A post at our departmental blog has reminded me that for many years I have been surprised at how unrealistic politicians’ claims of achieving full employment are. Technology and the market economy are driving in the other direction. For thousands of years people have been trying to work less. And in reality many jobs are of low quality and rather unattractive. Developed countries would have trouble even harvesting their own produce without cheap immigrant labour, for example. As less developed countries develop, the pool of cheap labour is reduced. Eventually we may have many tasks to do, but no one willing to do them. This may require an increase in the price of labour of fruit pickers and janitors, more use of automation, or clever redesign to eliminate the job altogether.

The creative destruction that means that many unskilled workers (e.g. in retail) lose jobs, while many other roles are created (e.g. in software development) may not reduce the number of jobs overall, but it certainly makes it tough for the unskilled. One problem is income, which in developed countries is less of a problem because of social transfers through the tax system. A bigger problem may be that idle hands do the devil’s work. If I didn’t have to work in order to maintain my current income level, I would probably do much the same as I do now, because a research career is a rewarding one (I might teach less and not do so much administration, and spend more time trying to help young children learn). I have an infinite number of things to learn about, and that is fun. However if one is unskilled and poorly educated, the sheer amount of free time might be hard to fill. I wonder how much of poor outcomes in terms of crime, health, etc of the underclass in developed countries stems from this basic deficiency of not knowing how to handle free time.