Jobless recovery

A jobless recovery or jobless growth is a phrase used by economists, especially in the United States, to describe the recovery from a recession which does not produce strong growth in employment. The first documented use of the term was in the New York Times in the 1930s.

Prior to the 1990s, most economic recoveries led to employment increases relatively rapidly. However, in the early 1990s recession, early 2000s recession, and late-2000s recession the employment recoveries have lagged increases in gross domestic product (GDP).

A jobless recovery is usually seen as a bad thing in a capitalist industrialized society, primarily because in such a society most people need jobs to earn the money they need to purchase goods and services from the marketplace, and also secondarily because doing something useful and productive is usually connected to a healthy individual's self-esteem. Some economists have suggested that increasingly better automation (including AI and robotics), better design, better materials, and better communications are together creating permanent structural unemployment as human labor is being replaced by machines (or, sometimes, voluntary efforts) and that social trends like environmentalism or voluntary simplicity may also reduce aggregate demand. But many mainstream economists still suggest the economy will correct itself in time through continually increasing demand for ever more new goods and services, and they suggest those goods and services will always require lots of paid human labor to produce or otherwise to guard.

There are a large number of possible cures that can be tried either to create jobs or to deal with the problems posed by widespread chronic unemployment, each with various different long term societal consequences (both good and bad). There are also other possible economic models like a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income economy where paid employment is not required to obtain basic goods and services, or a Gandhian swadeshi ecovillage economy that emphasizes community and family over abstract exchange. Some heterodox economists suggest moving towards those as another possible approach for dealing with the problems posed by a jobless recovery and other related economic issues like social equity and sustainability.

There is a paradox that many people may be happier with more free time to spend with friends, families, and hobbies, if they still can acquire the basic goods and services they need somehow, but this positive increase in satisfaction might appear as negative economic indicators like a shrinking GDP or a continually increasing unemployment rate. Also, not all jobs created by a recovery are equal in terms of their implications for overall societal well being (for example, more prison guard jobs may indicate some other social dysfunction is taking place).

In general, the US economy has for the 2000-2009 decade failed to create many new good jobs relative to population growth, and there is disagreement about what that trend means, whether it will continue, or what to do about it if it does continue. Some past predictions about the effect of automation on employment have failed to prove true, so predictions on future trends regarding employment based on automation are viewed with suspicion by default. Because any related predictions or suggestions rely on assumptions about human nature, embody political values, or entail speculating about the potential of future technology, there is much room for uncertainty and disagreement. This is an area that some think needs more research, experiment, and discussion to better understand how all the many connected issues interact and to determine the best way forward in the context of socially agreed upon values and priorities.

Causes and cures

Economists are still divided about the causes and cures of a jobless recovery: some argue that increased productivity through automation and robotics has allowed economic growth without reducing unemployment. Other economists suggest that jobless recoveries stem from structural change in the labor market, leading to unemployment as workers change jobs or industries.

Historical context

In 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression and vast unemployment and desperation while warehouses were full of goods, John Maynard Keynes published his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money which is largely credited with creating the terminology and shape of modern macroeconomics. It sought to bring about a revolution, commonly referred to as the "Keynesian Revolution", in the way economists thought - especially in relation to the proposition that a market economy tends naturally to restore itself to full employment after temporary shocks. While there were many competing ideas at the time, including a technocracy movement, a social credit movement, a communist movement, and a local-community-emphasizing swadeshi movement (important in India), Keynes' ideas became dominant in the USA. Actions based on Keynesian economics over the next two decades included both direct spending by the government on public works to increase employment (justified in part by a war effort) and manipulating interest rates through banking policy so businesses could expand and hire workers who would in turn demand more goods and services and create even more jobs. At the time, and since, Keynes' work was attacked by people on both the left and right of the political spectrum. However it was widely accepted by Western governments.

Since that time, there have been many further ideas in economics like Monetarism and New Keynesian economics. Neoliberal economics has moved in the direction of what some pejoratively call Free market fundamentalism as a return to some of the assumptions before Keynes, but which has become a dominant economic ideology in the USA. The advent of the global financial crisis in 2007 and widespread increasing unemployment has caused a resurgence in Keynesian thought.

It is not clear if this resurgence will be successful. While moving beyond the assumptions of his time, Keynes made several other assumptions that are explicit or implicit in his writing like:

• people will not do good work unless they are paid to do it;
• increasing rewards can only make work output better;
• the best way to get stuff or services is to buy them;
• the best way for people to get money is to earn it through working;
• the quality of the actual "work" in terms of enjoyability can be ignored;
• promoting community can be ignored in designing economic arrangements;
• negative externalities to the environment could be ignored;
• it is good or neutral that banks are the first to get newly created money;
• supply should come before demand; and
• innovation is not an important issue to consider in analyzing economies.

Different economists in the past like E.F. Schumacher, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and more recently Paul Romer and Elinor Ostrom have questioned one or more of these assumptions, as have non-economists like Alfie Kohn, Bob Black, Murray Bookchin, Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, and Marshall Brain. Many issues of economics remain contentious because many assumptions underlying economic theories are essentially statements on human nature, embody political values, or entail speculating about the potential of future technology.

New areas of economic research have been emerging to consolidate ideas about ecological economics and the economics of technological change, emphasizing natural capital and intellectual capital. Many economists have contributed to both movements. For example, Robert Costanza suggested in 1997 that the global ecosystem could be valued at around US$33 trillion at the time. According to Nobelist Robert Solow, about four-fifths of the growth in US output per worker was attributable to technical progress. And Eric von Hippel suggests that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of new innovation. These all call into question fundamental assumptions of mainstream macroeconomics which may shape the nature and quantity of jobs in high-technology economies that are also concerned about environmental issues. So, it is not clear a simple return to Keynesian thinking will be able to deal with economic issues that have changed significantly in the almost a century that has passed since Keynes developed his main insights, as brilliant as they were at the time. One difficulty with economics, compared to, say, physics, is that economics has limited experimental evidence from controlled experiments to back up theory; it is very expensive, time-consuming, or even unethical to experiment with alternative economics ideas, although computing is making some experimentation more feasible through simulation using agent based models, and many individuals and communities have been trying their own local experiments with alternatives. Many people seem to have a piece of the answer to the economic puzzle of the 21st century, including about jobs. As the pieces are put together, emerging from a response to the 2007 global financial crisis, we may well eventually see a new synthesis moving beyond Keynesian economics, in a way that will have the same profound effect in the 21st century as Keynes' work had in the 20th century, although reflecting the changes since then, perhaps reflecting a positive psychology change in emphasis from focusing on managing scarcity to focusing on creating abundance.

Also, many current industries that employ large numbers of people (ranging from the health insurance industry, the compulsory schooling industry, the defense industry, the fossil fuel industry, conventional agriculture industry, the software industry, the newspaper and media industries, and some consumer products industries) are coming under pressure from various movements from both the left and the right of the political spectrum in ways that might reduce the need for much paid work in various ways. Such changes might either directly eliminate jobs or, by increasing jobs temporarily eliminate subsequent problems in other areas and the jobs that go with them (as reflected in projections of overall cost savings by such transitions); for example building new wind farms instead of new coal plants might reduce medical expenses from asthma or from mercury poisoning. A single-payer health care movement, a homeschooling and alternative education movement, a global peace movement, a renewable energy movement, an organic agriculture movement, a free software movement, a peer-to-peer movement, a small government movement, an environmental movement, and a voluntary simplicity movement, taken together as a global mindshift of the collective imagination, have the potential to eliminate the need for many millions of paid jobs in the USA while providing enormous direct and indirect cost savings. This would make the unemployment situation much worse than it currently is, while paradoxically possibly improving our society and lowering taxes. Many of the current justifications for continuing social policies that may have problematical effects on the health of society, pose global security risks, or may waste prosperity in various ways is that they create vast numbers of paid jobs as a form of make-work.

As Keynes wrote in his book above about his own predecessors:

"The completeness of the [classical] victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority."

Automation, productivity increases, and demand

In the 1960s, The Triple Revolution memorandum suggested that machines would continue to reduce the number of manual laborers needed, while increasing the skill needed to work, thereby producing greater unemployment. The group recommended a basic income and other solutions. More recently, Marshall Brain has suggested in his Robotic Nation essay that a jobless recovery is due to automation and robots eliminating human jobs. He recommended in the long term (in which he theorizes most humans will be permanently unemployed) restructuring the economy by giving away money to all humans, again as a form of basic income.

These views stand in contrast to mainstream economic thought, which views productivity increases in general as a net benefit to workers in the economy. When creative destruction eliminates jobs in a certain sector due to innovation, the resulting available labor is put back to work in new jobs in a different sector. This may require education or re-training of workers. A jobless recovery may result in the short term due to the delays caused waiting for innovation and expansion in growth industries and retraining of workers. In the long term, this process is considered to raise real incomes or at least the standard of living for all workers, or alternatively leave more time for leisure through shorter work weeks.

However, this benefit from productivity assumes prosperity is generally shared, and that many workers are not left out of this prosperity for some reason like skills, talents, age, academic certifications, or other personal aspects. Averages may go up while many individuals lose out. The increasing rich/poor divide in the USA seems to reflect this. In general, better paying parts of the new economy requires higher levels of social skills, higher levels of abstract reasoning ability, higher levels of verbal fluency, higher levels of creativity, higher levels of competitiveness, higher levels of comfort with computer technology, and higher levels of parental investment that not everyone has. This helps explain why social mobility in the USA is at an all time low, even below that of Europe. Many jobs without such high skill requirements are potentially more easily automated.

For example, the workforce of the United States at the time of its founding was almost entirely employed in subsistence agriculture. After more than two centuries of technological advances, in 2007, only 0.6% of the workforce was employed in "farming, forestry, and fishing". Instead of becoming unemployed, these workers moved into manufacturing jobs created by the Industrial Revolution. As manufacturing has moved to other countries due to globalization or increased productivity allowed domestic companies to produce more with less labor, instead of becoming unemployed, many workers have moved to the service sector, which accounted for 78.5% of the U.S. economy in 2008. The increase in productivity has made it possible for people with jobs to have access to a wide variety of consumer goods and services that would have been unavailable or extremely expensive if over 90% of the workforce was busy with agriculture, and has drastically reduced the percentage of worker income spent on food.

However, many people who would like to be farmers or manufacturers no longer have the chance to do that for a living, and have been forced to seek jobs in other areas they may like less. In general, someone who enjoys working by using their hands and mind together may be forced to do something else they don't like as much, to a possible large loss in job satisfaction, assuming they can stand, say, a bureaucratic job at all.

Also, total working hours during the week have continued to shrink for many jobs throughout those changes (even as some jobs have been exceptions). One can ask how far this trend to declining hours will go, and if the remaining work hours will be spread evenly or whether some people will work a lot and some will work none at all. In general, people need food and manufactured goods much more than most services, and so this shift to a mostly service economy has also introduced a much greater volatility in the economy where desirable but optional services like restaurant meals, nail salon pedicures, or even high end investment banking services can be cut back on relatively easily; the current contraction in the economy surprised most economists for both its speed and depth, with industry after industry suffering a domino effect of cutbacks in jobs that fed upon itself.

But, even with a successful shift to mainly services, to maintain full employment, an economy has to create new jobs to replace the ones that have been automated, since competition and continual improvement is a key aspect of a free market economy. Marshall Brain and others like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil suggest robots, AI, and other automation can more and more easily fill many of the new jobs that get created, a trend that will only accelerate as robotics and artificial intelligence continue to improve. Also, a rise in free works developed by professional amateurs also displaces paid work. An economy with rising productivity also has to have rising demand per capita to balance the increased production, but for many things like housing, energy use, or media consumption demand may be limited per capita or may grow more slowly than exponentially rising productivity (driven in part by Moore's law and falling prices for computers and automation). Easy access to entertainment and education through the internet and computers -- effectively for free after an initial fixed cost for computing equipment -- has also has reduced demand for other services, simply by occupying people's time that might otherwise be spent in other paid-for pursuits like traveling or bowling. The internet also reduces demand for goods and services by supplying information that might otherwise require hiring experts or buying products. The internet also helps people make more satisfying purchases at a lower cost through product reviews produced by global social networking, also potentially reducing overall demand.

