Then why has the average hours worked by each person declined considerably over the decades? Is this not equivalent to there being less jobs in the economy?
you talking about worldwide there is less work being done?
link?
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It's easy to refute an argument if you first misrepresent it. William Keizer
The Bomb19: Then why has the average hours worked by each person declined considerably over the decades? Is this not equivalent to there being less jobs in the economy?
Yes and that's a very good thing. Labor is a disutility so the less of it the better off we are. Don't just conflate "less jobs" with "involuntary unemployment". The former does not imply the latter. (contrary to populary belief)
If everyone had a job because we got rid of any kind of vehicular transportation and had to ship everything by foot. Would we be better off?
I hereby banish the word "job" from all of economics!!! I hate that word! A job is a purely artificial category, it's meaningless. Reality consists of utility and disutility (subjective) as already noted and the balance between labor and leisure as it regards the subjective sense of utility and disutility. In other words. it' a pain in the ass to work, but it's a bigger pain in the ass to starve and freeze to death, so we engage in work (the lesser evil) in order to avoid a worse fate.
If you had been born 10,000 years ago, things would be no different... you had to work (labor, toil) by hunting, gathering, cultivating or husbanding in order to avoid starvation. You did this every day of your life but it wasn't a "job", it's called being human. The idea of "a job" as something a person "has" until they don't (retire) - like it's something you possess for a while and then later put away - is childlike thinking about the world.
I've tried explaining work to my young children and they are truly puzzled by it because it's an alien concept to the human brain, just like red lights and green lights. It's a modern artifice. So be it. But the objectification of "the job" and the assignment of magical "wealth-producing" powers to "the job" is child-like thinking. "Daddy goes into the big grey building in the morning, then he comes out in the evening with money and he buys things with the money." That's how little toddlers - and voters and politicians - think about "jobs". That economists with PhDs can talk about "jobs" in this same magical language is infuriating to me
Hence, by the powers vested in me by the Universe as the King of All Economics and Everything Else (hey, this is no less convincing than the Queen of England's or Pope's claim to power) I hereby ban the use of the word "jobs" in all economics discussion henceforth! Amnesty will be granted to all past usages of this word in economics discussions. Future offenses will be punished mercilessly by public humiliation.
Clayton -
People work less now because they want to work less. Do you know anyone who wants to go back to working 80 hours a week?
Political Atheists Blog
Clayton: I really don't get your objection to the word/concept of a job. It just refers to the social arrangement by which one person is, in return for remuneration, contractually obliged to make their labour-power available for use by another entity. That category exists so surely it needs a name. Why not 'job'?
@Consumariat: Because it's come to mean something more like "one's place in society" which is granted by a wealthy, powerful individual or corporation.
"Because it's come to mean something more like "one's place in society" which is granted by a wealthy, powerful individual or corporation."
Isn't that exactly what it is though? Surely the class* structure existed prior to the adoption of words to describe it. The words we use reflect the reality we inhabit; if the social and economic arrangments alter then so will our concept of categories like work.
* I know some of you believe that there is no such thing as class. However, I make no claim about why classes exist. For the sake of argument, lets say that classes emerge from a society that is not economically free.
@Consumariat: Sure, fine, yes, that is what a job is but it's not what human labor is. Human labor is a way to exchange a less satisfactory state of affairs for a more satisfactory state of affairs. This is something the individual does (perhaps by getting a job, perhaps in some other way) because he wants to improve his state of affairs, not because he loves the status quo and is dying to lick the feet of some scum-sucking manager in a futile bid to claw his way up the status-ladder. Manufactured applause is a cheap substitute for cold, hard cash. Yes, it is a substitute that most people seem to accept without any deeper reflection on what they're being cheated out of.
When people ask about the effect of mechanization on "jobs", the implication is that this is synonymous with the effect on human labor, that is, on the capacity of the individual to improve his state of affairs. I don't think this is true even in the present social order and is definitely not true in the general case.
