2 years ago: Making work

June 6, 2011, on this blog: Making work

“But that would just be make-work,” critics protest.

They say that as though that would be a bad thing. When the No. 1 problem is that there’s not enough work to go around, what’s wrong with making some? Right now there’s not enough of the stuff. High time to make more, I’d say.

The classic example of make-work is paying people to dig holes and then fill them back in. Even that would be preferable to the current situation, which involves not paying 13.9 million people and forcing them to sit idle on the sidelines. Digging holes and refilling them would be pointless and Sisyphean, but it would be better to be Sisyphus drawing a regular paycheck than to be one of our millions of long-term jobless whose unemployment insurance benefits have run out.

Still, I’m not advocating hole-digging and hole-filling because that would only address half of the problem of our current jobs crisis. It would meet the desperate need for work of those 13.9 million Americans with no source of earned income, but it would not address the damage being done to our economy and our society of losing the productive contributions of nearly 14 million people.

The current crisis — to again borrow one of my favorite phrases from Wendell Berry — is a solution neatly divided into two problems. We have people who desperately need work to do. And we have work that desperately needs doing.