Psychologists have refined ideas like Maslow's hierarchy of needs that suggest increasing material abundance only increases happiness up to a point. Services may still be of interest, but more and more, the thing people want to do after meeting basic material needs is to meet needs for being social, for esteem, and for self-actualization, which can often be met at low cost through interacting with neighbors face-to-face or online, being recognized for gifts to the commons, and by being creative in some way. This suggests demand for most paid services is ultimately limited, except to the extent they support these things; so, for example, people might more and more be buying paints and canvas but not finished pictures.

The law of supply and demand suggests that if the potential labor supply is high (like from increasing unemployment in a recession or jobless recovery), and if the demand for labor goes lower from increased productivity coupled with limited overall desire for more goods and services, then wages will feel significant downward pressure, even for the jobs that remain. But, lower wages mean less purchasing power, which lowers demand further still, in a downward spiral. In the past, this downward spiral has been stopped in various ways by creating higher economic demand (like by low interest loans, increased advertising, and even exhortations to shop as a "patriotic duty".). At best, all that has been managed with all this increased consumption is to hold the line on falling wages given increased productivity. But the productivity has been increasing exponentially. Our society has never before faced a deep recession with so much advanced automation to continue putting downward pressure on wages for so many jobs.

This decrease in demand has also been happening in the context of a general growing environmental consciousness that advocates voluntary simplicity and consuming less. There are other trends as well causing people to question key aspects of our economic system (like wars, fraud, bailouts, inequities, foreclosures, and even the fact of rising unemployment itself). Taken together, there is the potential from all these trends that our economy may even "implode" as it transitions to some new paradigm as predicted back in 1985 by Bob Black.

So, if productivity rises faster than demand, then one would expect falling prices and increasing unemployment. Could we just stop increasing productivity somehow? But without continual innovation, including increasing automation to lower production costs, profits in a market-driven economy will fall to zero through competition, and the profit-driven market place would freeze up. So this problem of a permanent jobless recovery may be inherent to real economies at some stage (as opposed to theoretical ones with infinite demand), with a jobless recovery reflecting essentially a divide by zero error in mainstream economic thinking, with costs trending to zero as productivity greatly exceeds demand. Moving beyond this divide-by-zero error might require some sort of post-scarcity economy.

However, many mainstream economists might simply reply that the above is an example of the "lump of labor fallacy", and that limited demand is a not possible based on their views of human nature and so demand for human labor is indeed infinite. Professional economists are, for the most part, mathematicians of a sort. It might seem to make more sense to listen to psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists than mathematicians about human nature, assuming human nature can be defined at all. Still, even if demand was potentially infinite like most economists suppose, and thus always growing faster than capacity, that lump of labor fallacy has nothing to say about robotics and automation once they exceed human abilities in the workplace at a lower cost. How to reconcile these two opposite positions remains contentious. But for mainstream economic predictions to be valid, two things have to be true: demand has to be effectively infinite, and robots and artificial intelligence must never equal the ability of most human workers for workplace tasks at a similar overall cost. We seem to already see evidence of both these assumptions by mainstream economists being wrong in restricted areas (like demand for housing has fallen off, and robots can paint cars better than people), but even then, the implications are not yet fully clear if these trends will generalize or how quickly they would do so. Almost all mainstream economists failed to predict the current economic downturn; many people, including some professional economists, are now questioning in general the value of mainstream economic models for dealing with unusual situations past the boundaries of those models' assumptions.

The "Beyond Current Horizons" project had this to say in its 2009 final report:: "Technological change is having a dramatic impact on the structure of employment as well as many other aspects of the way work is conducted. [The internet and computer technology] in particular has revolutionised the way business is done, created new markets and offered the possibilities for people to exert much more control over their working lives. It seems certain the pace of change will continue if not accelerate. However, it is important to recognise that just because something is technically possible does not mean that it will inevitably happen. As Baldry (2008) emphasises, outcomes are shaped by social and economic considerations and constraints. Simple extrapolations based on technological determinism, and based on the false idea of a fixed "lump of work", have resulted in many previous projections of the impact of technology on employment looking very silly... In the 1970s for example the doomsters predicted the collapse of employment and the paperless office would be the prime outcomes of the coming ICT revolution (see, for example, Jenkins and Sherman (1979)). Both were far wide of the mark. This does not mean to say that developments over the next decade or two will not have profound implications for employment and the world of work, but it does illustrate the dangers of simple extrapolation, taking no account of social and economic behaviour and the power of markets to adjust to new circumstances."

So, there remains uncertainty about what the future will hold, including how any potential benefits of ever more advanced technology will be distributed to all people somehow. Alternatively, we can consider how those benefits might be wasted like by creating artificial scarcity (such as through war or excessive bureaucracy) to make the facts of increasing abundance and limited demand fit economic theories based around scarcity and unlimited demand, and thus maintain full employment in a conventional way. Still, from a mainstream economics perspective, none of this alternative perspective is needed as the market will correct itself -- except when it does not, as admitted in 2008 by Alan Greenspan.

Globalization

Free trade has also been suggested as a possible driver of structural changes contributing to a jobless recovery. In this view, during lean times companies in developed countries are more likely to move factories and lower-skill jobs offshore, given the higher pressure to cut costs and lower likelihood remaining employees will leave the company. This results in the need for the workforce to shift to different manufacturing and service jobs (often higher-skill), but it takes time for these new jobs to be created (sometimes requiring the creation of new companies or the scaling up of startups) and for workers to be retrained or credentialed. For this to work out well, there must be unlimited demand for new products and services to justify new businesses, most workers must be able to adapt to these new jobs, and the new jobs must pay as well or better as the old ones both in terms of money and in terms of how well they are enjoyed for their own sake (for example, a wine maker might prefer to make wine, not operate a nail salon).

Possible Cures

Here is a list of possible ways to deal with joblessness. Some "cures" emerge mostly on their own; some require political action to start or to prevent. This list is intended to be complete in order to help in understanding the interaction between social changes and job creation; not all possibilities are desirable by most societies. The ones in the first half of the list (like wage subsidies, a shorter work week, or a basic income) in general would usually be considered more positive and adaptive responses than the ones in the second half of the list (like war, escapism, and luddism), although actual preferences or ordering of desirability and acceptability may vary depending on political beliefs and feelings about things like government intervention and taxation. Many of the items in the second half of the list have profit-making aspects for some individuals within the current economic system, although usually directly at the cost of others in society (like crime). Not all items on this list are compatible with each other. Not all might be considered moral or would be legal under international law or existing trade agreements. Some of these "cures" create new jobs (like public works), others make it easier to survive without a job (like frugality), others eliminate the unemployed individuals from the official statistics in various ways (like prisons), others in some way destroy abundance which has a side effect of creating jobs to build it back up (war), and some allow someone unemployed to take a job that someone else was doing but who no longer can do the job anymore for various reasons (like mandatory retirement). Some of the "cures" that help individuals survive without a job may actually increase the unemployment rate as they reduce demand for items in the market place produced by paid employment, contributing to overall increased joblessness even as the individual may be helped locally. Because these items may interact in unexpected ways, and people have many different feelings about them as different groups may benefit or be harmed in different ways, and many vested interests are involved, it is challenging for any economist, political scientist, politician or private citizen to make sense of all these issues or to pick a best way forward, even though people are trying in various ways to do that. New approaches in social science involving computer simulation may also help in understanding the way these issues interact to gain insight into them.

Do nothing

The default is always to do nothing. One can hope that the job market corrects itself somehow. In the meantime, one can stand back and watch while individuals without jobs fend for themselves in some way, like live off their savings, grow gardens for food, become homeless, move in with relatives who still have jobs, rely on local charities, or do something else they can on the rest of this list. Doing nothing is often justified by blaming the victim. Victim blaming is a powerful human psychological bias that protects people from painful or disquieting facts by shifting the blame for those events onto the people suffering from them, thus alleviating guilt. Often downturns in the economy are accompanied with seemingly inexplicable rises in right-wing political parties, even among those whose jobs are in danger and would not rationally benefit from laissez-faire policies. There are powerful psychological motivations for this: leaders who accuse the impoverished or jobless of moral laxity, laziness, or incompetence can ease the feelings of doubt and helplessness in the populus that has not been relatively impoverished. This creates a sense of moral superiority and invulnerability among those who have not yet suffered in the economic downturn, and prevents action to halt further job losses. As Harry S. Truman said, "It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours." Another justification for doing nothing draws on quasi-mystical arguments based on "self emerging complexities" or "nature correcting itself". In reality, complex systems -- like organisms -- frequently fail to self-correct: death being the most obvious example, but other examples are dehydration, excessive fever, infection, and cancer. In practice, these justifications may be examples of anthropomorphism: attributing consciousness to objects, or groups of objects, that cannot possess them. Science historian Robert Nadeau develops a related theme in his book "The Wealth of Nature: How Mainstream Economics Failed the Environment", suggesting Adam Smith's "invisible hand" metaphor for forces associated with the operation of the "natural laws of economics" was predicated on assumptions from eighteenth-century metaphysics and that the creators of neoclassical economics incorporated this view of the "lawful" mechanisms of free-market systems into a mathematical formalism borrowed wholesale (and inappropriately) from mid-nineteenth-century physics. Harvard Professor of Divinity Harvey Cox writes in "The Market as God" (The Atlantic, March 1999) that the "Do Nothing" philosophy is connected to a rising tide of theological thinking in economics; he suggests the new "economist-theologians" have created a economic theology "comparable in scope if not in profundity to that of Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth" which suggests that human interventions in the economy are ineffectual since the free market takes on the divine properties of omniscience, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence; he cites Alan Greenspan's testimony to the US Congress in 1998 against regulation of financial markets after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis as an example of a true believer increasing in faith after adversity. (Alan Greenspan's comments a decade later show a shift in his faith somewhat, referenced above as "Alan Greenspan Destroys Deregulation in 16 Seconds".)

Temporary support to the newly jobless

Temporary payments from the government like unemployment insurance and retraining funds can help people for a time, as can severance pay from the employer. When an economy is growing, these may be enough for routine unemployment. In a major recession with long term structural unemployment, such benefits may be rapidly exhausted before new work is found, at which point other options may need to be considered by the individual or society. Note that the self-employed usually do not receive such benefits. Neither do those in the informal sector of the economy if they lose their "off the books" work.

Family and friends

Family members or friends with jobs will often help relatives or friends who have lost a job by letting them move in and feeding them. One can just say that is the social safety net. In the past, that worked for many.

Charities and private donations

Local charities funded by private donations, like soup kitchens, food pantries, and homeless shelters can feed and house jobless people, assuming they have sufficient donations. National and global charities can help fund local initiatives or help create innovations to feed and house the jobless more cheaply or in a more pleasant way.

Government public works

Government public works can be initiated like in the 1930s during the Great Depression using public dollars to rebuild infrastructure and otherwise employ people in fields that have some public component like the arts, research, or medicine. Given the free culture movement, the government could pay writers, musicians, and programmers to create new free and open source digital works. These public dollars could come from a variety of sources such as taxes, printing the money (which can be non-inflationary if it matches the increase in money supply needs in the economy), borrowing the money, expecting fees for public services produced, and/or from selling or leasing government assets like land or broadcast spectrum.

Government subsidies to the private sector

Government subsidies to the private sector for new job creation can be started. For example, a state can supply a direct wage subsidy for new hires or allow a tax credit for new jobs created.

