I wouldn’t consider someone who teaches at a community college to be a loser. Maybe s/he just wanted to teach and didn’t want to deal with the whole “publish or perish” crap that you have to do at a university (I had a CC chemistry teacher who had this attitude) or s/he lived in that area because of personal or family issues.
There was a math teacher at my CC who I had briefly, until I dropped the class, who had an Ivy League Ph.D. and a lot of us figured that he’d probably pissed off too many people to ever teach at the university level.
Not a loser, certainly, but I think Hari’s point is that he wasn’t living up to his potential as a mathematician, as he probably wouldn’t be doing any original research nor teaching anything anywhere near his own level of expertise. (I’m reminded of Karl Weierstrass the high school teacher.) Sort of like someone who had the talent and charisma to be in the movies but had a career in another, more mundane field and maybe acted in a bit of community theater. Though I’m not sure if that’s really the kind of person this thread’s about.
Well for one thing, in a typical modern economic system, it would put a lot of upward pressure on labor costs.
Check out economic theories about the concept of NAIRU or Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. It’s basically the notion that when the employment rate gets too close to 100%, workers have so many options in the labor market that it starts to drive up wages even at the bottom of the pay scale. Increasing wage costs, of course, get passed on through the economy.
Whatever your political views about labor regulation, there’s no doubt that part of what keeps economic inflation down is the fact that a small but non-negligible chunk of the labor market is only marginally employable in the society in which they live (due to personal problems, disability, language/culture barriers, whatever) and thus can be induced to compete for very low-paying jobs.
To some extent, you could say that the weakest and least functional segment of society isn’t dragging down the economy, but rather anchoring it to financial stability. That’s why the hypothesis of a 100% healthy and socially functional population tends to make economists break out in a cold sweat.
I thought drug addiction was one of the major reasons why some of those “10%” never could “get it together” or become functioning, productive contributors to society; and that the War on Drugs was an attempt, albeit misguided and ineffective, to remove this obstacle to their ability to do productive work.
As long as we’re in GQ, can you back this up with some sort of evidence? ← ETA: Kimstu’s post wasn’t there when I posted this, but it’s sorta what I was looking for.
That 10% figure sounds like some general law of averages where everything just sort of settles. But that is probably only valid for a functioning modern democracy. I’m sure the number is closer to 50% or even 90% of countries like Somalia or Afghanistan. Most of history its usually been 10% who ruled everything and everyone else was a peasant or serf.
There may be such people, but 10% is way too high a percentage. History clearly shows that in the right economic conditions, when sufficient jobs are available and there is a shortage of labor over a sustained period, unemployment rates fall well below 10%. We have not seen such conditions in a while, because it is in the interests of capital to keep employment in short supply in order to keep wage levels low.
Unemployment only counts those actively seeking work. Therefore it would exclude most of the 10% we’re talking about. All of these people are not employed, but also (probably) not seeking work: students, stay at home moms, mentally ill homeless people, drug dealers, prisoners, hermits. (Now, some of these people are functional not working and others are not-functional and not working… I’m just listing folks who aren’t counted.)
So that’s part of that evidence that 10% are just totally disconnected from the system - they’re so disconnected that we don’t even measure them as part of the unemployed.
All that said, I wouldn’t define 10% as anything like an accurate count of these people. It’s probably something less than that.
I also wouldn’t use it as an excuse to end public aid or safety nets entirely. It’s cheaper to pay someone welfare than it is to pay for them to be in jail, even if we only look at dollars and not at quality of life for society as a whole. We just need to keep in mind that we’re not going to get these people to be productive members of society. We just need to minimize the overall cost and consider it a cost of being in a society.
To be fair, it’s not as though all of even the severely dysfunctional contribute nothing to society. I knew somebody who had mental illness issues severe enough that he’d never finished college or held down a job or had a serious relationship, but he befriended and helped elderly people in his residence, took occasional adult education classes and participated in interesting discussions, volunteered on some electoral campaigns, talked to his family members, etc.
Just because somebody isn’t “net productive” to the point of being able to financially support themselves (or be part of a self-supporting household, e.g., as a stay-at-home parent with a working spouse) for most of their lives doesn’t mean that their lives aren’t still useful to society in some ways.
You seem to be assuming that only those who “rule everything” count as a “functioning productive member of society”. Peasants and serfs in pre-modern societies had pretty rough lives but they were hardly dysfunctional freeloaders on the efforts of wealthy elites.
I don’t think this is a binary thing, with people either succeeding or not succeeding. I think there’s a distribution, and how helpful or abusive we are toward the people low in the distribution depends on our tolerance for very marginalized people. The more people we see starving, the harder we will try to take care of the low distribution. One could claim that 10% of people don’t make it, or equally well claim that we regulate challenges in our society such that 90% of people can make it. In any case, to be 10% we must be regulating in a certain way. This number 10 sounds suspiciously round to me.
I think that’s what Smith was getting at- the concept that no amount of money, effort or good vibes is going to get them to be productive in society, so not to worry about it too hard. I personally like dracoi’s idea of societal hospice where the idea is to keep them from being criminal, but not necessarily reward them either.
When you factor in all the people with severe mental illness (borderlines, PTSD, schizophrenics, depressives, anxious types, autistics, retarded, etc) a good % are going to be incapable of functioning, esp when you consider that treatment was mostly non-existent until recently and even now is only so-so. A lot can and do function, but w/o treatment a lot cannot.
Add in all the people who were horribly abused as kids until their minds were fucked, the social outcasts, invalids, the geriatric, etc. and yeah I can see 10% of people living on the fringes and unable to function. If anything, at any given time 10% of the population being mentally or physically incapable of functioning sounds low. Those people arent’ counted towards the unemployed though, at least they shouldn’t be. The unemployed is for able bodied people who want to work but can’t. People who choose to leave the workforce or who can’t work are not counted.
However it isn’t a constant 10%. People dip in and out of that. Someone may be fine, then due to a traumatic death be fucked up for 5 years, then function again, then get disabled near old age, etc. Some people are fucked up during certain periods but able to function during others.
I think it’s kind of important to take care of the poor because hardship has a tendency to spread throughout society. I’d much rather shell out of a few bucks every year so that a broke-ass guy will have some food rather than pay thousands of dollars in hospital bills after he stabs in my throat while mugging me.
We should not desire that paid labour expand to fill all space available to it. If some day we can get 100% of what we want with a 10% workload, it is not desirable that we waste resources creating make-work to waste the other 90%. The hard part is working out a fair way to distribute the benefit of improved efficiency that does not have unintended side effects.
So the bottom 10 percent, are they born, raised and die that way or do a few people float in and out of it? I just want to know how much contempt I need to dredge up.
You seem to be assuming that only those who “rule everything” count as a “functioning productive member of society”. Peasants and serfs in pre-modern societies had pretty rough lives but they were hardly dysfunctional freeloaders on the efforts of wealthy elites.