Whenever unemployment comes down - even if only very slightly - it sounds like really
good news. It's great that productive forces in the economy are growing and there’ll
be a little more money in people's pockets soon
But if one gets more ambitious about human potential, the picture gets more complicated
and darker than what governments make out.
Unemployment means being, generically, out of work.
But let’s coin a new word: MISEMPLOYMENT
It means being in work but of a kind that fails to tackle with any real sincerity the
true needs of other people: merely exciting them to unsatisfactory desires and pleasures
instead; the way Primark, Patek Philippe and youporn.com might.
This man is misemployed:
Similarly, a man employed by the Sands Casino in Las Vegas to hand out flyers to tourists
in order to entice them to use slot machines is clearly 'employed' in the technical sense.
He's marked as being off the unemployment registers. He is receiving a wage in return
for helping to solve some (small) puzzle of the human condition of interest to his employers:
that not enough tourists might otherwise leave the blue skies and heat of main street to
enter the air-conditioned halls of an Egyptian-themed casino.
The man is indeed employed, but he’s also in truth dramatically misemployed.
His labour is generating capital, but it is making no contribution to human welfare and
flourishing. He is joined in the misemployment ranks by people who make cigarettes, addictive
but sterile television shows, badly designed condos, ill-fitting and shoddy clothes, deceptive
advertisements, artery-clogging biscuits and highly-sugared drinks.
The rate of misemployment in modern economies is very high.
While we may be genuinely grateful for any job we’re given, at the back of our minds
we all - as employees - hope for something else:
that our work can contribute in some real way to the common good; that we can make a
modest difference.
Governments have, with some success, been learning techniques to reduce the overall
rate of unemployment. In the language of the field, they do this by 'stimulating demand.'
Though technically effective, this method fails to draw any distinction between good
and bad demand and therefore between employment and misemployment.
The real trick to bringing down the rate of misemployment isn't just to stimulate demand
per se, it’s to stimulate the right sort of demand: to excite people to buy the ingredients
of true satisfaction, to want the things that really matter, and therefore to give individuals
and businesses a chance to direct their labour, and make profits, in meaningful areas of the
economy.
Employment figures aren’t irrelevant - they matter a great deal. They are the first things
to be attended to. But these raw figures mask a more ambitious index we should get around
to building in the future: one that measures misemployment and hence shows how intelligently
and responsibly we are deploying human capital, that is, using up people’s lives.