Buddhist economics

There could be the adoption of “Buddhist Economics” social policy as suggested by E.F. Schumacher. This would be where full employment of everyone who needs a job with a job suited to their talents, interests, and personal growth is a stated societal goal. Other economic goals like minimizing labor costs would then be subordinate to it. Countries with more centrally planned economies like the old USSR had aspects of this as a stated goal, as a right to a job, but they may have lacked other aspects of Schumacher’s idea about the quality of the jobs or other values.

Natural resource economics

Natural resource economics is a transdisciplinary field of academic research within economics that aims to address the connections and interdependence between human economies and natural ecosystems. Its focus is how to operate an economy within the ecological constraints of earth's natural resources, usually with a concern about social equity. The relation of natural resource economics to increasing employment is discussed in more detail in the separate section below on a resource based economy. Essentially, the creation of good jobs (or otherwise preserving individual health) can be weighed in numerical equations along with other resource-related factors (like preserving the health of a watershed) in making broad economic plans including, if needed, regulation, taxation, subsidization, and redistribution of resources. A broad interpretation of this field includes efforts to move beyond money entirely as the main way to decided what is worth doing, and instead base decisions on current physical possibilities and the effect of those decisions on future physical possibilities.

Economic research

Since mainstream economists failed in both predicting and preventing the Great Recession and a subsequent jobless recovery, it might make sense for governments, businesses, charities, and individuals to fund and participate in extensive new research into improving the science of economics in a variety of ways, incorporating ideas from other areas like anthropology, cybernetics, biology, sociology, psychology, mechanical engineering, comedy, and religion. This research could involve physical experiments, action research, computer simulations, and theoretical work. For example, new experimental sustainable cities could be built in different areas, each to be organized around a different economic approach somehow, each as a Special Economic Zone. Different states could experiment with different economic models related to taxation and social benefits to see which ones worked well. Many new computer simulations could be developed to explore alternative economics themes to gain new insights into the implications of economic assumptions, values, and techniques. People from unusual backgrounds could be recruited into mainstream economics programs for new perspectives. For example, a person with field experience in anthropology could study mainstream economics to promote interdisciplinary cooperation and cross-fertilization, or a Mime artist could be asked to give a one hour lecture on mainstream economic theory. Given that humor is linked to creativity, current professional comedians could be trained in mainstream and alternative economics and invited to spend a year on faculty at top-ranked economics departments; historically, the role of court jester has been an important one in places where free speech and dissent are otherwise not allowed; physicist Jeff Schmidt suggests in his book Disciplined Minds that academia is often such a place, as does Noam Chomsky.

Humor

Beyond improving creativity and an ability to see situations from multiple perspectives, humor has also been linked to decreasing stress, living longer, increasing social connectivity, and increasing optimism (which may lead to more demand for goods and services). In difficult times, there is a demand for motivational speakers, and people with what may be seen as worthless economics degrees could learn to give motivational stand-up comedy sketches as Brett Leake retrained to do, a comedian with muscular dystrophy who joked on the Tonight Show about his disability being "a degree in Economics". Also, CEOs prefer to hire people with a good sense of humor. During the Great Depression, screwball comedies became an important way to uplift the public mood and spirit. As President John F. Kennedy said: "There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension. So we must do what we can with the third."

Optimism and thanksgiving

Optimistic people tend to start more businesses, hire more staff, borrow more money, and purchase more goods and services. Beyond through humor, optimism can be increased by positive media like science fiction that envisions a happy future, political speeches that encourage people, prototype demonstration projects like EPCOT Center or the Venus Project, positive psychology, and positive spirituality that focuses on thankfulness and abundance. An attitude of regular thankfulness encourages optimism. Ideas from other more optimistic and thankful cultures can be explored; for example, as Native American author Jamie Sans writes:

The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year.

A deeply optimistic belief in abundance and thanksgiving may have many implications for structuring a society, as anthropologist Marshall Sahlins suggested in his theory of the original affluent society, which echoes Jamie Sans' point from an academic perspective. Author James P. Hogan also echoes this point from a sci-fi perspective in his novel Voyage from Yesteryear, where a post-scarcity society based around a gift economy emerges in part due to beliefs about abundant energy resulting from advanced theoretical physics and abundant material goods and services resulting from advanced automation.

Basic income

A "basic income" is the idea that everyone in a society would get enough to live on every month as a check from the government without any requirements to prove financial need. The Alaska Permanent Fund is an example of a partial basic income for residents of Alaska. See the section below on Implementing a basic income. In summary, it would take about one half the US GDP to give everyone US$1500 a month (plus health care) to live from, and the other half of the GDP would motivate some people to provide the goods and services everyone would buy. If automation increased and less jobs were available, people would still have their basic income, and taxes could be adjusted to ensure the benefits of automation were being widely distributed.

Local subsistence

Individuals, families, and communities can work towards improved local subsistence like with 3D printing and organic gardening. Essentially, individuals can produce for their own needs outside the marketplace. Government and charities might help with this, like by supporting the development of more educational materials about organic gardening, or supporting research into flexible local manufacturing on a home-scale (like an improved RepRap).

Gift economy

Individuals and organizations could shift more of their production and consumption to a peer-to-peer gift economy. Wikipedia itself and Debian GNU/Linux are examples of this, where many peers do what they can to create a digital commons where all can draw from as they need. In the physical world, groups like Freecycle and others organize people through the internet to give away physical items they no longer need. Farmers may give away unsellable crops that would otherwise spoil to local food pantries or neighbors. In the service world, people can supply pro-bono services in relation to law or dentistry to those in need (this is easier to do when the services have no material costs) when they might otherwise have no paying clients. See the section below on Achieving a gift economy for more details on how this might work if implemented on a large scale.

Shorter work week

Government can mandate a shorter work week. This has been tried in France with mandated shorter working time. This may increase costs on business to manage and train more workers. It may increase productivity with better rested and happier employees, or it may decrease productivity as people who might want to work more legally cannot. Job sharing is a related idea, and sometimes unemployment insurance programs may help support this for a time at higher levels of pay instead of a company laying off some workers who then go on unemployment (and have their jobs skills erode) and keeping some other workers on as full-time. Some experts credit Germany's job-sharing practice called "kurzarbeit" (which literally means short work) and related government subsidies for helping maintain lower unemployment figures and preventing the loss of full-time auto-manufacturing jobs.

Mandatory retirement

The government can enforce mandatory retirement at ever earlier ages. This would probably need to be combined with some form of retirement package or basic income so the retiree could survive, or else they might become homeless after their savings were exhausted.

Making work fun

A society can collectively rethink work to be more fun so most of it is done as play, as suggested by Bob Black in his essay "The Abolition of Work", Theodore Sturgeon in his fictional writings like the story "The Skills of Xanadu", or Charles Fourier in his various writings. Changing the nature of work may then lead to other social transformations on this list.

Creating communitarian villages

Related to the above, people can create Charles Fourier's Phalanstère buildings or other settings for intentional living with a different model of work. These could be either fun-based or some other model of communal sharing of work like a balanced job complex or something else. An emerging area or related ideas has been called communitarianism (as distinct from communisim). Building better local communities has been tried in various ways throughout the years to greater and lesser success. Historically, many monasteries and convents are examples, as are Israeli Kibbutzim; newer ideas are connected to ecovillages and co-housing. See the section below on towards a new localism emphasizing community for more examples. Such communities can either create jobs locally in informal ways (often connected to subsistence production) or they help people survive without jobs through goods and services that flow more through a social network than through direct exchange. During the last Great Depression, many city dwellers returned for a time to the smaller rural communities, families, and social networks from where they came.

Alternative currencies and barter

Communities can create alternative currencies like the Ithaca Hour. They can create other types of Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS). They can promote or tolerate other informal forms of exchange like barter which help people without money still get their needs met if they have some good or service to offer directly in exchange. Alternative currencies and LETS systems can help create jobs in a few ways. Local currencies increase the overall money supply in a community, which can have similar local effects to increasing the national currency supply in terms of job creation through making possible increased exchange of goods and services by willing parties who simply lack currency to complete transactions and can't work out direct barter arrangements. Another benefit of increased currency supply is it makes possible increased borrowing from the LETS group to make purchases that would otherwise be deferred (and so directly creates demand). Borrowing LETS currencies to help start businesses may in turn create more local jobs. Another way local currencies create jobs is that they act as a form of local protectionism for local jobs at local merchants (since currency can generally be only spent locally). Local currency systems in the LETS tradition may also be somewhat more forgiving of debts (essentially making a quasi-bankruptcy easier if a person owing LETS currency units leaves the area); while not everyone agrees with this sentiment, LETS proponent James Taris suggests about LETS obligations, "... these are really only favours anyway ... members helping other members in a time of need. ..." (and suggests a debit limit be set). LETS systems may also employ local people directly in their administration. Like all currencies, local currencies can potentially have issues with inflation, deflation, debt bubbles, or counterfeiting. On a state level, California in 2009 began to issue what some call the equivalent of an alternative currency in the form of IOUs; however this was not done as a part of a LETS system and did not encounter immediate widespread local acceptance. During the Great Depression, hundreds of communities circulated their own temporary currencies. Benjamin Franklin has been claimed to have said that the prime cause of the American Revolution was the British outlawing the ability of the American colonies to print their own alternative currencies which thus caused a depression.

Rationing

A government can institute more formal rationing not necessarily connected to money. One good example is the rationing in the United Kingdom of food during WWII where overall UK citizens became healthier during the war. One bad example of rationing was in North Korea more recently where in the 1995-1998 North Korean famine millions of North Korean citizens starved despite having ration coupons.

Frugality

Individuals and organizations can increase their frugality along the lines of “Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do, or Do Without!“ (a slogan from an old WWII poster). However, even if this helps people deal with having less money, it may further increase joblessness in other sectors of the economy whose goods and services are no longer purchased.

New frontiers

The opening of a new frontiers can create jobs dealing with new resources and new processes on the frontier. In the past, frontiers have been newly discovered vacant lands (or ones coquered through war). In the present, there remain new frontiers in cyberspace, nanotech, psychological innerspace, spirituality or perhaps something else. In the future there may be new seasteads in the ocean as The Sea Frontier and new habitats in outer space as The High Frontier. The government could encourage the creation of these new frontiers in various ways.

Reducing the minimum wage

A government could lower or eliminate the mandate minimum wage to encourage employment. A minimum wage would no longer be needed to assure a living wage if there was a basic income that already supplied a guaranteed minimum income, as above. Without a basic income, reducing or removing the minimum wage may just lead to a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions as workers fight over fewer and fewer remaining jobs if the alternative economic explanations like by Marshall Brain are correct.

Increased social benefits

A government can introduce social benefits like health insurance in countries where they are otherwise provided by as fringe benefits of employment. Right now, there is an an extra economic incentive to get more out of fewer workers given otherwise fixed fringe benefits cost per employee. If fringe benefits were not an issue, there would be less incentive for businesses not to hire new workers. The extra management costs and training costs of more employees working less hours might then more easily be outweighed by the increased productivity of workers who have more leisure time. In general, countries in Western Europe have taken more of this approach as part of their choice of welfare state model where social benefits are broadly distributed based on citizenship than in the USA where social benefits are distributed based on provable financial need (leading to more bureaucracy in the USA to prevent fraud and review applications).

Migration

There can be increased migration to an area with jobs. This can be within a country or even to another country. For example, illegal immigration of Mexicans to the USA or “guest worker” programs like in Germany for people from Turkey and other countries have often provided employment for individuals born in smaller economies. Someday emigration to ocean seasteads or space habitats may even be possible in search of employment, just like many people left Europe to move to the Americas and Australia in search of work in previous centuries.

