[lbo-talk] Brad DeLong's dubious view of layoff restrictions

Jerry Monaco monacojerry at gmail.com
Mon Apr 3 06:14:17 PDT 2006


All of the above, from Wojtek, Jim, Dennis, is interesting....

Question: Let us say that the government in Germany employed people directly ... from social work to make work .. giving every teacher a paid teacher's assistant, building extra schools so that elementary schools had only 10 kids per class room, crossing guards instead of stop lights, employing people to build and plant roof gardens, ... no one doubt that unemployment would go down ... but as far as DeLong is concerned this would not say anything about the efficiency or inefficiency of "the market." There would be a decline in "labor flexibility" and thus all of this social work-make work and rooftop gardening would be by definition inefficient?

Somebody explain to me how this works? Perhaps my question isn't even coherent? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20060403/0cb83bf2/attachment.htm>



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