{"id":15640,"date":"2013-06-06T06:29:46","date_gmt":"2013-06-06T10:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=15640"},"modified":"2013-06-01T19:31:29","modified_gmt":"2013-06-01T23:31:29","slug":"2-years-ago-making-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/06\/06\/2-years-ago-making-work\/","title":{"rendered":"2 years ago: Making work"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

June 6, 2011, on this blog:\u00a0Making work<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cBut that would just be make-work,\u201d<\/em> critics protest.<\/p>\n

They say that as though that would be a bad<\/em> thing. When the No. 1 problem is that there\u2019s not enough work to go around, what\u2019s wrong with making some? Right now there\u2019s not enough of the stuff. High time to make more, I\u2019d say.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Still, I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

The current crisis \u2014 to again borrow one of my favorite phrases from Wendell Berry \u2014 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The current crisis \u2014 to again borrow one of my favorite phrases from Wendell Berry \u2014 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n2 years ago: Making work<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The current crisis \u2014 to again borrow one of my favorite phrases from Wendell Berry \u2014 is a solution neatly divided into two problems. We have people who desperately need work to do. 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