Protectionism

A government can increase protectionism of local industries by placing a tax called a tariff on certain imports or by just declaring certain imports to be illegal (both of which can lead to smuggling). Note that tariffs in American history were the largest source of federal revenue from the 1790s to the eve of World War I, until they were surpassed by income taxes. If demand is limited, or capital for retooling and retraining is limited, and/or people enjoy and are well suited to their current work in preference to alternatives, then when existing local demand is being protected from imports, local jobs may be being saved or created at no major cost to the local economy, even if other distant places previously supplying imports might suffer a drop in employment. If demand is unlimited as assumed by most mainstream economists, and capital can be easily shifted from one industry to another, and workers could easily move between industries regardless of personal preferences or talents or training, then the theory of comparative advantage suggests any benefits of protectionism will be at best local to a protected industry and the rest of the local economy will suffer from increased costs and less variety of goods and services. Fluctuating currency exchange rates may work as a form of protectionism, an issue explored by Jane Jacobs as regards import replacement in the context of city economies. Beyond direct laws outlawing or taxing imports, local industries can also be protected in various indirect ways like language barriers, local ownership rules, local subsidies, local preferences, local culture, local social networks, and regulation and red tape. These indirect barriers make it hard for outsiders to understand how to do business in an area profitably and thus increase jobs for local residents who understand the local issues. For example, it is often hard for many US firms to do business in China selling products to Chinese for some of these reasons unless they take on Chinese partners, essentially creating local businesses in China. As another indirect form of protectionism, local purchasing movements are based around moral persuasion may protect local industries and local jobs from competition from imports; increasingly common is a local food movement (which also has roots in environmentalism) promoting local farmers' markets which creates jobs for local farmers and may sometimes save on fossil fuel use for transporting food long distances. Local purchasing may also boost the amount of currency in local circulation which may have other local economic benefits that create jobs similar locally to increasing the money supply on a national basis. Even when costs may be higher for local purchases, the immediate extra cost to the individual of a local purchase may sometimes be outweighed in the long term by reduced local taxes otherwise needed to deal with local unemployment costs and related social dysfunction. Since individuals may still save money for themselves by buying outside the local area for a specific transaction, local purchasing movements may sometimes set the individual's short term benefit against the local area's overall long term benefit, as a form of free rider problem. Simply imposing tariffs or making imports illegal avoids this free rider problem and the need for individual moral persuasion, subject to other possible social costs depending on assumptions above about demand, capital, workers, market variety, and effect on other distant communities.

Money supply

A society can increase the money supply in various ways through the banking system, creating either more fiat dollars or getting the existing dollars to move faster. This is the usual way most mainstream economists suggest dealing with economic problems. In theory, banks with more money will lend it out to create more economic activity, subject to long term problems related to possible debt bubbles. Although in practice banks may just hoard money for perceived future security.

Bankruptcy

There can be increasing bankruptcy or other renegotiation of debts. Individuals may see bankruptcy as a chance to start over with borrowing and spending. Lenient bankruptcy laws take away some of the fears about borrowing money by borrowers which promotes purchases and new businesses. Bankruptcies serve also as part of a transfer of money from those who have it for whatever reason to those who spend it. A Jubilee year in Christianity is a year of general forgiveness of debts that could help reset a stalled economy with an excessive rich/poor divide. Aspects of the US current recovery plan and bank bailouts connect to bankruptcy, either by giving money to banks to cover bad loans and so avoid bankruptcy and sometimes by asking banks to renegotiate old debts like mortgages. Hyperinflation can have a similar effect to widespread bankruptcy by making old debts easier to pay.

Homelessness

Local areas can accommodate the homeless in tent cities or with other makeshift housing as a sort of refugee from the mainstream economy. Cities in good weather areas can house homeless people outdoors all year long. This becomes more problematical in cold weather areas where the homeless freeze to death unless kept warm. Some homeless people then commit property crimes so they are incarcerated during the winter months. Special technologies like the paraSITE, a cheap inflatable shelter for the homeless, can help with that. Such areas can then become engines for job creation for police and social workers to deal with related social problems of many people living under stressful conditions.

Advertising

Increasing advertising can entice people into more debt. This is one cause of the current economic crisis as the debt bubble eventually burst.

Planned obsolescence

Companies can intentionally producing shoddy merchandise or things with planned obsolescence. Government standards and mandates can be created to ensure no products work well for very long. This can also be encouraged by promoting faddism in the culture. This increases jobs in manufacturing and for product liability lawyers, at a cost to those who buy defective merchandise.

Prisons

Social policy can promote more prisons (including private prisons), in part through even tougher laws on common activities like recreational drug use or copyright infringement of music. This employs guards and construction workers, and keeps people out of the labor pool who have been arrested, including through selective enforcement. For decades incarceration in the United States has been a growing trend and is now the highest in the world; the prison industry is one of the few reliable employment areas in some rural economies, especially for people unable to afford a college education but may find relatively high paying work in a prison. The growth in the private prison industry may even be directly profitable to some corrupt judges, and a fear of lack of integrity and transparency from sensational cases of corruption may further increase the demand for lawyers. It has been suggested that attempts to reform harsh drug laws have been resisted based on the potential for jobs losses, although recent political shifts have caused some drug laws to become more lenient anyway, which may contribute to unemployment in specific places like New York State, both from guards becoming unemployed and also the difficulty of newly released ex-convicts in finding employment. It has been suggested by historian Howard Zinn that a major aspect of current society is to essentially have one part of the population guard the other part and any social improvements in this regard may increase unemployment as much guarding work would be eliminated, both in prisons and also throughout the economy, with significant effects on employment; as Professor Zinn wrote:

How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred -- by economic inequity -- faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices. ... In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people -- the employed, the somewhat privileged -- are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls. That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us.

Overwhelmed guards faced with traumatic experiences on a daily basis also increase the demand for psychologists, marriage counselors, doctors, suicide hotlines, and undertakers (life expectancy for US corrections officers is around 59 years, compared with 77 for the U.S. population overall, according to insurance data), thus increasing demand for workers in these other occupations.

Compulsory schooling

Governments can expand compulsory schooling and otherwise raise academic degree requirements for jobs. This employs guards/teachers and keeps people out of the labor pool. According to John Taylor Gatto, excessive schooling may also suppress true education that might otherwise lead to greater productivity. Lower productivity may then mean more jobs since less is produced per worker.

War

More war employs guards/soldiers, blows up and wastes abundance (requiring it to be replaced by workers), and kills or disables workers to keep them out of the labor pool. According to Major General Smedley D. Butler, "War is a racket" because, in his view, war is mostly about creating paid work for which some industrialists get profits (so, one hundred dollars might be spent by a government so an industrialist could get one dollar in profit). Wars may also create new frontiers, as above, to colonize the conquered lands. War is an easily justifiable explanation for a government to spend huge amounts of money to create jobs, especially as anyone who objects can then be denounced for, as Hermann Göring suggested, "lack of patriotism".

Internment and genocide

Governments can start internment and genocide of those deemed a nonperson or unperson. Similar to war, genocide against a minority employs guards/soldiers and kills or disables workers to keep them out of the labor pool. Genocide also creates a spoils of conquest that can be used to reward soldiers and other workers with land and goods. The genocide against the Native Americans, the genocide against the Jews during WWII, and the internment of Japanese-American US citizens during WWII are all examples of this process. All had employment benefits to the rest of the country as nonpersons needed to be guarded or otherwise processed and killed, and those deemed nonpersons are also then not part of official unemployment statistics. Marshall Brain also develops a theme related to this in Manna, with the unemployed interned in Terrafoam dorms, and eventually, the unemployed then started speculating about being executed as a group.

Bureaucracy

Excessive bureaucracy as well as more excessive regulation employs guards/bureaucrats and creates endless paperwork and make-work between bureaucrats that wastes abundance. The US health insurance industry is one example here, with one of every three health care dollars being wasted, but creating a lot of jobs in the process. One of the arguments against health care reform in the USA is that millions of health care workers who make paperwork for each other will be left unemployed. Franz Kafka wrote some fiction with this theme of endless bureaucracy. More recently the movie Brazil painted such a future of endless bureaucracy.

Reducing volunteerism

Reducing the informal unpaid volunteer aspect of society would create jobs in the formal paid economy. Many things that can be done by volunteers or unpaid relatives, including raising young children, caring for the sick or dying, or engaging in civic duties, would take a lot more time if done formally as part of a for-profit enterprise. When formalized and done for pay, these volunteer tasks may also be done at a lower quality of care which creates jobs related to other spawned dysfunctions, like more psychologists to deal with increased child unhappiness. This is one reason the well-meant movement of women into the workforce may actually have been a net negative as far as societal well being as our society fell into what Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren calls "The Two Income Trap". More paid jobs for psychologists were also created dealing the general decrease in women’s happiness as women transitioned from hard-working and often unrecognized volunteer roles with a lot of autonomy and direct human-to-human nurturing to paid labor in authoritarian settings on abstract tasks. To keep the volunteer vs. paid labor system balanced, for every woman moving into the formal workforce, a man could have come out and gone into the informal volunteer workforce including child-care and unpaid civic responsibilities, such as watching streets to keep them safe, but that did not happen. Thus the net result of a huge number of people abandoning volunteer roles may have been more total paid work that needed to be done in society because vital volunteer work was no longer done and paid work like formal policing was done with less care and less local knowledge, and formal schooling likewise was of lower quality for children's growth because it was less personally tailored. So more paid jobs are created as more total work is required by everyone to deal with decreased overall social productivity and increased social dysfunction.

Competition

Increasing competition in a society will greatly increase the amount of work to be done. As Alfie Kohn and others like Richard Stallman have pointed out, direct competition in a society is overall a reducer of abundance. While there is a lot of value in a diversity of services and products and friendly competition can help increase that, once people agree on the value of a service or product, cooperation by people in producing the good or service is almost always more efficient than directly competing with each other. Competition creates wasted duplicate efforts, incompatible standards, confusion among potential consumers, excessive advertising, and even direct sabotage; all of that dysfunction creates more work for everyone though. While it may make sense to have a variety of, say, cameras, whether the groups producing those cameras cooperate or compete in discussing new innovations is the issue. The free software movement, with groups working on different software products but sharing code and ideas under free licenses shows an alternative to commercial product groups working in secrecy and isolation and defending their finished proprietary products with patents and copyrights from those who would copy them or improve them independently. Law Professor James Boyle talks about aspects of this in his free book “The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind“.

Confusion

Increased confusion in society can create more work. Historically, the story of the Tower of Babel relates to this, with a unified cooperative humanity creating a huge tower to the heavens until humanity is scattered across the earth with a confusion of languages leading to misunderstanding and fighting. A current example related to confusion is how commercial spam had damaged the ability of people to cooperate through email, newsgroups, and other online services, but spam still creates many jobs related to filtering email or forums. Computer viruses have a similar effect in creating many jobs and destroying much abundance or otherwise decreasing productivity through creating confused computer systems. Another aspect of confusion is creating new for-profit products like Vioxx that may be no better than other solutions (or even worse) but using enough advertising dollars to confuse everyone the new products are needed as opposed to cheaper or safer existing solutions. Caltech Professor David Goodstein writes in his “The Big Crunch” essay how scientific integrity can break down under increased competition for funds. Still, from a jobless recovery point of view, lack of integrity whether as regards science or other things creates more jobs dealing with the mess and guarding against future problems. The failure of science may also lead to increased ill-health in a society with related employment benefits, mentioned below.

Disability and ill-health

Increased disability and ill health from pollution, advertising, harmful products, stress, or pandemic plague can creates jobs for medical workers, and keeps disabled people out of the labor pool. Increasing obesity, diabetes, cancer, and autism connected to something like nutritional deficiencies from processed food or lack of outdoor activity in the sun getting vitamin D may contribute to this unintentionally, but whether this gets researched or talked about in depth is intentional. In general the time of the Black Plague was a huge time of opportunity for the survivors.

