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.

5. Nashville, Tenn.

Harrison McClary/Reuters/File
The riverboat General Jackson makes its way along the Cumberland River in downtown Nashville, Tenn.

Nashville's population climbed by 5.9 percent between 2000 and 2010, and the US Census estimates that Nashville grew by another 6.7 percent in 2015. In early February of this year, financial services firm UBS announced that it would be moving 2,500 jobs to Poland, India, China -- and Nashville, thanks the relatively low cost of operating there. UBS has created almost 500 jobs in Nashville since 2014, and plans to add almost 100 more. It’s not just jobs from major companies like UBS that are experiencing real growth in Nashville, though. AngelList lists more than 412 startups in Nashville that are hiring.

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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”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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