Abstract
Few non-Marxists argue that there is or at least should be something like a right to be employed—that is, an independent individual right to some sort of meaningful job that is enforceable against either a particular private employer or the state, and I do not intend to spend any time discussing the Marxist posi- tion here, for two reasons. First, because such discussions are already plentiful elsewhere.1 And second, because I am going to start with the assumption that we have already decided, for whatever reason, that we will not seek to replace capi- talism with socialism—that is, we have already decided to opt for mostly private ownership of the means of production and a free-market economy moderated by the protections of political liberalism instead of a system of public ownership of the means of production and a centrally planned economy, with or without the protections of political liberalism, regardless of the effect on unemployment that this decision may or may not have. So while I believe that Marxism (and for that matter all other forms of what we commonly call socialism) does not provide an attractive answer to the problem of unemployment, all things considered, I shall not argue for that position here, although I shall use the work of some Marxist critics of capitalism as well as the work of a great many capitalist economists to help explore what capitalism and especially liberal capitalism really entails. Nevertheless, nothing I am going to say in this work requires anyone to abandon the view that some form of socialism offers an attractive solution to the problem of unemployment if that is the view they currently maintain.
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Notes
See, e.g., Richard J. Arneson, “Meaningful Work and Socialism,” Ethics 97 (1987): 517–545.
For more on the various practical problems associated with these proposals, see Malcolm Sawyer, “Employer of Last Resort: Could It Deliver Full Employment and Price Stability?” Journal of Economic Issues 37 (2003): 881–907.
See, e.g., David Neumark, Brandon Wall, and Junfu Zhang, “Do Small Businesses Create More Jobs? New Evidence for the United States from the National Establishment Times Series,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 93 (2011): 16–29
David L. Birch, Job Creation in America: How Our Smallest Companies Put the Most People to Work (New York: Free Press, 1987).
For a description and discussion of both fundamental theorems, see Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The Invisible Hand and Modern Welfare Economics,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 3641 (March 1991), esp. pp. 2–4. See also Amartya Sen, “The Moral Standing of the Market,” Social Philosophy and Policy 2.2 (1985): 1–19
The “full information” and “instantaneous adjustment” qualifiers are of course necessary, for otherwise unemployment could still arise in a perfectly competitive market. See, e.g., Axel Leijonhufved, “Effective Demand Failures,” The Swedish Journal of Economics 75 (1973): 27–48
Liebow, “No Man Can Live with the Terrible Knowledge that He Is Not Needed.”. The same, of course, also applies to women who want a job but cannot get one. For similar expressions of the deep debilitating power of unemployment on the human psyche, see, e.g., A.C. Pigou, Unemployment (London: Williams and Norgate, 1913), pp. 32–34
The origination of the term “Homo Faber” is usually credited to Benjamin Franklin but the term was perhaps used most extensively by Hannah Arendt and Max Scheler. See, e.g., Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition: Second Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
See Lisa Herzog, Inventing the Market: Smith, Hegel and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. p. 74
Sean Sayers, Marx and Alienation (London: Palgrave MacmĂĽlan, 2011)
Bertell Oilman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971)
See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited (New York: Basic Books, 2012 [2011]).
See G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Sec. 41–70, pp. 73–102.
Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Ch. 10, esp. pp. 353
Stephen R. Munzer, A Theory of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Margaret Jane Radin, “Property and Personhood,” Stanford Law Review 34 (1982): 957–1015.
Robert Reiff, “Alienation and Dehumanization,” in Auto Work and Its Discontents, ed. B. J. Widdick (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 45–51
See, e.g., Ernest J. Weinrib, “The Case for the Duty to Rescue,” Yale Law journal 90 (1980): 247–293.
See Thomas Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33 (2005): 113–147
Among contemporary political philosophers, the person most associated with the idea of providing everyone some sort of basic income is Philippe Van Parijs. See Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (if anything) Can justify Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Prominent luck egalitarians would include Ronald Dworldn, G. A. Cohen, Thomas Nagel, Erik Rakowski, John Roemer, Richard Arneson, and Philippe Van Parijs, although each elaborates the content of luck egalitarianism in different ways. See Richard J. Arneson, “Luck Egalitarianism and Prioritarianism,” Ethics 110 (2000): 339–349
See Mark R. Reiff, “Proportionality, Winner-Take-All, and Distributive Justice,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 8 (2009): 5–42
See Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
For further discussion of this point, see Mark R. Reiff, “The Attack on Liberalism,” in Law and Philosophy, ed. Michael Freeman and Ross Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 173–210
See generally Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011), pp. 322–341
Haim Levy, The Capital Asset Pricing Model in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 326.
See Cass Sunstein, Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
For an important argument that this is an and perhaps the obligation of a liberal capitalist society, see Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in Public and Private Morality, ed. Stuart Hampshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
Indeed, avoiding the leveling down objection is often offered by supporters of the difference principle as the reason why their view is superior to that of strict egalitari-anism. See Campbell Brown, “Giving up Levelling Down,” Economics and Philosophy 19 (2003): 111–134
Larry Temldn, “Equality, Priority, and the Levelling down Objection,” in The Ldeal of Equality, ed. Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams (New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 126–161
Elizabeth Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109 (1999): 287–337
See, e.g., Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Loss Aversion in Riskless Choice,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 106 (1991): 1039–1061.
Actually, it was Joan Robinson who said this, although she attributed it to Keynes. See Joan Robinson, “Kalecld and Keynes,” in Contributions to Modern Economics (New York: Academic Press, 1978[1964]), pp. 53–60
Pavlina R. Tcherneva, “Reorienting Fiscal Policy: A Bottom-up Approach,” Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics 37 (2014): 43–66
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Reiff, M.R. (2015). In What Sense Is Unemployment a Proper Object of Moral Concern?. In: On Unemployment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-55000-2_3
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