There has been a fair amount of buzz recently about the idea that society should guarantee everyone a job. As usual, Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex (SSC) has a pretty good writeup discussing some of the issues with a basic jobs guarantee.
People need jobs for two basic reasons: to make money, and to provide meaning. The SSC article criticizes government jobs guarantee proposals by arguing that:
- There is an easier way to guarantee people money (i.e., just give them money, one version of which is called Universal Basic Income or UBI)
- Capitalism is pretty good at creating and distributing jobs, and a Jobs Guarantee doesn’t solve the problems of the capitalist system (e.g., some people are disabled, some people are just really bad at jobs, some jobs are hard to value like caretakers, homemakers, etc)
- The government would probably provide really crappy jobs
- People are better off finding purpose and meaning without a crappy job
I basically agree with his conclusion that state and federal governments should not try to provide everyone with a job, and I am undecided on UBI. However, I want to explore the slightly different question of whether a family (or tribe) should take responsibility for making sure its members have a good job. Is it possible? What would it look like?
People (esp. rich people) have been helping friends and family members find jobs for as long as their have been jobs. For example, parents help their kids get into college, and try to help them make connections wherever possible. Sometimes wealthy families pull strings to make sure their kids get cushy jobs or even set them up with some startup capital.
In other words, there is a standard model for helping your friends and family get jobs in the market economy. Is it enough? Is it a good thing that most people undergo some anxiety at some point in their life about how they will make a living?
My answer is that families should strive to provide jobs for their family members, and they should do it for two reasons:
- It is not good or necessary to wonder whether society has a place for you.
- The kinds of jobs the free market provides are not good enough.
These two reasons are actually pretty closely related. The reason your typical job isn’t good enough is that it doesn’t come attached with people who actually care about you (e.g., enough to provide true job security). And job insecurity is a form of “emotional malnutrition” that is common in modern society, and I don’t really think it does people any good to be emotionally starved. In fact, I think it contributes to long term problems with anxiety, depression, addiction, etc.
However, recently I decided to hire someone for my own business and I realized just how efficient the existing job market it. I put out an ad on a job site and within a few days I had a couple dozen highly qualified candidates from around the world…much more qualified for this particular than I would find if I tried to hire a member of my family.
Plus, not only would hiring within the family require me to choose a less qualified candidate, they probably wouldn’t have the immediate need and availability of the candidates I found on the free market.
Because of this recent experience, I must make it clear that I don’t want to replace the existing job market entirely. It is mind-boggling just how well the system works (at least when the economy is humming along). But at some point people need an anchor, something they can make a permanent commitment to, and that has a permanent commitment to them.
Commitment
The idea of commitment is an interesting one. In a way it is the heart of a jobs guarantee. I commit to making sure you have a job, and you commit to building something together with me. But commitment is hard. In my present position, I need someone to help me, but I can’t even make a commitment as long as a year because my business needs are changing. So I had to offer a part-time, contract position.
Why is commitment hard? Here is my formula:
Uncertainty + Commitment = Risk
We don’t know what the future will hold. We are pretty adaptable, but as soon as we commit to provide something for someone else, that uncertainty becomes a liability.
In the case of my part-time job. I might have enough work to keep someone busy full time at this particular moment, but if something changes and I have made a full-time commitment, I am on the hook. That is, I have additional risk.
For a big business, the amount of risk can be spread out and any particular employee costs a very small proportion of overall revenue. So the ship doesn’t turn as fast. But things change for big businesses, too. And when they do, there really is no underlying commitment to employees.
In other words, in my current situation I don’t even really want to take on the risk of a few months of full time salary. For a big business, they are easily capable of doing this, but the commitment is often still very limited.
In the end, I think that true commitment requires sharing of the risk on both sides. It also implies some kind of equity sharing. If a business hits a rough patch, it can’t just shed it’s equity holders (unless it goes bankrupt, of course). They share the risk. Of course, most equity holders aren’t really committed. They can sell at any time. And like the efficiency of the labor market, this is mostly a good thing.
In the labor market there are a few big sources of uncertainty. First, there is uncertainty regarding the skills and abilities of a job candidate. Second, there is uncertainty regarding the demand for the products or services the business provides.
Regarding the first issue, a family probably has less uncertainty about each other than a typical stranger on the job market. But I actually don’t think it is a good idea for people to work with their family their whole life. It is good to experiment on your own for a while. The model would look like this (the Hero’s Journey model):
- The family raises a child
- The child goes out on their own to find out who they really are
- The child returns to the family, who makes a place for them in the business
Regarding business risk, you can’t really make a commitment to providing for someone’s livelihood unless you can address this. The only real solutions are adaptability and diversification. The Hero’s Journey model might contribute to adaptability of a family business to some extent (i.e., people go out in the world and learn modern skills and ideas and bring them back to the family). Also, having some degree of commitment between different family entities (i.e., tribal connections) might be a way to provide some level of diversification.
That’s about all I have to say about providing a family job guarantee at the moment, but it certainly isn’t a solved problem so I will probably be returning to the question in the future.