Escapism

Increasing escapism, whether mild and adaptive like watching a bit more funny media or exercising a little more, or more serious and dysfunctional like alcoholism, drug addiction, internet addiction, or other problems, may keep the individual out of the work force and create jobs tending to them.

Suicide

Increasing suicide rates by the unemployed or others affected by societal stress may create jobs. Individuals who have completed suicide but were unemployed are no longer in the official statistics. Dead individuals who had jobs now have created an available job. Suicides who also in the process murder others with jobs will increase available jobs by the number of murders. Some suicides are also forms of insurance fraud to provide benefits for their families. This all may lead to increased employment for police forensics teams and insurance adjusters, as well as social workers and ministers to deal with grieving families and grieving communities. Botched suicides may leave someone paralyzed and thus create jobs tending to the disabled person for decades. This trend increases the need for suicide prevention counselors to help suicidal people see other alternatives and to rebuild healthy roots that keep suicidal individuals growing and helping others as they move through what Thomas Moore calls “Dark Nights of the Soul” as times calling for self-renewal and transformation. As an indirect form of suicide, evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary biologists suggest that increasing heart attacks or strokes in times of stress may be one way that older members of the species unconsciously make way for younger family members in times of perceived resource scarcity, despite the lost wisdom and lost stories; the loss of older members of society also creates more work for the younger ones, and that work is done less efficiently because of the loss of knowledge (thus creating even more work).

Abortion and birth control

More abortion or birth control temporarily employs medical staff even if it may reduce future medical jobs caring for children, reduces current costs of child care for unemployed households, and kills or otherwise prevents the birth of potential workers to keep them out of the future labor pool. It also reduces future abundance by having less people around to make things as implied by Julian Lincoln Simon in “The Ultimate Resource“. In general, abortions go up in difficult economic times. In Marshall Brain's Manna novel, contraceptives were introduced into the water supply of the unemployed.

Aging population

An aging population resulting directly from small-family policies or even indirectly from anti-family aspects of other social policies creates jobs for medical workers, social workers, and other assistants to fill roles previously filled informally by children. Most industrialized countries are facing aging populations as an indirect consequence of aspects of those societies. Social policies in relation to directly discouraging or encouraging large families come into play with a dialog between those who fear overpopulation and resource constraints like is the basis of China's one-child policy versus those who believe that people can reduce their ecological footprint voluntary or through better technology and that people can expand long-term resource availability through seasteading or space habitats or other means.

Crime

Increased crime including theft, murder, fraud, smuggling, arson, kidnapping, and tax evasion destroys prosperity and also is a form of self-employment. Individuals sometimes turn to crime as a last resort to feed their families, or to support an addiction emerging out of stress, or to get back at perceived injustices. Eventually the individual usually is either killed during a crime or caught and arrested, which brings him or her out of the official unemployment figures and creates jobs for police and prison guards. Each murdered or traumatized victim may also create more jobs dealing with the aftermath, as well as remove the victims from the labor pool either due to death or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Social unrest

Social unrest including luddism, machine breaking, vandalism, and rioting employs guards, police, lawyers, judges, social workers, and others, and keeps convicted troublemakers out of the labor pool, while destroying abundance and thus creating more work for everyone.

Implications of cures and a paradox

Likely we will see a mix of all those in the future, and in fact, a mix of all those is what we have now. Many of these items like bankruptcy, homelessness, advertising, faddism, schooling, prison, war, internment/genocide, excessive bureaucracy, formalization, competition, confusion, ill-health, escapism, suicide, abortion, aging, crime, and rioting are usually considered as undesirable. Still, many societies have used these ideas intentionally or not in the past to destroy abundance (either in the short term or long term) and create guarding jobs and other types of jobs related to social dysfunction. Jane Jacobs has called some of these sorts of things "transactions of decline" like discussed in her book Dark Age Ahead. It is important to distinguish between creating jobs of various sorts and the overall affect on societal happiness (see the “Broken window fallacy“). That is why, even though all these things increase a country's GDP, it is important to have other measures of societal health like a Genuine Progress Indicator.

Many of the things a healthy society might value highly like scientific integrity, cooperation, efficiency of various sorts, public goods, clarity in communications, truth in advertising, and so on are valuable precisely because they save everyone trouble and effort. But the flip side of that may be a generally decreasing the need for paid jobs in a society that is improving along the lines of a genuine progress indicator, which becomes a problem when the main right to consume comes from having a paid job. The point of contention between mainstream Keynesian macroeconomics on the one hand and the Triple Revolution memorandum on the other is whether available paid work will grow infinitely in an unregulated free market or whether total paid work is limited in a happier society by a law of diminishing returns for desiring stuff and services in preference to more free time and the joy of volunteerism (like contributing to Wikipedia).

For example, to elaborate on “The Parable of the Broken Window”, and consider how these "cures" come into play, consider a riot about unemployment and hunger where rioters break windows and are arrested for that. Normally, a free market capitalist society might not do anything to create jobs or deal with hunger directly, but faced with this obvious problem as a threat to the public order and the market, such a society needs to act. First, the rioters are taken off the unemployment roles, because they are now prisoners. This reduces official unemployment. Beyond repairing the broken window, all sorts of jobs have been created here, many funded by fiat dollars that now can be justified to be taxed, printed, or borrowed — for police on overtime to respond to the riot, for bureaucrats to institute new security checks, for lawyers and judges to prosecute, defend, and judge the rioters, for prison construction to house the rioters, for guards to guard the rioters, for social workers and psychologists to talk to the imprisoned rioters as well as the ones they harmed, for the media to report on all this, and so on. The GDP soars, and official unemployment goes down a lot. Everyone might have been happier with more free time resulting from abundance that they could spend being good neighbors and good parents given society really did have the resources to provide incomes and food to all these people (even the prisoners now get regular meals), but the only way to make the system work according to its current mythological rules is to justify the spending based on the management of scarcity and violence along the lines of mainstream economics.

For another example, shutting down the primarily volunteer Wikipedia effort would create more formal jobs in the proprietary encyclopedia industry and increase GDP, but overall, society might be much worse off in the opinion of many people (especially Wikipedians).

So, sometimes the "cure" for unemployment is worse than the disease, depending on societal values.

For another example, consider a world where more and more people contributed to the Wikipedia project and similar free and open source content efforts to the point where everyone who wanted to could quickly know enough to print whatever they wanted locally using a 3D printer given to them by a friend. At that point, not having a job might not matter much as long as a jobless person had access to some land or seawater to mine resources for the printer (using robotic extraction tools that were printed out) and also had a place to put down solar panels (also printed). At that point, the jobless person no longer would have much need for the formal economy. Still, access to land would remains a social issue, and issues of land reform might come into play even if people could produce most of what they needed or trade informally for the rest. Almost everyone might be fairly happy moving towards what would be becoming a post-scarcity Star Trek matter replicator economy, but the measurable GDP and formal employment would be crashing to near zero with such a shift. By our current economic measuring tools, such a Star Trek society with a low GDP in terms of the market value of freely printed goods and with massive "unemployment" in current terms of paid work for companies would be considered an economic disaster, even if average people were taking holidays on Mars in spaceships they built themselves and every child was growing up surrounded by smiling parents and helpful neighbors.

Understanding this paradox, that a happy Star Trek society makes no conventional economic sense but many want it anyway and aspects seem technically feasible, and figuring out what to do about that, is at the core of much current alternative economics exploration of a new high-tech sort. A related Appropriate Technology movement intending to make technology more locally accessible and democratic started in the 1970s, but at a lower level of technology. This high technology version of appropriate technology is connected to the free culture movement. A transition to free is also more and more becoming mainstream business now that free and open-source is becoming the default for new technology businesses. Free technology is slowly extending to the physical world including through pioneering work at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms and the RepRap project. Essentially, if these projects and many others continue to expand, and more of the economy transitions to "free" as the default, a transition to a Star Trek society might look like a jobless recovery for a time.

The important thing to remember is that joblessness is not necessarily a bad thing. It means people have more time for family, friends, hobbies, and volunteerism, even if lack of formal external direction may be confusing in the short-term. What is bad about formal unemployment is mainly not having a right to draw from the fruits of our technosphere and biosphere because much of it is now privatized or otherwise under enclosure. Otherwise, given a basic income, with the internet, there are endless ways to connect directly to other people to do worthwhile projects, and raising children well is something that by itself can absorb about as much energy as the community can put in to that. Likewise, an increase in the number of jobs, if it is due to things like war, rioting, excessive bureaucracy, endless compulsory schooling, plagues, and other "transactions of decline", may not overall indicate a society making genuine progress for most of its members, even as there becomes a lot of work to do for everyone and plenty of widespread social agreement for spending money on such things.

Some of these "cures" above are aligned with a change to a society of abundance; some of these are aligned with creating artificial scarcity. Depending on the mix of "cures" to a jobless recovery, different people pay different costs or get different benefits from a cost-benefit perspective. The choice of mix of cures thus becomes a matter of politics, not economics.

Ultimately, a jobless recovery might be something to rejoice in, as long as the issue of social equity and human rights in relation to the industrial commons are addressed. But those may require social change.

Whether or not mainstream economics ideas can pull us out of the Great Recession and a jobless recovery, in the long term, the problems posed by increasing automation and environmental concerns suggest that some form of heterodox economics will be adopted in the long term to avoid deeper recessions with more permanent jobloss. There are at least four major alternative forms of social change that we might see in the future to deal with these issues of increasing joblessness in the face of abundance produced through high technology. These correspond roughly to the alternatives being suggested at the time of Keynes' General Theory in the 1930s, and which lost out to it in the USA, of communism, technocracy, social credit, and a Gandhian swadeshi movement. In modern terms, these might be considered a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income, and communitarianism. These will be discussed in the next four sections in relation to jobs. Given exponentially increasing technological capacity in AI/robotics and computing/communications and materials/design, each of these approaches are really just different paths to a common converging point of abundance for all, where people only work on things they want to do on a primarily voluntary basis in the context of a sustainable society. But how we get there depends on what path we take. These paths are not mutually exclusive. To some extent, our society is exploring all of them at once right now in various ways, and has been for a long time.

Achieving a gift economy

A gift economy is one where people voluntarily produce goods and services that they give to other people, either directly or through some sort of commons. Wikipedia is an example of a peer-produced digital commons that was made primarily through gift giving, and those using Wikipedia are essentially receiving a gift. Debian GNU/Linux and the Apache project are similar digital examples. With reduced costs for computing and communications, it has become easier for digital content to be given away at very little monetary cost once the material has been produced. The Freecycle Network is an example in the physical realm, where people with things they want to get rid of announce them to others who can come and get them for free. Many municipalities also have reuse areas at their town recycling centers where people can leave goods that are still useful that someone else might take. And various projects continue to be developed in the area of flexible manufacturing and 3D printing, like the work on RepRap and at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, and with the promise of advanced nanotech at some point, it is foreseeable that someday printing a consumer item may be as easy as downloading and playing a song. Already, various digital commons exist in all sorts of areas of interest; for example, LittleBigPlanet has announced in July 2009 they have had their one millionth upload of a user-created digital world level that people can play in. There are a growing number of resources already about how to make things online, including as part of a "Maker" or open source hardware movement. One could envision, as described above, an shift of our entire global economy mainly to people just making designs for free and printing them locally, with all labor either to make designs or to gather raw materials provided as voluntary gifts or accomplished through robots that were also printed out.