The initial question has been explained fairly well already. Utility vs disutility. For the OP, perhaps those terms are meaningless to you. Allow to explain what is meant by them. Many government will "create jobs" by building highways and bridges. To those who get the "job", this seems like a good deal. But if "creating jobs" is your only goal, then take away the caterpillars and give everyone shovels, better yet give the workers spoons. This will make the project take longer or require immensely larger amounts of labor. In one way or another total man hours would greatly increase if the government were to follow the policy of giving every worker a spoon to build the road with. Now, there are many different topics we could go into from here, but, for the sake of simplicity, understand that when a worker with a spoon is given a shovel or a caterpillar, it increases his personal utility toward the creation of the project. While many people might initially think "great more jobs!" But if we follow this logic, we must get rid of all machines that make life and labor easier as well. Now you start to see the absurdity in these thoughts. The best way I've ever heard it put is this, "The goal of any economy should never be the goal of full employment, but rather the goal of full production, however you cannot have full production without full employment." That was from Hazlitt. This doesn't mean that full employment = full production, but rather that full employment is necessary, but not sufficient for full production. Also, it is important to understand that demand for goods is infinite. Because of this, when an inventor creates a more efficient way to produce this good, this frees up the labor that would have performed that job now mechanized to do more productive jobs. Again, because demand is infinite, when someone looses their job to mechanization, he is not now without work. He must simply go to the next job where labor is needed. Labor will always be needed and here is why. There is not a finite amount of work or "jobs" to be divided up among the populace. If this were the case, then we would all be living in relative squalor compared to our ancestors ages ago who lived in a world containing a mere fractions of the population in the world today. Obviously, our living conditions are much better, which proves that the opposite is true. Greater populations = greater division of labor. Each man creates his own value to society. This is the other side of the coin of the full production part of the equation above. To have full production, you must have both full employment (self or otherwise) + the maximization of every mans value he can offer to the market. As long as there is a state AT ALL, full value maximization, thus full production, is impossible. Hope that helps.
And I agree with Clayton. The term "job" is way to vague to aptly describe the conditions of the question. I could sit on my ass all day, call my self a professional couch ornament, and call myself self-employed. My job is to ornament couches. Obviously this job has no demand and is therefore worthless. This is why full employment is both irrelevant and, ultimately, un-defineable. I think that is what clayton is getting at. Is that what you meant clayton?
Is that what you meant clayton?
That's definitely part of it. The other part is the social conditioning aspect of it, the way that the Elites want us to think about ourselves. See, "jobs" are like slots. There are only so many slots available. If there are too many people due to population increase or immigration of people from oppressed countries, the slots will get all filled up and then we'll be in a sorry state of affairs with idlers wandering the streets, homeless.
We're supposed to think of our job as our life-support. It is our permit to live or, rather, by working it we are given permission to live (digits in a bank account). Without it, our permission to live is withdrawn (digits disappear) and we are bankrupted, evicted and repossessed. The pretext of the (very horrid) movie In Time is not completely unlike how the Elites want us to think of our jobs. We're "refilling" our little permit slip called a "bank account" and, if that ever runs out, it's Game Over.
At that point, you become a ward of the State through the welfare system where you will spend the rest of your life waiting in line to get life extensions (small, free refills on the permit slip) but what you're really doing is preparing to die. That's why government buildings are all modeled on mausoleums, tombs or prisons and exude the air of a funeral home. Take a look next time you drive past a government building. It either looks like a prison or a mausoleum of some sort. They are the ministries of death.
Yes, I'm painting the situation in high contrast and, no, this is not literally what the world is but this is how they want to condition us to think about the world. It's the angst that they want firmly planted in the back of your mind. It is the mental cattle-prod that goads you out of bed in the morning and forces you to ignore every nerve in your body screaming that this "job" treadmill you're exhausting yourself on is unnatural, unhealthy, unfulfilling and is ultimately leading to your early demise.
</rant>
While we're at it, can we get rid of "career"? I cringe everytime I hear a classmate say, "I want a career in XYZ." It pisses me off that they seek "careers" in what they want, instead of the market wants. Then they go complain about how they can't find jobs in what they want to do.
And "career" reeks of rigidness. As if the career-seeker is unwilling to adapt to the market.
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."
@Muffinburg: Absolutely, it reeks of the "slot theory" of society. "We" need 1,000 iron workers, 500 watchmakers, 72 Bishops, 350 street sweepers, 925 farmers, and so on. So, it's just a matter of choosing your slot. Once chosen, you cannot change or only at the expense of going back to Novice status.
Argh.