<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, helvetica, san-serif; font-size: 11px; "><h1 style="margin-top: 8px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: -2px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-size: 36px; line-height: 1.1em; font-weight: normal; font-family: Trebuchet, 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.8pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); ">The Beauty of a Social Problem</h1><cite class="byline" style="display: block; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 1px; ">by Walter Benn Michaels</cite><div id="body" style="margin-top: 30px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 30px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em; ">Unemployment is both a problem and a solution. It’s a problem for the unemployed, who want work, a solution for employers who not only want workers but also want the cheapest ones they can get. If, say, you’re looking to hire a salesperson (the largest occupation in the <span class="caps">U.S.</span>), the reason you can get one for an average salary of only $12 an hour is because there are a lot of unemployed potential salespeople out there. Which means, in turn, that unemployment is not just a problem for people who don’t have jobs, it’s a problem also for people who do. If you’ve got that sales job, the unemployed are your competition; they may be worse off than you but you’re worse off because of them—they’re the reason you’re only making $12 an hour.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 30px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em; ">That’s why Karl Marx, the communist, thought of the unemployed—the “relative surplus population”—as the “pivot on which the law of supply and demand in labor works.” But you don’t have to be a communist to see the utility (to employers) of unemployment. Or to see why the received wisdom is that we should not go below what Milton Friedman (not a communist) called the “natural rate of unemployment,” since, if we do, we run the risk of “accelerating inflation,” which is to say, the risk of having to pay the higher wages that could be demanded by salespersons if there weren’t a surplus of them. <br><br>The inequality produced and maintained by unemployment is thus different from other inequalities, like racism or sexism. No one argues, for example, that we need a certain amount of racism or sexism to make the economy work. Just the opposite. Most free market economists probably think that discrimination is ethically wrong but ever since Friedman’s colleague, Gary Becker, wrote <em>The Economics of Discriminatio</em>n, they know it’s bad for profits. Employers who won’t hire black workers are just strengthening the bargaining power of white workers; they’re throwing away their relative surplus population card. Unlike racism, however, the right amount of unemployment is good for profits. Indeed, it’s good for capitalism itself. Thus the inequality enabled by unemployment is, in a capitalist economy, a useful inequality, and the question of our attitude toward the unemployed (unlike the question of our attitude toward the victims of racism or sexism or any kind of discrimination) is both complicated and beside the point. It’s complicated because, the closer we are to thinking of ourselves as members of the working class, the more our empathy for the unemployed (they get no wages) gets mixed with resentment of them (because they get no wages, we get lower wages). It’s beside the point because how we feel about the unemployed has no connection at all to anything we might do about unemployment. Capitalism likes it, whether or not we do...</p></div></span></blockquote>From <<a href="http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/10/art/the-beauty-of-a-social-problem">http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/10/art/the-beauty-of-a-social-problem</a>>.</body></html>