Sharing the Pain
Brad DeLong writes (pdf):Three weeks ago I was talking to some activists from the California Tea Party. I was trying to explain the Keynesian perspective: "Shouldn’t we keep public employment from falling," I said, "because right the government can borrow at such extraordinarily good terms, and if we keep our teachers at work then they educate our students and our students can earn more in the future -- and if teachers have incomes they spend money and that employs more people in private sector?"
And they said no.
They said: we have lost our jobs in the private sector. It is only fair for those who work in the government to run some risk of loosing their jobs as well. They are unionized. They have pensions. It is not fair that they should have jobs too. They need to lose their jobs as well.
Brad has his own thoughts about what's going on here, but my take is a little different: I see a perfectly valid and natural moral intuition being mis-applied to an inappropriate context.
"Share the suffering" is -- I believe -- among the hard-wired moral intuitions with which the human brain comes equipped, straight from the factory. We have it because it is a correct response to a large category of misfortunes which have befallen human communities from our hunter-gatherer origins, specifically: temporary shortages of critical resources, notably food.
When confronted with such a shortage, the chances of survival are improved if everyone goes a bit hungry, rather than some enjoying their accustomed comforts while others are permanently injured or killed by extreme malnutrition. "Share the suffering" is good strategy...if the suffering in question is the shortage of a consumable resource and sharing takes the form of consuming less so that others might consume more.
This intuition can be "tricked," however, by a faulty metaphor. In particular, we are accustomed to viewing a job as a resource and holding a job as consuming that resource. And that's not how jobs work at all.
A job isn't a resource, it is a productive activity. Doing job doesn't consume stuff, it produces stuff (net -- jobs which do consume stuff, net, tend to go away). And -- within limits dictated by things like the total population and things people would rather do than work (like care for children, pursue education, or simply retire) -- jobs make more jobs.
So applying intuitions about "sharing the suffering" to job losses yields precisely the wrong results. Eliminating Job A doesn't make Job B more secure, it makes it less. Layoffs beget layoffs.
This isn't a left-right thing, by the way. The idea of "shipping our jobs overseas" rests on the same metaphor and is misleading in similar (though not identical) ways. It's the metaphor itself that's defective.
And they said no.
They said: we have lost our jobs in the private sector. It is only fair for those who work in the government to run some risk of loosing their jobs as well. They are unionized. They have pensions. It is not fair that they should have jobs too. They need to lose their jobs as well.
Brad has his own thoughts about what's going on here, but my take is a little different: I see a perfectly valid and natural moral intuition being mis-applied to an inappropriate context.
"Share the suffering" is -- I believe -- among the hard-wired moral intuitions with which the human brain comes equipped, straight from the factory. We have it because it is a correct response to a large category of misfortunes which have befallen human communities from our hunter-gatherer origins, specifically: temporary shortages of critical resources, notably food.
When confronted with such a shortage, the chances of survival are improved if everyone goes a bit hungry, rather than some enjoying their accustomed comforts while others are permanently injured or killed by extreme malnutrition. "Share the suffering" is good strategy...if the suffering in question is the shortage of a consumable resource and sharing takes the form of consuming less so that others might consume more.
This intuition can be "tricked," however, by a faulty metaphor. In particular, we are accustomed to viewing a job as a resource and holding a job as consuming that resource. And that's not how jobs work at all.
A job isn't a resource, it is a productive activity. Doing job doesn't consume stuff, it produces stuff (net -- jobs which do consume stuff, net, tend to go away). And -- within limits dictated by things like the total population and things people would rather do than work (like care for children, pursue education, or simply retire) -- jobs make more jobs.
So applying intuitions about "sharing the suffering" to job losses yields precisely the wrong results. Eliminating Job A doesn't make Job B more secure, it makes it less. Layoffs beget layoffs.
This isn't a left-right thing, by the way. The idea of "shipping our jobs overseas" rests on the same metaphor and is misleading in similar (though not identical) ways. It's the metaphor itself that's defective.