In such an economy, there would be no formal paid jobs, and money would cease to matter. There would still be things to do, but they would be voluntary. There might be many slackers or free riders in such a system. But the immense productive power of automation and robotics might enable only 1% of the population to provide for the other 99% in terms of goods and service. In the same way, agriculture has gone from an industry where everyone worked in it to one where almost nobody works in it, and those who do are assisted by machines. Manufacturing is following a similar downward trajectory in employment. The internet and robotics might allow services to follow the same downward trajectory in employment needs (like with advanced robotic medical devices). So, as long as there is even just a small percentage of people who like to make things and like to do things, such a gift economy may be feasible, as long as these few people have machines to help them.

Debian GNU/Linux is an example of this, where a few thousand core maintainers and developers are able to produce software that millions of people use, with their efforts amplified by the power of computers, thus allowing less than 0.1% of the user population to supply for all the rest. This is one realization in the digital realm of the old communist slogan of "from each according to his or her abilities, to each according to his or her needs". Note that this definition of "digital communism" has little resemblance to state-dominated central planning linked to a totalitarian dictatorship like the USSR had under Stalin which used the term "communist" in a different way.

With a greater focus on individual aesthetics and no need for "profit", it is possible that decisions will consider positive and negative externalities better than a market-based system does. It would be an economy where decisions about what to do or make are made by sending emails and twitters around instead of sending dollars and euros around. Just like with the Debian project, a person's "job" would then be whatever they decide to do based on looking at twitters, emails, or the world around him or her, the same as for any hobbyist free software developer today. And when this person wanted some material object, they would either request it from a common storage area somehow or print it out locally, the same as how people now use apt-get to download and install software with Debian GNU/Linux.

This sort of gift-economy would be dependent on high technology that is still under development in order to be easily realizable in the physical realm. So, it is likely we might see one a resource-based economy, a basic income, or stronger local economies first in the physical realm, even as the digital realm may increasingly become a gift economy before those are adopted. Because people can be socially conservative for good reasons, it may be that we will see a physical gift economy through RepRap and similar systems before governments are willing to agree to a change in social policy that the other approaches would require. At that point, the other systems below might never be adopted directly. While estimates vary, many people like Raymond Kurzweil think we are probably at most twenty to thirty years or so away (2030-2040) from a nanotech matter replicator that can make most consumer goods, as well about about that far as general purpose robots that can perform most tasks requiring human-level hand-eye coordination. That would put a hard stop on mainstream economics of around 2040, since any material or informational scarcities after the presence of such Star Trek-like matter replicators and general purpose robots would be mainly artificial scarcities.

There also remain many who are skeptical about how soon such advanced 3D printing devices may arrive, how well they might work, or what materials they could handle. Similarly many people object (including on theological grounds) to the idea that robotics and AI will ever be able to do most jobs humans are paid now to do (especially ones involving creativity, judgment, hand-eye coordination, or dealing with unusual situations).

While this may seem to be purely a technical argument about whether such devices can exist or how soon we will have them (or even, questioning just what we can do with the computers and robots and flexible manufacturing devices we have even now), the consequences in terms of planning social policy and related economic issues are profound. For example, what do fifty year projections for, say, the US Social Security trust fund mean if the entire monetary economy as we know it may not exist in two decades? What would health care costs be in 2029 if we could mass-produce robotic doctors, robotic ambulances, and even robotic nursebots (like Sebastian Thrun has worked towards)? Or what would costs be if people could print out most medical devices (or even most drugs) at home on demand using nanotech-based 3D printers? Likewise, two decades is about how long it would take a child born in 2009 to enter the work force after college in 2030 -- what type of jobs or culture should such children be preparing for if 3D printing replaces much manufacturing, and if robotics/AI and a freely produced commons replaces most services? What would the economy be like in even just ten years if society decided much of the work done globally now is mainly about guarding or is make-work based on scarcity assumptions that are out-of-date just in relation to technology we have today (especially given movements towards voluntary simplicity or environmentalism)? If we were to embrace the prospect of a gift economy and global abundance through 3D printing, improved robotics, better design, better materials, and so on, then our societal spending patterns might shift greatly, even now, in terms of less worries about long-term deficit spending to create millions of R&D jobs today developing advanced technology under free and open source licenses. In that sense, a gift economy may be an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We can also have a lower-tech gift economy without 3D printing, perhaps centered around ecovillages. But it would require a lot more manual labor and higher individual skill levels, making it less likely to happen on its own given our current economic structure.

Resource-based economics and employment

As mentioned above, natural resource economics is a transdisciplinary field of academic research within economics that aims to address the connections and interdependence between human economies and natural ecosystems. Its focus is how to operate an economy within the ecological constraints of earth's natural resources, usually with a concern about social equity. Traditional areas of environmental and natural resource economics, include welfare theory, pollution control, resource extraction, and non-market valuation, and also resource exhaustibility, sustainability, environmental management, and environmental policy. To do that involves looking in more detail about how resources are physically converted to each other in very specific ways, tracing in detail the flows of various forms of energy, materials, productive technologies, in the context of human and ecological health, to achieve specific social values, including adequate good jobs and a healthy environment.

The magic of the free market includes being able to realize the alchemist's age old dream of turning lead into gold, accomplished very simply by selling lead in the marketplace for a medium of exchange, like fiat dollars, and then purchasing gold with that medium of exchange. While this often works at an individual level, the logic of this market system can break down in various ways taken as a whole system, some of which effect the availability of jobs. There are externalities like pollution from producing lead or gold which are not paid by the purchaser. Many individuals in society have no way to acquire the medium of exchange because they have no capital or savings, or their labor has little to no value, or there are no paid jobs if demand is limited. When people hoard the medium of exchange itself the market may slow down (like when banks hoard bailout funds) and decrease the value of labor. Problems like business cycles and credit bubbles can arise when most societal planning is done in terms of maximizing control of the medium of exchange and not in terms of building physically productive infrastructure; these cycles can then lead to periods of retrenchment or slow growth in jobs even when the physical capacity is there to do a lot more to produce abundance of various products or services.

Mainstream economic analysis essentially mixes together in just one variable, often called financial capital or cost, both what is imaginary, the fiat dollars which act as a sort of generalized kanban token to signal demand, and what are actual physical resources of all sorts of types (like houses, factories, human health, and the biosphere). This mixing confuses internal aspects of the economic control system (currency movement) with what it is intended to control (a physical infrastructure). This mixing assumes that money and physical resources are all easily interchangeable between each other (which has some truth at the individual microeconomic level within a larger free market). But the previously mostly ignored macroeconomic issue of precisely how physical resources are interchangeable had generally been left to other disciplines before this shift in economic thinking. For example, the question of exactly how coal-fired power plants might connect to human health was previously left to the health profession or the engineering profession before this transdisciplinary shift where economists, engineers, and health professionals might all work together to understand the interactions. In the process of thinking through the interactions, considerations about creating healthy and enjoyable jobs would be included, which might indicate a value in shifting economic resources to the green energy sector. These sorts of analyses have long happened informally through the political process a big issue of resource-based economics is to formalize this decision making process somehow, where the issue of creating good jobs would be weighed as one factor among many.

Resource-based economics remains difficult and information intensive. Modern computers have made this more sophisticated macroeconomic analysis easier to do, helping with tracking thousands of variables and their complex interactions. Previously, economists had to do all their analysis by hand or in their heads, which was one reason why generalizing to one type of currency to make analysis easier was so appealing. Exactly how job creation and job destruction interrelates to all these variables is still an active area of research.

The unfortunate consequence of the mixing of fiat money and physical resources in financial analysis is that movements of large numbers of these imaginary dollars (essentially represented these days by a few numbers in a computer somewhere) may swamp any practical attempts to do consistent planning for future physical resource needs or full employment (if that is desired). As Keynes says in his "General Theory" in "Chapter 12: The State of Long-Term Expectation":

It is as though a farmer, having tapped his barometer after breakfast, could decide to remove his capital from the farming business between 10 and 11 in the morning and reconsider whether he should return to it later in the week. But the daily revaluations of the Stock Exchange, though they are primarily made to facilitate transfers of old investments between one individual and another, inevitably exert a decisive influence on the rate of current investment. For there is no sense in building up a new enterprise at a cost greater than that at which a similar existing enterprise can be purchased; whilst there is an inducement to spend on a new project what may seem an extravagant sum, if it can be floated off on the Stock Exchange at an immediate profit. Thus certain classes of investment are governed by the average expectation of those who deal on the Stock Exchange as revealed in the price of shares, rather than by the genuine expectations of the professional entrepreneur.

Douglas Adams wrote a humorous version of this in his book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

A market-based economy as a stigmergic planning system does not focus on the direct societal well-being which the medium of exchange is somehow supposed to represent (like the times when single value GDP does not represent a more nuanced Genuine_progress_indicator). This matter remains controversial and is a main issue between advocates of green economics and neo-classical economics. Green economists suggest that while a free market system has worked to produce some societal well-being, because of the confusion of financial well-being with social well-being, a market based economy can enter various dysfunctional states like unemployed people starving next to granaries full of grain hoarded by speculators, or people being employed in the systematic destruction of the environment because it is financially profitable in the short-term to some, and so there needs to be more strategic hierarchical planning and regulation considering many factors, both employment issues and ecological issues. Neo-classical economists argue the market can adequately deal with those issues as part of internal feedback processes using essentially a single currency, and that hierarchical controls of a decentralized market will only lead to greater dysfunction through regulatory capture by profit making concerns. A resource-based economist might suggest that is a circular argument -- that regulation of the financial sector fails because of financial causes. A new synthesis balancing ideas of meshworks and hierarchies in the economy may be emerging through the transdisciplinary work of people like Manuel de Landa.

Many people have produced different visions of a resource-based economy, either as science-fiction or as practical systems, often sometimes having different political systems to go with them.

Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows have worked towards The Venus Project, which has a major theme of creating a resource-based economy. They suggest a resource-based economy would replace the need for monetary economy we have now, which is "scarcity-oriented" or "scarcity-based". They suggest that the world is rich in natural resources and energy and that — with modern technology and judicious efficiency — the needs of the global population can be met with abundance, while at the same time removing the current limitations of what is deemed possible due to notions of economic viability. They propose using a cybernetic control system as a variation on central planning to make decisions about resource allocation. Their vision is that automation and robotics would eventually do much of the work in such a society, with the cybernetic system somehow allocating productive capacity to all people on an equitable basis, so that formal employment might cease to matter as far as acquiring goods and services. Fresco claims some of his ideas stem from his formative years during the Great Depression. A somewhat related but not identical technocracy movement commanded considerable popularity in the USA for a brief period in the early 1930s, when it overshadowed most other proposals for dealing with the crisis of the Great Depression, until the New Deal in turn overshadowed it. Project Cybersyn was a Chilean attempt at real-time computer-controlled planned economy in the years 1970–1973 also using cybernetic ideas, but it was destroyed after a military coup encouraged by the US CIA on September 11, 1973; otherwise, it is possible from that seed might have grow a similar global system by now, as a form of Techno-progressivism.

The society described in Marshall Brain's Manna sci-fi novel has some related themes, but with less emphasis on optimal planning by scientists or technologists. The currently most well known example in fiction is probably Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek series started in the 1960s, which shows a society that has moved beyond money as a medium of exchange, relying heavily on matter replicators and strategic planning, even as they still have many other practical difficulties to deal with as a society, with much of the society arranged as a sort of democratic federation with a large hierarchical military component. In 1982, author James P. Hogan depicted a more decentralized gift-economy in his book, Voyage from Yesteryear, which shows a society based on fusion energy and massive automation, but where human decisions still play a central role in a very decentralized way, with an economy that has become focused on status achieved through competency and gift-giving; however that gift economy itself was described as having emerged from an earlier resource-based economy organized originally created through relying on cybernetic systems including advanced robotics. Author Iain Banks has a series of novels that depict The Culture, where one character says "Money is a sign of poverty", indicating how they have transitioned to a world of abundance for everyone through better planning and better technology, and so day-to-day rationing using fiat dollars is not much of an issue. In all of those fictional depictions, while people still do things, they don't do them for paid employment, even if there may be other aspects to the social structure.

