[lbo-talk] Businesses are refusing to hire the unemployed,

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Feb 20 09:32:33 PST 2011


It seems to me that many (most? All?) economic analyses tend to be generalizations from somewhat arbitrarily selected data. And this not only fails to be "scientific" but is rather unconvincing as history. (I assume that what is misnamed "economics" is a subdivision of history, and one judges it by the standards of historiography, not "science." The premise of a special realm of study, "political economy" or "economics," is grounded in a failure to recognize the core premises of Ellen Meiksins Wood's work: the separation of "the economic" from "the state" in capitalism. That means, as someone on this list suggested some months ago, that capitalism and capitalist society are not identical: i.e., that capitalism is embedded in a thick ensemble of social relations, most of which (daily life, education, state power, war and war preparation) are not themselves capitalist. Hence the context of purely "economic" data is necessarily ignored by the economist.

Carrol

-----Original Message-----

From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Jeffrey Fisher Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2011 11:12 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Businesses are refusing to hire the unemployed,

Well, there's nothing scientific about it at all, unfortunately. It's just a survey of the people they happen to get, as far as I can tell.

The hard truth is that there doesn't seem to be any hard data about the relative difficulty of landing a job for the employed and the unemployed. Admittedly, I haven't gone all out to find it, but I would expect that if there really were something substantive, it wouldn't be that hard to find. And of course, this period of steep unemployment is a particular case and wouldn't necessarily apply in a situation where unemployment was half or less what it is now, with fewer long-term unemployed.

But if there was ever a time to study it, you'd think now would be that time, wouldn't you?

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 9:30 AM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:


> This study doesn't seem to control for the amount of time and
> degree of effort that unemployed versus employed job seekers
> put into job searching. Generally, the unemployed would seem
> to have morespare time to devote to job searching. Unless,
> this crucial variable is controlled for, I don't see how one
> can make a meaninguly comparison between the fruits of
> job search efforts by the employed versus those of the
> unemployed.
>
> Jim Farmelant
> http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
> www.foxymath.com
> Learn or Review Basic Math
>
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