In The Doldrums

Armed and Dangerous takes an up close and personal look at unemployment as seen through the lens of two of his gaming buddies, one of whom has taken to living in a homeless shelter: Marginal Devolution

What these guys have in common is that they’re only marginally employable. What borderline mental illness has done to one, mediocre skills and the unintended consequences of anti-discrimination laws have done to the other. As long as I’ve known both (and that would actually be most of my years, for both of them), they’ve worked dead-end jobs and put their passion into science fiction and wargaming. They’re decent, honest, unambitious men who have never wanted anything but steady work, a normal life, and a hobby or two. They’re not stupid and they have respectable work habits; in fact they’re probably more conscientious and safe than average. Now they don’t quite fit; too old, too geeky, too male, too quiet. The job market has discarded one and the other is hanging by a thread.

When I look at these guys, though, I can’t buy the explanation most people would jump for, which is that they simply fell behind in an increasingly skill-intensive job market. Thing is, they’re not uneducated; they’re not the stranded fruit-picker or construction worker that narrative would fit. Nor does offshoring explain what’s happened to these guys, because their jobs were the relatively hard-to-export kind.

No. What I think is: These are the people who go to the wall when the cost of employing someone gets too high. We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped. Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.

A&D's personal solution is to call together his social circle and try to find jobs for these guys, which is certainly more useful and compassionate than simply passing the hat and giving them a few bucks (or petitioning the gov't to do so). A&D's broader point is even more important: gov't efforts to "solve" unemployment, and to deliver on grandiose chicken-in-every-pot campaign promises, often can have the opposite effect; yet we cannot conceive of a gov't that would not react quickly to demands that it stimulate growth and job creation.

For better or for worse, the New Deal provided a convincing template for voters to demand economic growth and for the gov't to deliver. Of course, that growth was dependent on piling increased regulatory and tax burdens upon employers until we reached the present point where jobs are devilishly hard to create, but, hey, at least there was a method at work that people could readily understand. The GOP can talk all they want about deregulation and the coming "conservative backlash," but there can be no revolution without a politically palatable method for creating jobs and nurturing growth. Otherwise, the "revolution" will do little more than reform the welfare state, leaving it ripe for rebirth.