A society that has collapsed with a huge population decline back to a pre-industrial and pre-agricultural state, re-emphasizing hunting and gathering, also has aspects of a resource-based economy. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in Original affluent society suggested shifting anthropological thought away from seeing hunter-gatherer societies as primitive to seeing them as practitioners of a refined mode of subsistence from which much can be learned. The seeming contradiction is explained in part because, with tiny populations with limited aspirations living on a huge planet, resources for humans such as berries, fish, and building materials like wood become effectively infinite, even if they require some playful effort to collect or entail competition with other creatures (animal competitors tend to come out on the worse end of things against cooperating knowledgable healthy humans, even with humans having just stone knives and blowguns). How to accomplish the trick of making resources seem infinite while having huge populations with high aspirations both for material comforts and creatively engaging work is a major challenge of the 21st century, one that these authors address in various different ways.

In a capitalist money-based society, supply chain management, the Extended Enterprise, and Sustainable and Lifecycle Information-based Manufacturing are related ideas with a much smaller scope. In practice, these sorts of resource issues are being considered more and more in all areas of mainstream microeconomic and macroeconomic analysis as capitalist firms adopt a Resource-based view, but the weighting of different values or assumptions about resource substituteability may be different in different economic models. In general, the models individual firms are using do not weigh employment in well-paying jobs except as a negative cost.

Implementing a basic income

A resource-based economy, as above, would be a profound shift in how our society operates. There is a different approach to universal prosperity which continues to be based on the ideas of a market, called a "basic income". As mentioned above, a basic income is the idea that everyone in a society would get enough to live on every month as a check from the government without any requirements to prove financial need or having to prove they were seeking employment. The Alaska Permanent Fund is an example of a partial basic income for residents of Alaska. In the USA, this would essentially entail expanding Social Security and Medicaid for all with no means testing, and would require about one half of the current GDP to be redistributed in this way in the United States. If automation increased and less jobs were available, people would still have their basic income, and taxes on automated businesses could be adjusted to ensure the benefits of automation were being widely distributed. Marshall Brain's Manna novel has a scenario at the end that outlines such a plan. James S. Albus has a related plan and book he calls "People's Capitalism".

How would this work financially right now in the USA? For a basic income of US$2000 a month per person, this would cost US$24,000 a year per person. Some of which would pay for universal health insurance, so the net per month might be only US$1500 a month per person. Paid to three hundred million people, this would cost US$7.2 trillion dollars a year, or about one half of the 2008 US GDP. The remaining half of the GDP would then motivate some of the individuals in society who wanted more than a subsistence living to run businesses to supply various needs and have a greater private income. This amount of the GDP that would be directly earned would be equivalent to about the USA's GDP back in 1993 of US$6.6 trillion. That amount was enough to motivate people back then, so it seems like it would be enough now.

This basic income for all could then replace many unrelated social supports like unemployment insurance, the public school system (since parents would have enough per child to hire tutors on the free market or homeschool), disability payments, and retirement programs. A related plan of a guaranteed minimum income almost passed through the US Congress under Richard M. Nixon, in part by the efforts of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote a book about it called "The Politics of a Guaranteed Income". Support from the left came from those who wanted to see an end to poverty or an increase in equality in the society. Support on the right came from those who wanted to otherwise minimize government involvement in the economy, because, except for the funding means, like a tax, there might no longer be as much need for things like a minimum wage, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, affirmative action, union-friendly regulations, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and/or other burdens on business; because everyone would be assured of a basic income already, the business world could become more rough-and-tumble. These protections would no longer be as important if people had more choices through a basic income, including the choice not to work or to start their own business, and so had more power to negotiate good terms or walk away from bad ones. So, presumably business would have more motivation to treat employees well without regulation and related extensive bureaucratic oversight if employees could always easily walk away.

While one could have both a basic income and pubic schools, it is also possible for a basic income that includes children to replace public schools. Homeschooling might greatly increase, because, for example, a family of five with three children would have US$1500 a month per child in net income to spend on the children's behalf, or US$4500 a month just for the three children, which would make it more feasible for one parent to stay home with the children or alternatively, to afford private school and private college. A family might decide to do have one parent do homeschooling as their "job" (with perhaps occasionally hiring tutors for music lessons or math lessons) to keep most of that money in the family (and, say, instead go on learning vacations to distant places), rather than pay all that money to private schools or tutors. Some parents might prefer this as a way to financially recognize their contributions to society in a way other than by joining a hierarchical company and then hiring day care providers and then private tutors to take care of their children. Other families where parents preferred to work in an outside job might decide to rely entirely on private schools for their children's education and would have sufficient funds to do so. This idea appeals to conservatives because it promotes individual choice in "free market education" (including making possible greater support for religious schools), and it appeals to liberals because it ensures there is sufficient funds in a family for every child to have a decent education (including college) regardless of where they live or whether someone in their family is employed. It even appeals to some confident and skilled teachers who might suddenly be free of most bureaucratic regulation and able to teach the way they wanted to students interested in their subjects. Public schools could be repurposed as learning centers open to the public of all ages and interests, similar to public libraries or adult education programs, both as places for people to take classes or receive tutoring on an individual basis, and to function as secular community centers or expanded libraries of tools and skills.

There are obvious objections to this proposal in that some parents may be unfit parents in some ways, but as suggested by advocates of homeschooling like Raymond and Dorothy Moore, "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children – when obviously most children already have even more secure housing." Also, because everyone in the community would have more free time for helping neighbors, it is possible that children in difficult home situations would benefit from more general abundance in the neighborhood since everyone would have a basic income, like parents down the street who would have plenty of free time to help out a little with raising children of neighboring families going through difficult times just to be neighborly. Also, many dysfunctional families in the USA are that way in part from stress over money or lack of available health care (including mental health care).

For a family of five, the total income of US$7500 a month, in addition to comprehensive health insurance, would be equivalent to more than even most US millionaires might obtain from their investments, so, essentially, this would turn much of the entire US population into millionaires overnight, and even some regular millionaires with families might be better off financially. A basic income could be funded by a combination of several approaches, including income taxes, property taxes, revenue from leasing public lands or other public resources like broadcast spectrum, increasing the money supply to match economic growth, redirecting existing school taxes (New York State, for example, already spends about US$20,000 per child per year on public school), or by other means. Unlike a resource-based economy with more central planning, an economy based around a basic income would still use the market for distributed planning how to meet demand, but now significant demand would be assured since everyone in the society would always have a reliable amount of money to spend each month on goods and services. A basic income might increase employment right now, and if automation eventually replaced the need for most human workers over time, people would still have a basic income to reflect a human right to some of the fruits of all that advanced automation.

Towards a new localism emphasizing community

While the three movements above (a gift economy, a resource-based economy, and a basic income economy) are about broad shifts in the entire global economy, another major alternative is to focus mainly on local solutions at the village and small community level, often called decentralization. Decentralization is the process of dispersing decision-making governance closer to the people and/or citizen. Markets are very decentralized systems in theory, but in practice market economies may come to be dominated by a few powerful organizations in each major economic area, including through government protection of cartels and monopolies (including through excessively broad patents, excessively long copyrights, and other barriers to entry), and also by the concentration of capital in the absence of redistributive social policies because it usually takes money to make money and thus the phrase "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer".

Movements towards rebuilding local connections outside the formal global market are a possible response to that. These ideas have deep roots because they go back to the way humans organized themselves during hunter/gatherer times as villages and tribes. Such communities can either create jobs locally in informal ways (often connected to subsistence production) or they help people survive without jobs through goods and services that flow more through a social network (family ties, friendship, neighborly feelings, or sometimes barter or alternative currencies) rather than through direct formal exchange of a national currency for goods and services through the market. Many times local businesses are either employee-owned or run by a sole-proprietor who may consider local employment of neighbors and relatives as an important value. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, back when many people in the USA still had relatives with farms, many unemployed people moved back from the city to live a subsistence lifestyle with relatives on farms (even as many farms themselves were not economically viable or faced environmental problems from topsoil depletion). Local communities can develop formal and informal ways to protect themselves from the ravages of some aspects of the market, as mentioned above in the section on protectionism, though sometimes at other tradeoffs (like deciding to emphasize the non-material side of life like community, family, or some form of spirituality). While much of a new local movement emphasizes small communities like villages, Jane Jacobs developed what are essentially local ideas in talking about cities and import replacement. Advances in some technologies like 3D printing, renewable energy, and internet communications allow some of Jacobs' import replacement ideas to be thought about on a smaller village scale. A broader notion of these ideas like developed by Dee Hock are that they are not about isolationism as much as a chaordic continuum where political and economic decision making power are exercised at the smallest scale that makes sense.

Issues like taxes or war often may still intrude on communities that turn somewhat inward, but the hope is that if people in many localities emphasized rebuilding local communities, these local communities might join up somehow and have an effect on these larger issues eventually. That is part of the intent of the maxim "Think Globally, Act Locally, Plan Modestly" suggested by Rene Dubois. Local efforts often appeal to many people because they seem more feasible than broader social changes. It is hard to imagine billions of people shifting to a gift economy overnight, but it is relatively easy to imagine, say, building a new community center or farmers' market for the hundred families who live in an area, or alternatively, finding a dozen families who might want to start a co-housing project emphasizing environmental values and community, and then, from that success in building community, to work towards larger scale projects or towards interlinking the smaller efforts. Marty P. Johnson is an example of a social entrepreneur following this model; he and his colleagues helped rebuild community in parts of the city of Trenton through Isles, Inc., a community development organization. However, community development efforts don't have to be done formally. Also, in many countries like India, much social and economic life is still centered around villages; technology like that of the OLPC project or many other cheaper or more appropriate technology alternatives (upgraded to 21st century possibilities like 3D printing and nanotech) can potentially help existing remote villages gain many material benefits of global technological improvements including internet connectivity while still retaining a unique local community with local face-to-face social benefits.

There are many variations on the communitarian idea, drawing on ideas mentioned in the list above, since many of the ideas can be used together. Many monasteries and convents are historical examples, as are the Israeli Kibbutzim. One of the best know recent movements in the west in E.F. Schumacher's "Small is beautiful" appropriate and village technology movement of the 1970s. Mahatma_Gandhi developed even earlier the concept of Swaraj that stresses governance not by a hierarchical government, but self governance through individuals and community building, with a focus on political and economic decentralization, build in turn on an even earlier Indian Swadeshi movement for local self-sufficiency. A more recent movement is directly called communitarianism, and is a group of related but distinct philosophies, began in the late 20th century, opposing exalted forms of individualism; communitarianism emphasizes the need to balance individual rights and interests with that of the community as a whole, and that individual people (or citizens) are shaped by the cultures and values of their communities.

As mentioned above, people can create Charles Fourier's Phalanstère buildings or other settings for intentional living with a different model of work. These could either fun-based or some other model of communal sharing of work like a balanced job complex or something else. Joan Roelofs has a modern proposal.

The relatively new ecovillage movement also emphasizes developing a local economy that emphasizes community and family and local self-sufficiency and self-reliance over abstract exchange. These efforts towards self-sufficiency are made easier through voluntary simplicity. Such villages may have benefits other than employment, primarily an increased sense of community, something not usually measured by most mainstream economists, but valuable to many people none-the-less.

A back to the land movement became popular for a time in the 1960s and 1970s, often without good results, and usually focusing more on farmsteads than villages. People now have better appropriate technology that has been developed over the recent decades (like improved wind turbines). People also have some newer ideas for more community-oriented living in ecovillages and cohousing communities that may have closer ties to urban areas rather than try to be completely independent. Many Amish settlements reflect some of these ideals, although such communitarian villages might have higher technological levels than the Amish.

