The inverse is true as well. If there are people who cannot find jobs, then employers wont have an incentive to be productive, they can afford to waste people on bullshit jobs.
No, it's not, but the current situation smacks of systemic job loss rather than cyclical job loss. It's a problem. What happens when people absolutely can't find new jobs? Self-feeding demand destruction?
Most of the comments here focus on how people aren't trying hard enough to get jobs. This article indicates that the jobs don't exist and that the problem is likely to get far worse. You can try as hard as you want to get a job - if no one is hiring, you aren't going to get one.
The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people. This should be a good thing, but it won't work under most existing economic systems. Our entire economy has to change to accomodate the new reality that a significant percentage of the population will be unemployed.
So let's think this tautology through. It's difficult to get a job -> person is not able to get employment -> person becomes unemployed -> only lazy people are unemployed -> lazy people don't want jobs -> therefore everyone is employed
I don't like either sides of the argument. It really depends on the people. People that are doing well will want to work, poor people and people that just have a hard time getting a job will eventually give up. Proof? How people stop looking for work already and give up and stop getting counted as unemployed.
But, what happens where there are no workers? Everywhere I go there are signs saying help wanted. But, unemployment is practically non-existent where I live. Everyone who wants a job, has a job.
If you choose a job whose necessity will disappear in the future, then it's bad luck for you. Better job choice next time. For me this argument is the same as coachmen complaining about cars taking away their jobs.
And these same people think they will just be hired right away and things will spool right back up. With nearly 40 million people claiming unemployment. Things that took years to build crumbled in weeks. It will take years again.
Since employment is one of the main sources of unhappiness I assume this will create an oscillating state of happy unemployed - unhappy employed people perpectually in and out of jobs as their happiness dips below a certain threshold.
Oh I agree. High unemployment and a lot of bullshit jobs doesn't mean that we've run out of things to do. It just means that employment is being deliberately repressed and the economic system has been morphed into dysfunctional beast that serves a tiny number of privileged people.
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