[Peace-discuss] "The Beauty of a Social Problem"

[C. G. Estabrook]

> The Beauty of a Social Problem
> by Walter Benn Michaels
> 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  
> U.S.), 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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 The Economics of  
> Discrimination, 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...
>
 From <http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/10/art/the-beauty-of-a-social-problem 
 >.
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