Joe Stanley
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Weaker Than Expected Job Growth In August -
Blogging as Praxis: joestanley: anticapitalist: joestanley: anticapitalist:“Many people... Lots of back and forth about unemployment.
I’m not going to respond any further because it’s clear we’re talking past one another, and this is already dangerously close to a disagreement on the Internet, which is a waste of time for all parties involved. Sufficed to say, please ask any economics professor if your statements about unemployment are correct and realistically implementable as they stand. Those are the only statements I am talking about, the ones in the public eye. The ones that got promoted in the #politics tag.
Now, this is something that took me many years of lobbying to realize (despite how obvious it is), so please think about it as you continue to be engaged in policy and politics: There are two layers to any system of lawmaking. The first is the policy layer, i.e. can the proposal actually do what it sets out to accomplish? The second is the political layer, i.e. can the proposal pass all required legislative, executive and judicial bodies and become a long-standing law?
Your suggestions and examples may or may not pass the first layer. They certainly do not pass the second layer at this time. And that sucks, it really does. But as much as we rail against this second layer, it doesn’t change the fact that it exists, and anything to be considered “realistic” needs to be able to pass both layers within a measurable timeframe.
I’ve already gotten a few notes asking why I am “wasting” my time with this, but it isn’t a waste. Because there are a lot of thought leaders and young and full-of-potential progressives who are spending a lot of time and effort on proposals that only pass one of those two layers, and all the resources involved have produced what, exactly? I don’t see any co-ops toppling the capitalist system. I don’t see any communes supplanting the free market. Meanwhile, I do see congressmen using terms like “legitimate rape” and are still in the lead against incumbent senators.
Yes, I’d love to see a world where there are no zero marginal product workers. Yes, I’d love to see successful and sustainable re-education systems in place to help with generational shifts in skill demands. And yes, I’d love to see a world where people do not hunger. But waiting at the destination while the rest of us carry the burden of getting the group there does not help.
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“Many people (especially conservatives) make the argument that if you’re on welfare you shouldn’t be eating steak or any expensive/good food. They say things like “oh they didn’t earn it”. This appeals to the cutthroat asshole within all of us, but if you think about it for half a second, you’ll realize how awful that mindset is. These people are denied employment, denied a home, and the chance to make a life because of the current political and economic structure, and you want to deny them even a taste of good food? More often than not, it’s not their fault that they’re poor or unemployed. But let’s assume that you have an actual lazy person who is using welfare money to buy steak. OH NO someone doesn’t like work! WE MUST PUNISH HIM. No, fuck that. Work sucks dick. Given that society could function with most people working way fewer hours, (which is what unemployment means: all the work can be done by fewer people, aka many people with short hours would also cover the ‘required work’), let people enjoy life without working.”
“which is what unemployment means: all the work can be done by fewer people, aka many people with short hours would also cover the ‘required work”
Half of my face is numb due to anesthetic right now, which makes the look of disgusted confusion covering the other half infinitely more terrifying. This argument is akin to saying that because you have seven vegetables, you can make any recipe that calls for seven vegetables, and even moreso that you could use a part of each vegetable to make any recipe requiring less than seven vegetables.
I’m assuming your anesthetic has also impaired your brain function, because you clearly didn’t understand what I was saying.
Since you seem eager to compare unemployment to vegetable use, I’ll describe it with a more apt analogy.
Let’s say you have 10 vegetable plants, but you can feed and satisfy the world by plucking all the vegetables from 7 of the plants. Thus, the you decide to stop caring for the other 3 plants and they start withering away and are constantly on the brink of death.
You could instead take fewer vegetables from each plant and include the 3 other plants and start nurturing them.
Do you get it?
However, this vegetable analogy is a really dumb analogy.
The vegetable analogy is “dumb” because it is an egregious oversimplification of the issue, much like the following statement: “which is what unemployment means: all the work can be done by fewer people, aka many people with short hours would also cover the ‘required work’”
Even setting aside the natural unemployment rate (which isn’t agreed upon), this statement is only correct in a world where all work is equal, or the ability to perform all work is equal. This is not the case in the world, let alone the U.S., let alone a single state. Different work requires different skills, and there is a strong case to be made that a good portion of our current unemployment rates are due to structural unemployment. It is made up of a lot of parts, but the three big ones I see are:
- A reluctance or inability for workers to relocate to areas where their skills are relatively higher in demand (i.e. choosing underemployment over long distance relocation, or the inability to move to a location due to immigration laws).
- The large shift over the past decades from production to service in the U.S. labor market.
- The overall growth of computers and technical skill required across the market at large (the fear of manufacturing jobs being sent overseas hides the real issue that automation has caused relative declines across the globe, and those being employed require greater and greater expertise).
This does not even begin to address the fact that even in a world where all work is equal, distributing it equally to all work-desiring individuals would result in some people being unable to sustain themselves economically, unless we also assume that all wages are being distributed equally, or otherwise there is a massive increase in social safety nets worldwide. At this point we are so divorced from the realities of the present and near future that I’d rather be playing Dungeons & Dragons.
As a final note, in the coming decades I think we are going to have to deal with zero marginal product workers. Your statement implicitly posits that they will never exist. I think they are an all-too-terrifying reality, and the more we ignore it the greater a problem it will become.
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“Many people (especially conservatives) make the argument that if you’re on welfare you shouldn’t be eating steak or any expensive/good food. They say things like “oh they didn’t earn it”. This appeals to the cutthroat asshole within all of us, but if you think about it for half a second, you’ll realize how awful that mindset is.
These people are denied employment, denied a home, and the chance to make a life because of the current political and economic structure, and you want to deny them even a taste of good food?
More often than not, it’s not their fault that they’re poor or unemployed. But let’s assume that you have an actual lazy person who is using welfare money to buy steak. OH NO someone doesn’t like work! WE MUST PUNISH HIM. No, fuck that. Work sucks dick.
Given that society could function with most people working way fewer hours, (which is what unemployment means: all the work can be done by fewer people, aka many people with short hours would also cover the ‘required work’), let people enjoy life without working.”—Blogging as Praxis: Apparently being poor means not being allowed to have fun
“which is what unemployment means: all the work can be done by fewer people, aka many people with short hours would also cover the ‘required work”
Half of my face is numb due to anesthetic right now, which makes the look of disgusted confusion covering the other half infinitely more terrifying. This argument is akin to saying that because you have seven vegetables, you can make any recipe that calls for seven vegetables, and even moreso that you could use a part of each vegetable to make any recipe requiring less than seven vegetables.
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Do progressive policies increase state unemployment?
Conservatives like to hold up California’s generally progressive policies next to its high unemployment rate as a claim that conservative policies are better for jobs. A look at the unemployment rate by state reveals how absurd this argument is.
Nevada has the highest unemployment rate. (That’s right. Michigan’s been eclipsed. It is now tied for the 39th lowest unemployment with Oregon.)
The lowest unemployment rates are North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, Vermont, and New Hampshire. The highest rates are Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, California, Rhode Island, and Nevada. If anything, the rate reveals that oil booms and low, largely rural populations are good for the employment and crashed housing bubbles and urban centers are bad for employment.
Texas, the conservative poster child, has an unemployment rate of 7.1%, which puts it in the middle of the pack at 22. Massachusetts, with its job-killing healthcare mandate, comes out better than Texas with a 6.9% unemployment rate. Bottom line? There is no obvious correlation between political leaning and unemployment rate.
(via jasencomstock)
