Work Sucks, Let's Stop Forcing People To Do It In Order To Live

Matt Yglesias has what strikes me as a very good post about the idea, popular among some left-wingers, of a "jobs guarantee," in which the government would commit to providing employment for anyone who couldn't get it elsewhere doing some sort of relatively routine work. This idea strikes me as one that you'd come up with if you had a general lack of aversion to governments doing things to solve problems directly (as I do and as, I think, Yglesias does as well) and if you had for some reason defined unemployment as bad, as such. That is to say, it ignores the question of why unemployment is bad. It would, therefore, solve unemployment itself because, well, of course it would, that's what a "jobs guarantee" is, it's taking the concept of unemployment off the table. But it wouldn't necessarily do very much to reduce the badness which unemployment currently creates.

The primary harm of unemployment is that you don't get paid for doing work. That's how our society works: as an initial condition anyway, subject to modification around the edges by government programs, people get money by working for it. (Well, most of us do, anyway, those of us who don't get to make money through investments.) No work, no money; no money, going on living gets very hard. But the thing is, there are very, very few jobs in the world that anyone would do if they could collect the same salary while not doing it. Or to put it another way, the "work" side of things has disutility, even for those of us who have pretty good jobs (in which case the disutility is low enough that there's a huge surplus when you factor in the utility of the money). As compared to just handing out the same amount of money we'd be paying them to do work under the "jobs guarantee," then, the jobs guarantee imposes a loss on its purported beneficiaries: they have to work. Moreover, they have to work at what would probably not be very pleasant jobs.

The question, then, is whether there's any purpose to imposing that cost, or more specifically to enforcing that cost as a condition of receiving public assistance. Presumably the purpose is the same as the motive behind the destruction, by the early capitalists, of all means people might have of making a living without a wage: to induce people to do work. But... that's a right-wing motive, yes? Not that liberals (as opposed to communists) think we should abolish the concept of paying a wage for labor, but we generally want to make society do a bit less to coerce people to do unpleasant work on pain of starvation, homelessness, and death. We're the people who should say, of a guaranteed basic income that wasn't dependent on employment, "yes, this will probably reduce GDP a bit, but that's okay because we're prosperous enough to afford it and it will increase human happiness." The problem of unemployment isn't the lack of stuff to do, isn't the idleness, it's the lack of money. The liberal approach should be to guarantee that the lack of money won't get too terrible.

Now, that's not to say that there aren't problems to unemployment. For instance, being unemployed long-term or when you're a young adult can make it much harder to get employment going forward. Since nobody's proposing to abolish the general concept of capitalism, that's a harm done to unemployed people. Federal makework as part of a "jobs guarantee" probably wouldn't do much to solve that, anyway. Moreover, liberals have other, better solutions to the problem of there not being enough work to do: government spending and/or aggressive monetary policy to boost aggregate demand! This would have the added benefit of contributing to rising wages, production (partially canceling the effects of a GBI or a simulacrum thereof), and bargaining power for workers.

As the Yglesias post notes, a jobs guarantee looks inferior in every way to some combination of unconditional cash grants, non-cash public services where appropriate, appropriate monetary policy, and wage subsidies. You would only come to the idea of a "jobs guarantee" if you forgot why we want jobs. We don't want them for the jobs, we want them for the not starving. It is and should always be a key plank in the liberal platform that not starving shouldn't depend on finding someone to pay you to do something for them, even if it's the government paying you. The alternative is the kind of coercion right-wingers use to force people into working terrible jobs for the benefit of the bosses. The liberal solution is clear: guarantee a living, not a job.