Unemployment

[Beet]

Use this thread to discuss unemployment. All views are welcome. I am not necessarily interested in jumping down anyone's throat or debating to death on this one.

Here are my initial thoughts about how to raise employment levels-

1) Lower the cost of employment. Particularly, health care costs have pushed up the cost of labor. The Obamacare debate is a red herring. The real problem is distorted incentives. Even insured patients must shoulder a greater burden for care. Additionally, doctors are human beings and not saints, and in America they are overpaid. It shouldn't be heresy to say this.

2) Shift from traditional education model to employer-based education model. Give incentives to companies to train their own workers- with an eye to the long term. For example, instead of giving Johnny a loan to go to Big State University and study whatever he wants, give Acme Manufacturing a loan to give Johnny a loan to study a specialized kind of welding that Acme Manufacturing is likely to need in 5 years, and if Johnny takes employment at Acme Manufacturing upon graduation and works there for three years, the loan is forgiven.

3) Lower search costs. Endless time is spent searching for a job. The government should create a database where anyone can submit a job opening and a resume. Perhaps this begins with an initial buyout of the big jobs sites likes like monster.com. Make the data available to anyone and independent contractors can then use this information to match people with opportunities.

4) Georgia Works. Georgians receiving unemployment benefits are matched with employers who are seeking employees and who agree to provide up to eight weeks of training. The employers do not pay the workers, who work no more than 24 hours a week; instead workers continue to receive their unemployment checks and a $240 stipend to help cover transportation, child care and other expenses.

5) Reduce the workweek. Instead of laying off workers, reduce the workweek from 5 days to 4. If five people work only 32 hours a week instead of 40 hours a week, that leaves 40 hours of work undone-- enough for an extra employee. As a corollary, more holidays. Mother's & Father's Day? Columbus Day? Super Bowl monday? Halloween? Make them all time off. If people have these days off, they'll likely use them to go out on the town or something-- spend money. This will not only reduce labor supply, but boost consumer spending.

[Beet]

It's a book on the history of food that posits this strange hypothesis is that people were better off before the agricultural revolution than immediately after, for essentially Malthusian reasons. Although I don't remember it saying that people were actually better off or less "nasty, brutish and short" -- mostly that people were taller because there is more nutrients in red meat. Of course, that relies on the fallacy that some people "replaced" other people.

More realistically, what happened is that agriculturalists and hunter gatherers existed side by side, and the latter never really went extinct, they were simply outbreeded by the agriculturalists. Hence it was not so much that one lifestyle replaced another as a whole new lifestyle was created and turned out to be much more successful at fostering reproduction.

[Beet]

Okay, obviously the happiness part of my argument was a bit of a leap as quantifying happiness is only a recent developed obtained through psychological data. I'd still contend that if early farmers had shorter lifespans due to poor nutrition and a quicker spread of disease and also worked longer hours to grow these meager crops in the first place, it makes some sense to make the leap towards saying that they were less happy. There was also less independence for the average farmer compared to the average hunter-gatherer as early farming communities became stratified.

Of course it could be argued that the Sumerians had more independence due to the existence of granaries ensuring a steady food supply, albeit lower in nutritional quality. Since humans are naturally risk-averse, you might guess that most of us would prefer the relatively more steady guarantee of agricultural food than the riskier business a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, (and be willing to sacrifice nutrition for that purpose). But yes, "happiness" is a poor criteria because it is hardly knowable.