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[ChairmanPoo]

While NO, unemployment and this so-called "degrowth" aren't good things, the idea of a better distribution of work hours DOES have some merit, particularily in regards to the crisis. Instead of laying off people, many companies would rather make a better distribution of the work avaiable (and hence the wages) among the people they do have. This would save them money in indemnizations and allow them to keep the staff for when the bad times went away.  It's far from flawless, however: Workers however might or might not find it convenient. If they're struggling with the mortgages and living consts already, maybe they'd rather have some people kicked out (running the risk of THEY being the ones kicked out) than starve all together in harmony. And there are jobs where there simply isn't enough qualified personnel as it is.


PD: also: a surplus of unemployed people has some advantages for  capitalist economies. Offer and demand: more people asking for a job = you have to pay less.

[GlyphGryph]

Take their wealth out of hand, and you lose the ability to motivate people towards a personal reward (why would I work my arse off, if the government will just reposess everything later?).

There is significant evidence that this is not actually true, unless you really do repossess EVERYTHING. And even then it's only true for like 2/3rds of the people.

turns out most of them do it for the power and prestige, and while the wealth is a good way to flex that, if yo take the wealth equally from them AND their peers, they aren't made significantly worse off by it.

Its the same quirk of human nature that makes unemployment such a bad thing - we are greedy bastards, but most of us don't base our happiness on stuff so much as on what stuff we have compared to prevailing cultural norms and how much stuff we had yesterday. We are surrounded by appealing narratives, and we need money to buy in.

And employers don't want to deal with people with a low commitment. They don't want to manage 30 employees for a weeks worth of work instead of two. So even if the actual necessities are much less than people think they are, its extremely difficult to only earn that much money. It's not efficient, so there's pressures on employees not to offer it if possible. If it's an hour or two a day, there are pressures, via time lost to commutes, not to work it on the employees part as well. And people like having extra money around, for emergencies, or because they can always find a use for it.

Oh! And we spend a lot of money on minimizing risk. In fact, huge swathes of our economy are dedicated to it. Many risks that we used to simply accept, we can't justify any longer because there ARE ways to mitigate them.

All of this means unemployment is bad, and there aren't any easy solutions.

Persoally, I'm a big supporter of a negative-income-tax variant. But again, this might just be greed talking - I was most happy when I was homeless, and I've calculated that I'll need about a hundred thousand, AFTER paying off student loans, to live happily that way for the rest of my life. Which is quite a bit, and about half of that will be dedicated to fighting, bribing, and avoiding police officers (who are, by far, the worst part of being homeless, and dealing with them can get pricey). An NIT would mean I wouldn't have to do that, and I could just dedicate myself to making games and whatnot for people to enjoy.

[mainiac]

The greatest economist of the 20th century predicted in 1930 that 100 years later we'd have a 15 hour work week.
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
I think it's instructive to compare our situation to 1930 to see where things went wrong.

It's true that both 1930 and 2012 have levels of high inequality worldwide.  In the US in particular these two years represent the two peaks of inequality with roughly the same percentage of total income going to the top 1%.   However in between these years were the very good years for inequality in the 50s to 70s.  The 50s to 70s also had a very fast growth rate in many of the worlds biggest economies.  But the 40 hour work week did not budge.  It might have fluctuated a bit, like the living standards of a pre-industrial society, but there wasn't a sustained change.

We also had the 70s where there was a huge boom in the labor participation rate.  Mostly this was the result of feminism causing many more women to work.  The baby boom was hitting it's peak as well.  This would seem like the ideal time to shorten the work week, tons of workers, tons of prosperity and fast technological increase in efficiency.  But no fundamental change.

Even in the current worldwide recession we see that among the employed we have average hours worked going up not down.  Rather then sharing the work, employers just have their people work overtime before gambling on a new employee, causing a slight tick upwards.

All adds up to a pretty clear picture that the 40 hour work week does not respond to conventional economic pressures.  It's not an efficient market, it's a social convention where people expect a 40 hour work week so that's what they will put up with.

I would speculate that the change has come as more of our workworce is being shifted into low productivity labor.  In order to keep up with that social pressure more and more people are doing increasingly marginal work in low paying service sector jobs.  In past decades those people could be working in manufacturing or agriculture and be much more productive.  But computerization, mechanization and foreign labor have reduced the number of highly productive jobs in manufacturing and agriculture even as net domestic outputs in both sectors have increased enormously.  So instead they go into whatever labor there is to be done.

[justinlee999]

I propose robots producing more robots, and each person is assigned 2 of the robots, and they do what the owners want them to do.

Then we have robot-run factories, maintained and operated by robots.

Then we'll have self-evolving robots, so humans need not program any more.

Robots.

[jester]

Capitalism,  like democracy is the worst system on earth apart from all the others. 


  On a sidenote, alot of the jobs we have now are just pointless makework already, companies producing crap products that become redundant/break quickly so people will buy more of their stuff.  The old lightbulb thing (we can make lightbulbs that last for 100 times as long as they do, for about 50% more, but then how would lightbulb people make money?) is a great example. 

  The more I think about it the more worried I get that our current system is just geared to burning up resources as fast as possible while producing as little as possible in the long term.

  Sidenote 2:  Back when we were all hunter gatherers we only worked for about 3 hours a day to provide for ourselves, sure you died at 32, but I think its important to remember that this 8 hours a day working thing isnt normal human behavior at all. 

