To make a more rational point, I think this has to do with the corporate focus on profits over good corporate citizenship in the last few decades. I’m not going full bore socialist, but I don’t see why a company can’t value both profit AND citizenship. I agree that you don’t want make-work jobs just to keep people off the streets, but there are a lot of valuable jobs going un-staffed in the interest of squeezing every penny out. People loaded down with the responsibilities of what used to be three full time jobs, for example. When I was job-hunting a few years ago, there were many ads for Business Analyst with requirements of software development, analysis and also project management. Even administrative assistants that used to support whole departments have been cut and now everybody has to handle their own calls, letters to customers and vendors, meeting planning, and other organizational tasks. If you’re paying good money for a highly skilled software engineer, why do you want him scheduling meetings and writing letters? That’s just an example.
You could be right, but I look at it this way-- the more companies make mistakes, the more business opportunities there are for me if I ever want to compete with them.
Okay, but the Hoover Dam wasn’t just a case of giving a bunch of people a salary and saying “Go build something.” The Hoover Dam (called the Boulder Dam when it was built) was built because they really needed a big dam built there; it was planned long before the Depression hit. As it happens it was a fortunate thing that it provided jobs for men who needed it (though it managed to kill a lot of them) but the impetus of the project was that it was something that needed to be built.
Starting with “let’s employ people” is starting at the wrong end of the question. If you set out to merely employ people, you will end up paying them to do nothing of value, as in fact can be seen in some countries. If you begin your question with “what do we need to get done?” you might end up actually employing people in a way that gets something useful done.
As an unofficial addendum to RickJay’s post, the other problem is that even if you have a project that definitely needs to get built, the bulk of jobs often take a long time to arrive. Let’s say everyone agrees that a new bridge is needed somewhere. You can’t just send out a bunch of men and build it–you need to wait months or years for a relatively small group of highly paid engineers, managers, architects, and other officials to design, organize, and approve your project (and this often can’t be sped up–a “nine women can’t make a baby in one month” type of problem). So if you fund these types of infrastructure projects, the construction jobs don’t actually arrive until the economy is already on an upwswing. This was a big problem in the late 2000’s, wherein the government simply couldn’t find enough “shovel-ready” projects to fund.
Now, if you don’t give a crap about the environment, you have a depression that goes on for years, and you are building things that are less engineered than what we have today, your fiscal stimulus will probably be successful (at least from a Keynesian viewpoint). But if not, you’re liable to just waste your money by any metric.
And every time someone brings up The Hoover Dam, I want to ask them how long the Environmental Impact Report took to get approved. And then I want to ask them where they plan to set up the tent city to house the workers that will be shipped to the big, new job site. You simply couldn’t do something like that today, and looking back at what might have worked 80 years ago during a Depression as an example of what we should be doing today is laughable on the face of it.
I wasn’t aware that anyone was advocating that government hire for private companies. So I’m not sure what the point of your post was.
Government jobs might take up the slack left by private companies who are not hiring now (or during the recession) not because there are unqualified applicants, but because they are hoping for an unemployed applicant who can bend steel with her bare hands and leap over might buildings in a single bound.
In the long run they will screw up and implode. In the short run they will undercut you and your company will be dead. Participants in a race to the bottom feel they have little recourse. They’re not necessarily evil. Or stupid.
I may be misremembering, but wasn’t there, at one time, a program to do this through the private sector, with the government giving companies money they were to use to hire people? And the same questionable memory tells me it fell victim to a de facto lack of an effective enforcement mechanism, though I can think of a rather simple one.
This thread is about the government guaranteeing everyone a job. One poster says that companies don’t know how to hire the right people. I ask if that poster thinks the government should do the hiring instead. You come back with this post:
That seems to be a very strange thing to post if I was supposed to interpret it as meaning: “I think private companies are better at hiring than the government would be”.