Things like access to electricity, entertainment, information, travel, a broader social circle, and a wide variety of goods and services, as well as employment to earn the money to buy access to those things, were historically many of the reasons people left small rural communities to move to big cities. Because rural communities now have better access to most of these things (including through driving to city hubs occasionally and via internet shopping and online social networks), many people are finding they can meet their needs for face-to-face community in smaller towns and rural areas while still having access to things they previously could find only in cities. Suburbanization is also part of this broader trend in the USA, and aspects of a new community focus include people rethinking suburban "bedroom" communities (used by commuters to raise children but otherwise often not thought of as economic engines of jobs) as instead more vibrant local communities in themselves with a wide variety of local businesses and community activities (beyond school-oriented ones). This local movement may become increasingly important for those commuters who may have lost their jobs in distant cities and are now looking to create local opportunities with less costs for long-distance commuting or high city rents.

Other aspects of localism movements entail rethinking unilateral extrinsic national security as more based on intrinsic security by social policy focusing more on mutual security and sustainable local production methods (like renewable energy as discussed in the 1982 book Brittle Power). According to the authors of "Brittle Power", a resilient energy system (which emphasizes decentralized production and consumption) is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.

David Morris and many others involved with organizations such as the E.F. Schumacher Society have developed a variety of ideas for "Reclaiming Community" at the local level; he wrote in 1996:

We are living through an historical moment in which the vision and the values of Fritz Schumacher and Peter Kropotkin and Louis Brandeis and Ralph Borsodi should be translated into practical political programs and policies. Anyone who delivers a lecture these days tells audiences that we are living in a time of great change. I am no different. But I would remind you of the distinction Bertrand Russell once made about the difference between change and progress. Change is inevitable, Russell observed, whereas progress is problematic. Change is scientific whereas progress is ethical. We will have change whether we want it or not, but to achieve progress we have to get involved. We have to create new rules. We have to channel human creativity in directions compatible with our value system. And to accomplish that we have to know where we want to go. Schumacher taught us that local self-reliance and humanly scaled systems and a shortening of the distance between those who make the decisions and those who feel the impact of those decisions are goals that are achievable, effective, and popular. Today more than at any time in our history, we need to let his wisdom guide us.

Analysis

The Current Population Survey aggregate data examines the United States long term employment creation by decade.

Decade	Employment Growth (EG)	Population Growth (PG)	EG/PG	Notes
1950's	7,215,000	11,516,000	62.65%
1960's	13,862,000	19,449,000	71.27%
1970's	21,224,000	30,811,000	68.88%
1980's	17,685,000	20,865,000	84.76%
1990's	16,998,000	21,667,000	78.45%
2000's	5,137,000	26,254,000	19.57%	to Mar. 2009

These figures indicate that job growth in the USA has greatly slowed in the most recent decade 2000-2009, even as the population and workforce productivity has continued to increase. The gains in productivity have mostly not gone to the workers since real wages for most workers in the USA have been stagnant for the past three decades, and even dropped slightly in the past decade, in part as a result of economic policies reflecting Neoliberalism. This point is made in detail by Economics Professor Richard D. Wolff in his movie on the economic meltdown called "Capitalism Hits The Fan" as well as an earlier related public lecture with a similar name. The trends seem to indicate that the mainstream macroeconomic conventional wisdom about employment and wages naturally increasing in parallel with economic growth is fundamentally flawed as far as the USA is concerned, even if there was truth to it up to a few decades after WWII (while the USA had the only major intact economy and was able to export excess production on favorable terms, and before automation and better design and global competition had become increasingly widespread).

Note that much of the recent job growth in the USA has also been in lower wage service industry jobs with limited to no benefits and little job security, so, even when jobs have increased, they have not been of the same economic quality as in past decades (even as the work may often be less demanding in terms of physical strength). These trends call into question the positive aspect of the Three-sector hypothesis, that shifts of an economy away from extraction and manufacturing to service industries are in general permanently good for workers. In practice we see, as implied by the numbers above, a relative erosion in the need for domestic labor compared to population growth, as the need for many service jobs are eliminated, just like extractive and manufacturing jobs before them were eliminated. So, many service jobs also eventually become deskilled, automated, amplified (more output per worker), designed out of existence (for example, old style telephone operators were replaced in part by direct dialing), or just no longer wanted (given limited demand or also a downward spiral of unemployment and declining wages).

Offshoring also effects these numbers for the past decade; although in theory, as national currencies and wages reach an equilibrium, offshoring by itself should not permanently effect employment (ignoring any temporary problems or deindustrialization). Still, offshoring is making the particular US jobs situation worse right now. By the time that offshoring situation changes, increasing automation and better design will, following Marshall Brain's arguments, make it more likely most new jobs are filled by robots and other automation than by people, even if the jobs come back to the USA. If Marshall Brain is right, it is quite possible job growth in the 2010-2019 decade in the USA may be virtually non-existent or even negative, where some new jobs like in green energy are more than offset by job losses in other areas.

One can look at any list of robot videos to see the state of the art in robotics circa 2009. Taken together, the videos like in the referenced list show robots doing things like throwing and catching a cellphone, driving across rural countryside and in urban settings, doing domestic duties like laundry, walking around moving obstacles on the floor, cleaning floors, performing military duties, assisting in police duties, walking across rugged terrain, pruning grape vines, milking cows, cleaning barn floors, assisting with surgery, laying undersea cable, exploring Mars, building cars in factories, mowing a lawn, printing 3D parts, and even performing autopsies. That state of the art suggests Marshall Brain may be right about robotic trends, given even just the current robotic capabilities which are not yet in widespread use. A broad interpretation of Moore's law, along the lines of Raymond Kurzweil or Hans Moravec, in the context of continued economic and military competition, suggests that in ten to twenty years, robots will be capable of ever more amazing feats at ever lower costs. Apparently, even just the robots we currently have now could remake big parts of the employment landscape without much further improvements. But, the table above shows jobs are already not keeping up with population growth. If these trends continue, without some form of a basic income or other structural changes, our current economic system may completely collapse, as Marshall Brain predicts.

The main jobless recovery issue would then become more and more what the Triple Revolution memorandum suggested was happening in 1964, but which has been slower to play out than they expected:

The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people’s rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures—unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S. The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted. There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand—for granting the right to consume—now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system.

One may ask why the Triple Revolution memorandum was off in its predictions by several decades. There are a several possible interacting explanations:

• Amara's law, suggest by Roy Amara and elaborated on by Ray Kurzweil in his Law of Accelerating Returns, suggests "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run". So, while the people writing the memorandum saw the trends in automation, they did not realize that they were exponential, slow at the start, and the faster at the end.
• Increasing demand (up to a point). Demand for goods and services has increased in the USA. As Professor Juliet Schor points out in her 1993 book, "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure", due to rising productivity per hour worked, Americans could (in 1993) have been working only four hour days to achieve a 1940s lifestyle (and only two or three hour days by 2009), but instead they were working ten hour days to have more stuff (bigger houses, more cars, more electronics, and so on). This was both because they wanted it and, unlike in Europe, there were not taxes and regulations to shift wealth from individual pursuits to community pursuits (like support for arts or mass transit or a social safety net) to prevent a social trap related to conspicuous consumption. As suggested above, this trend may have finally run its course for many healthy people in the USA, perhaps even beyond diminishing returns, to the point of negative returns (like big houses with big lawns create social distance that diminishes community). Suniya S. Luthar has written about this in "The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth".
• While the USA had a lot of material abundance in the 1960s and later, the rest of the world did not. Increased global growth has provided many export opportunities in the USA, although that growth trend for the USA has reached its end, given the USA is now importing a lot of stuff and otherwise offshoring jobs now that the global economy has reached parity in many areas. However, continued global growth up to current US levels of consumption will still increase demand for jobs for a time in other countries, until those countries as well hit a law of diminishing returns. Hans Rosling has "Gap Minder" projections for the rest of the world reaching current US levels of consumption in a few decades, and shows how many have already surpassed 1960s levels of US consumption.
• The USA has engaged in numerous wars abroad since the 1960s (the general Cold War with the USSR, and also wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and also numerous smaller interventions), each of which have served to burn up US abundance (as well as abundance in the other countries). While the Triple Revolution memorandum suggested wars were getting too horrible to fight given nuclear weapons, it seems that countries have, so far, found ways to fight non-nuclear wars at a continuing low level of intensity enough to remove a lot of prosperity and create military jobs. How long that trend to contained wars continues is hard to predict; the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists still keeps up their Doomsday Clock, currently at five minutes to midnight, compared to 12 minutes to midnight when the memorandum was written.
• Incarceration in the United States has increased enormously, to rates far higher that any other industrialized nation, thus creating a lot of jobs and taking many people off the unemployment roles (at a great social cost); some of this has been driven by the drug war; some is linked to increasing social dysfunction from economic inequality.
• Increasing mental health issues like depression and autism, and increasing physical health issues like obesity and diabetes and cancer, all possibly linked to poor nutrition, stress, lack of exercise, lack of sunlight and other factors in an industrialized USA (including industrial pollution), have meant many new jobs have been created in the health care field. So, for example, coal plants don't just create jobs for coal miners, construction workers, and plant operators, they also create jobs for doctors treating the results of low-level mercury pollution poisoning people and from smog cutting down sunlight. Television not only creates jobs for media producers, but also for health care workers to treat obesity resulting from sedentary watching behavior (including not enough sunlight and vitamin D) or purchasing unhealthy products that are advertised.
• An aging Baby Boomer population in the USA has increased the need for other services.
• Some unions and other groups (including some radical environmentalists) have fought against all forms of automation and other forms of advanced technology, rather than focusing on directing where the fruits of automation go or guiding what sorts of innovations are worked towards.
• The much slower pace of the civil rights movement in spreading to other areas of society than expected.
• The movement of women into the work force increasing formal economic jobs greatly as the volunteer sector of the economy diminished and other social dysfunctions (like teen pregnancies) increased given less time by individuals for community participation (essentially, many women abandoned their unrecognized but essential social roles, but men did not take up the slack).
• Increased schooling expectations (for example jobs that once done by people without even a high school diploma like child care now may require a graduate degree as a qualification) have led to an increased number of jobs in teaching as well as kept young people out of the labor market. Professor David Goodstein in his "The Big Crunch" essay suggests an exponential growth trend in academia also continued into the 1970s, but has ended now, leading to an oversupply of people with PhDs and other advanced degrees relative to the needs of academia. This has lead to some of the inflation of academic requirements for various jobs given the oversupply of people with degrees, which in turn has lead to even more schooling to get a degree, as a form of academic certification arms race.

Aspects of how all these negative activities can create jobs were parodied in a scene with the character Zorg breaking a glass in the movie The Fifth Element. However, to build an alternative to the worldview of Zorg built around the Parable of the broken window, a mythology of scarcity, and a desire for control through hoarding and hiring and firing, may require thinking differently about economics than mainstream Keynesian economics or even Neoliberalism, given all these other trends toward abundance (especially given the potential for things like automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, better materials, better design, and volunteerism to replace most paid human labor).

Taken together, these and other factors help explain why the Triple Revolution memorandum was ahead of its time in predicting the falling employment trend we only now in the table above, appearing decades later than predicted. It has taken decades because many of the trends in the predictions have only recently accelerated in the past decade or two in an exponential way (like improved robotics and improved internet-mediated communications). And it is taking decades for the trends holding back the predictions (like increasing incarceration or increasing health problems) to play out (and many of these negative trends, from increased incarceration, increased pollution, lack of vitamin D, obesity, and so on, are now being actively addressed by society, and so presumably will not continue to grow much, although new issues may arise). So, the reasoning behind the Triple Revolution memorandum about structural unemployment such as reflected in a jobless recovery may now be more relevant that ever, even if some of its specific suggestions for social reform and infrastructure reform may now be out of date.

See also

• Deindustrialization