-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of SA Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2011 8:46 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] OWS Demands working group: jobs for all!
On 10/20/2011 8:24 PM, Thomas Volscho wrote:
> It is the exploitation that leads to early death and sickness. Not necessarily the job itself.
One of the most consistent findings of the literature on subjective well-being is that unemployment is in a class by itself (except for divorce) in the harm that it does -- independent of its effect on income. The effect on income just compounds the harm.
This is from a profile of Andrew Oswald, one of the leading researchers in this field:
http://nickcohen.net/2007/01/08/time-out-with-nick-cohen-andrew-oswald/
> One aspect of [Milton] Friedman's work, which was more of an
> assumption than a detailed argument, profoundly unsettled Oswald and
> stayed with him for years. In common with most other economists,
> Friedman supposed that people were rational. In his work on
> unemployment that was to win him the Nobel Prize, he took it for
> granted that inflation made sensible people choose unemployment over
> work - they simply calculated that more leisure compensated for the
> loss of income, and went on the dole.
>
> The idea that joblessness was voluntary was incredibly useful for
> Conservatives presiding over the mass unemployment of the 1980s.
> Norman Tebbit told the 1981 Conservative party conference: "I grew up
> in the 1930s with an unemployed father. He did not riot. He got on his
> bike and looked for work, and he kept on looking until he had found
> it." By implication, the unemployed who didn't get on their bikes
> wanted to stay at home and riot, and nothing could be done for them.
>
> Disproportionate misery
>
> Oswald thought Friedman and his acolytes were talking nonsense, but
> how to prove it? His conceptual breakthrough was to use the
> statistical technique of regression analysis to isolate and measure
> the happiness and misery of people's lives....As Oswald and his
> colleagues found when they did slightly more sophisticated
> calculations than mine, the effect of unemployment is irrational, out
> of all proportion to the actual loss of income. People weren't sitting
> on the dole coolly weighing the benefits of more spare time against
> loss of wages. They were wracked by a disproportionate misery.
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