Okay. I took her comment as a frustrated aside, perhaps because my friend is equally frustrated. I could try to make it relevant by using it as an argument that companies don’t do a good job hiring, but the guaranteed job proposal is just as valid if companies hired perfectly.
It doesn’t matter how good a job government does in hiring since the proposal is for them to hire (initially) everyone, so they are going to do a worse job in terms of qualified applicants by definition.
There have definitely been tax incentives. I think I may remember a program like what you mention. I remember reading about the great hopes for such programs - I don’t remember reading any stories about how they worked well.
You’re absolutely right that the companies have the right to make that decision. But it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily correct. As a hiring manager, I have had educational requirements put on me (because we can get them, with so many grads these days) only to have those people complaining that the job isn’t meeting their college-degree expectations/aspirations.
That was the point I was trying to make: there’s plenty of real work that needs to be done, which would create real assets, increase the real wealth of the country, and improve the productivity and quality of life for future generations. Meanwhile millions are idle because they don’t have jobs. It’s a solution that would solve two problems: unemployment, and creating a better, more productive USA for the future.
The productivity of someone who is doing nothing (is unemployed) is 0. If you employ him doing something useful, you increase overall productivity.
I’m not aware that’s a problem in this country. Most people want more: better homes, safer cleaner streets, better education for their children, newer, better cars, travel opportunities, etc. Except for the tiny percentage who have more money than they could possibly spend, virtually everyone wants something they can’t afford. In most cases, many things. I wouldn’t mind having a private jet, for example.
But to answer your question directly: if the economy actually produced more goods and services than people wanted, that would cause deflationary effect on the price of goods and services. I just don’t think it’s a likely scenario.
If we do reach a place where everyone has everything they want, I’d argue that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.
The part that you are missing is that you can’t just round up a herd of unemployed men and women and yell ‘March, go forth, and make this great nation a better place!’. It is not that simple at all. It costs very significant amounts of money to put the bureaucracies in place before you can even put a single pair of boots on the ground. Even superficial and non-skilled labor like roadside trash cleanup would require lots of expensive support on the administrative side. Trash and graffiti cleanup makes the targeted areas look nicer but it can’t support itself so it actually cost money overall well beyond the cost of simply paying people to stay home. Beyond simple aesthetics, those types of initiatives can introduce negative productivity because of their high overhead costs with few tangible economic gains.
There are plenty of infrastructure projects that need to be done but this isn’t 1850 or even 1940 anymore. Man-power isn’t the limiting factor. Those projects mainly require a relative few really skilled engineers and project managers plus skilled heavy equipment operators to get done. I know more about operating heavy equipment than the vast majority of people and I still wouldn’t be qualified to work on the simplest bridge project. The average long-term unemployed person would simply be a dangerous menace attempting such a thing at all.
Again, what types of jobs do you think you could give to literally millions of unemployed people that would A) be meaningfully productive and B) not cost much more than they are worth by using ‘free’ labor that is anything but that when you calculate all of the associated costs of administering the program.
I am not saying that there aren’t any. There has to be a few within a problem of this size but I don’t think it as straightforward to develop and administer as some people believe. The U.S. moved well beyond the simple muscle power phase of development a long time ago so that greatly limits most jobs, even basic ones, to people that have some skills.
Brainstorm some real ideas for jobs that large numbers of these people could do interchangeably and we can discuss them.
It’s not a question about what people want, but what they can afford. I want a mansion in Beverly Hills. That doesn’t mean I’m planning to buy one anytime soon.
And when there are more goods than can be sold, what happens is that companies idle the factories and lay people off. That sorta works against the whole guaranteed job thingy.
I think that’s a good argument against a guaranteed job program. The only solution I know would be not paying those who don’t work. Presumably the jobs would only be for people who actually want to work. If they don’t want to work and can get by without working, then they wouldn’t be part of the program.
Thats a good point. I suppose the unemployed are not included in denominator. If they were, productivity per person would go up, as well as overall productivity.