Unemployment and jobs: Work for post-materialists - 4 views
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I think Mr Yglesias' proposal that the Fed target a 3-4% rate of inflation is indeed the single best thing Washington can do to create jobs today.
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there's something that bothers me slightly about this whole "job creation" discussion. The implicit idea seems to be that policy should aim to increase employer demand for employees. But it occurs to me that perhaps some of the long-term unemployed want remunerative work, but are a bit sick of "employment".
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Philosophical questions of self-ownership and the alienability of labour aside, I am convinced that autonomy is profoundly important to most of us, and that the sort of self-rental involved in the employment relation is regularly experienced as a lamentable loss of autonomy, if not humiliating subjection. I think a lot of us would rather not work for somebody else.
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A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure
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This is me. I don't want to maximise income. I want to maximise autonomy and time for unremunerative but satisfying creative work. Reihan Salam has written provocatively on the subject of threshold earners, in addition to introducing me to David Roberts' related idea of "the medium chill".
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Word up. There are too many things I want to do that cost me money--or at least don't pay me.
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This resonated with me, as well. I am actually pretty good at doing things that are completely tertiary to my job. I've been focused on turning my full-time job into that, but what I'd really like is some way to bounce from project to project, doing what I'm good at, getting some fulfillment, and getting something back from it. I feel like all these little internet-networks hold the potential for that, but - as the article points out - it's not as though you can get by that way.
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as Ronald Inglehart has documented, the achievement of high levels of widespread material well-being has precipitated a momentous shift toward "post-materialist" values across the entire developed world.
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Having secured a relatively comfortable standard of living, we have come to worry less about the stuff we need to get by and more about the pursuit of self-realisation, meaning in life, justice in society, and harmony with the natural world.
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Whatever our level of education, if unemployment benefits and odd jobs add up to enough to keep us above a socially acceptable material threshold, we will not be in a hurry to accept any available employment, no matter how unpleasant or unsuitable.
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So, yeah, I'd like to see wage subsidies and a 4% inflation target. But I'd also like to see a shift away from economic policy that pushes us so insistently into the "employee" role. What does the government call you if you are working but not on somebody's payroll with social security and Medicare taxes automatically deducted from your wages? Self-employed!
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You must work for somebody, even if it's yourself.
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But I don't want to be a tiny business that hires me. I don't want to be my own boss. I don't want to be a boss at all, or to have one. I just want to work and get paid for it, on terms agreeable to the parties involved.
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Clearly, decoupling health benefits from employment would help a lot. Less obviously, but at least as importantly, we need to eliminate the insane patchwork of regulations that keep folks from legally cutting hair for money in a kitchen, or legally making a few bucks every now and then taxiing people around town in a 1988 Ford Escort. De-formalising and de-bureaucratising labour certainly makes it harder for government to track who has paid what to whom, who owes how much in various taxes, and so forth. But it would be truly pathetic if the legal/economic organisation of our society was optimised for government surveillance and tax collection and not for the exercise of autonomy in pursuit of a meaningful life.
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... Maybe. The fact of the matter is that group insurance rates through employers tend to be much more affordable than getting individual coverage. There's a reason so many hipsters and art types work part-time at Starbucks and other shops that offer benefits to part-time workers. Just as there's a reason for regulation beyond just tracking how money moves. We don't just certify drugs or beef because we want to make sure we know what people are spending money on at the supermarket.
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Quite true. Will's a bit too anti-regulatory for my taste. To expand your observation: if we let the free market do its thing, it does not logically follow that all our food will be safer, absent a regulatory apparatus. In fact, my hazy recollection is that the mix of regional laws and patchwork of safety requirements is one reason that some industries _crave_ regulation, so they can do business without quadrupling the size of their legal department.
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