[Muz]

Having been job hunting for a few months, I think unemployment is actually a good thing. While I was searching for a job, a lot of people used to ask (well, accuse) me why I didn't get a job immediately like everyone else. Unemployment in Malaysia is practically nil, the rates are mostly people who want a better job.

And in reality, it's because most jobs are incredibly shitty. Pay goes below poverty level for most jobs, not even high enough to pay for daily transport and food (something like $0.75 an hour). Professional jobs normally go into illegal working hours, paying less than legal overtime, with very hazardous workplaces.

There are a LOT of high-tech jobs, but around 500 applicants for each. People tend to choose cheap skilled workers over smart ones. Universities churn out graduates with high grades. HR tends to be bottom of the barrel, so they just take anyone from any shitty university with first class grades over someone from a recognized ivy league universities with bad grades (because the exams were actually hard instead of 'memorize this sentence and write it out again in the exam').

Employers complain that they can't find enough workers, yet they take the typical approach of looking through the resumes on top of the table and binning the rest.

Unemployment is just a really poor measure of a country's economic health. I find it takes a skilled worker much longer to find a job, assuming they're not in high demand like engineering, law, medical, finance. Someone with a physics or math PhD could take well over a year to find a suitable job. Someone with no degree might need half a day to find a suitable job.

There's nothing preventing a math PhD guy from getting a job shovelling roadkill, but it's actually negative productivity, since they'll be likely to miss out on actual research jobs as they'd be too busy to job hunt. Heck, a smart unemployed person is bound to do something useful in their free time or at least learn something, so this unemployment time often pays better than getting a minimum wage job.

The depressing part is not because of unemployment itself, but because of friends and family and general culture accusing people of being too picky of getting a suitable job. In a truly productive society, everyone would have a degree at least, and require about 3-6 months to get a specialized job in their field, and their family/welfare should be able to provide enough to keep them alive until they do. But with today's culture, you want to force people into a job.. any job, regardless of whether it pays off on a macro level or in the long term.

[kaenneth]

The serious problem I see is Employers who don't want to hire people who are Unemployed.

There are many, many managers out there who will only hire someone who currently has a job somewhere else.

Which means that instead of 4 people each being unemployed for 3 months; you get 1 person unfairly unemployed for a year. After which, their Unemployment benefits have run out.

[Truean]

Alright, there are simply two main views:

Star Trek: Technology Productivity leads to freeing up human time for enjoyment, etc.
Real World: Technology Productivity leads to short term increased corporate profits and long term collapse.

The view that "productivity is better' follows the Star Trek Model, or the Semi Star Trek Model of "we'll use that laid off labor somewhere else," which doesn't work once you run out of "somewhere else." We currently don't have any "somewhere else," for all the laid off people. What ends up happening is, people get laid off and are made artificially unable to provide for themselves, which people cruelly mistake as being "lazy." They say three little words to these people, "get a job." The real reply to this is, "no duh." They already thought of that, and if it were that easy, they'd have done it long ago.

Unemployment as it currently stands means people artificially made unable to provide for themselves. They were productive before and they're still able to be productive now if someone would give them the chance. It's an artificial disability as it currently stands.

Now ideally, in the Star Trek theory, we'd finally have time to do all that stuff we wanted to do, but we all know that's not happening easily.

[kaenneth]

We need megaprojects; like fixing the roads/telecom/railroads/dams/etc.

Rebuilding all the old 1970's-80's nuke plants to modern standards would create a few jobs.

[Truean]

We need megaprojects; like fixing the roads/telecom/railroads/dams/etc.

Rebuilding all the old 1970's-80's nuke plants to modern standards would create a few jobs.

Hell, filling all the potholes in Cleveland alone would employ everyone. Forget the rest of the infrastructure.

[Pnx]

We need megaprojects; like fixing the roads/telecom/railroads/dams/etc.

Rebuilding all the old 1970's-80's nuke plants to modern standards would create a few jobs.

Hell, filling all the potholes in Cleveland alone would employ everyone. Forget the rest of the infrastructure.

Oh god, so much this. But we really need to find some better way of dealing with the frequent freeze/thaw cycle on roads.

[Leafsnail]

1) The bare necessities to live entails quite a lot. Nowadays, that includes food, shelter, clean water, heathcare, and probably transportation. That's a lot to give for free.
2) If we do give it for free, we need to be ensured that those services are being provided, and provided well. We don't want bread lines.

You can get all those things in the UK (and many other countries with welfare), depending on your circumstances (I've no idea how the council housing system works but it is possible to get if you're really unable to work).  Although for easier implementation you give people the money with which to buy food.  That's a lot easier for everyone involved than bread lines (and even provides automatic economic stimulus in the event of recession).

[Truean]

We need megaprojects; like fixing the roads/telecom/railroads/dams/etc.

Rebuilding all the old 1970's-80's nuke plants to modern standards would create a few jobs.

Hell, filling all the potholes in Cleveland alone would employ everyone. Forget the rest of the infrastructure.

Oh god, so much this. But we really need to find some better way of dealing with the frequent freeze/thaw cycle on roads.

The honest truth? It's simple. You build concrete squares and just replace them in a day when they wear out. Literally road tiles that are about 2 ft by 2ft cemented together and mass produced. That'd made too much sense though

[mainiac]

We hardly need megaprojects to find productive employment for people.  Most places in the US and Europe have cut back on police and teachers, some pretty essential services.

Wouldn't road tiles like that become unsafe to drive on every time there's a freeze?

[Eagle_eye]

this is an interesting read that addresses some of your topic: http://michael-hudson.com/2012/04/productivity-the-miracle-of-compound-interest-and-poverty/