option bonanza winners at the dot-coms and elsewhere will be the first to suffer as clients first cut out the expenses for which they have no ongoing obligation or which are obviously excessive. Meanwhile, as the stock market settles into a decade long slumber, stock options will become valueless, takeovers will slow to a trickle, and even technological innovation will be held back by the lack of eager venture capital finance.

Consequently the well established companies, dominant in their businesses, will be the long-term survivors. After an initial round of layoffs, they will find themselves less threatened by upstart competitors so job security and the rewards of long service in such companies will sharply increase. As in the 1930’s, the majority of innovations and growth will come from within the Fortune 500, and the life expectancy of major U.S. corporations will once again increase, reversing the trend of the last 40 years.

Competition from abroad also will diminish, partly because competitors in emerging markets will find it difficult to obtain finances and partly because a national and indeed international upsurge in protectionism will entrench existing developed country competitors in place. Companies will find it relatively easy to trim salaries, but unattractive and unnecessary to trim head count, since their most valuable employees will have few other options.

Organization Man, your time is about to return. Put away the jeans, or preferably burn them, and get out and press the Grey Flannel Suit.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)

This article originally appeared on United Press International.