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Need a side job? The 10 best cities for 'gig economy' workers

The gig economy has become typified by piecemeal jobs found on platforms like Uber and Etsy, but that's just part of a larger sea change in the American labor force: 54 million workers considered themselves freelancers last year. Here are the 10 US cities with the most opportunities for them, according to Thumbtack.

3. Chicago

Nam Y. Huh/AP/File
A winter garden tree is covered by snow in Buffalo Grove, Ill. (March 2, 2016).

The Windy City has a thriving startup scene. There are about 2720 Chicago-based startups that are hiring on AngelList. Retaining that talent, however, is another matter: as the Chicago Tribune reported in October 2015, while Chicago is good at growing vibrant individuals with good ideas, it has difficulty keeping them. Many people who begin in the startup scene in Chicago end up going on to other ventures in hubs like Silicon Valley, Boston, or New York.

"We have a natural talent drain," Chicago-based entrepreneur and philanthropist J.B. Pritzker, managing partner of the investment firm Pritzker Group, told the Tribune. "We develop a lot of talent in Illinois, and the question is how much do you have available to that talent to absorb them into your economy, and how much of that talent needs to get up and leave because opportunity exists elsewhere?"

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

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