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Try Starting With the Idea That Able People Ought to Have Work
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Try Starting With the Idea That Able People Ought to Have Work
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by William Pfaff
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PARIS -- A friend who is very good at posing important questions, most of all when he doesn't know the answers, asked me recently why the purpose of the modern economy should not be redefined so as to provide a serious, reasonably paid job for everyone willing to work.
. The West's economic priority today is wealth creation: corporate and GDP growth. The assumption is made that this wealth eventually trickles down to everyone in society. Everyone knows that this is untrue, which is why the Washington Consensus no longer commands a consensus, and why people were rampaging in Genoa.. Consider, my friend says, what it would do to our ghettos if every school-leaver had a real offer of serious work - "manly" work for the boys, to quote the late Paul Goodman. One reason to join a drug-dealing ghetto gang is that in the estimate of ghetto peers it is "manly" work, often the only such work available.. What would it do to welfare programs as currently conceived if every family were assured at least one serious income? In principle, welfare as we know it could be abolished for all but those physically incapable of work. My friend's proposal concerns social priorities. If you ask who is to pay for it, or how it should be organized, he says he doesn't know. That is the business of specialists. He is Candide, merely asking questions.. You may say that his idea had a life-sized trial called Communism, and that it proved to be a human and economic disaster. The response is that Communism was a program for political and social control; its economics were subordinate to that. During Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, government-financed programs kept people in useful work. This couldn't end the Depression, but America continues to benefit from the consequent national park and forest development, and construction of national transport and power infrastructure.. Public works now are out of fashion among mainstream economists, although there is discernible movement in Europe toward obtaining public utility from unemployment benefits by demanding that recipients perform some work of social interest and personal development.. John Maynard Keynes once wrote that the basic debate over human society in the future would be over the scope to be allowed "the money-making and money-loving instincts as the main motive force of the economic machine.". Capitalism has been an efficient technique for production, but, as Robert Skidelsky has written (in his marvelous biography of Keynes), "the motives it relied upon might still be felt to be morally objectionable." Keynes said that the "problem is to work out a social organization which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life." That has always been the problem. Capitalism in its modern form has proved a wonderful creator of wealth, but also of what Pius XII, in a 1931 encyclical, described as the "economic despotism of a few." He asserted that such despotism was the "natural result of limitless free capitalism." Social priorities and economics are inextricably linked.. Full employment has been a basic problem in economic thought throughout most of this century. The definition of full employment itself is controversial. Theory, common sense and observation all confirm that in the modern economy, some level of unemployment is essential and inevitable. The closer an economy approaches to full employment, the harder it becomes to avoid inflation and balance of payments deficit. A basic issue of debate between monetarists and Keynesians has been the monetarist (and neoliberal) assumption that markets always seek equilibrium, hence that they automatically tend toward producing full employment. Government intervention supposedly destabilizes them. This assumption has not proved true, since even if the pool of unemployed represents unfulfilled demand, actual income has to be provided before this demand can be activated, with beneficial effect on manufacturers and the overall economy.. Furthermore, the natural motivation of individual employers is to maximize profits and to limit wages to the lowest level consistent with holding on to the needed work force - even though high wages historically have sustained high demand, following Henry Ford's argument that he paid high wages so his employees could buy his automobiles..
The simple argument is that it would be not only a principled but a practical act to acknowledge every person's "natural" right to serious work, and to wages that will allow him or her to support a family, educate children and acquire property. That, my friend says, would benefit society, as well as its people. In a society as rich as we are, his seems a reasonable proposition, although heresy.
Copyright © 2001 the International Herald Tribune
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