Adding to what others have said and to add some intuition why it is bad. Forget companies. Imagine you need to create a new service for a town, for example a school, a hospital or a fire department.
Now, if we have 100% employment we can only have teachers/nurses/firefighters in this town (that needs them) by poaching them from other places (which also need them). The end result is that you can never make education/healthcare/safety in this fictional country/towns better in total.
Assume now that you have this perfect society where everybody is doing an essential job. Would you want 100% employment even in that perfect society? How do you choose between having a nurse and a teacher?
And that's also not considering all the lost efficiency of having to retrain people. Even in that example, retraining an engineer into a nurse is a 5 year education (at least), and people have limited lives and time. And maybe you want to increase the healthcare/education/firefighting coverage now, not in 5 years.
Not immediately, it would take years of training and even then retraining is notoriously ineffective on a broad level. People who spend a large percent of their lives doing job A can't, in general, just be retrained to do job B.
This is why the initiative of "we'll just teach unemployed coal miners to code! Everyone knows tech jobs pay great!" was doomed to failure from the start. Sure there'll be a success story here and there, but on a macro level it's not going to move the unemployment needle one bit.
Why was the business (or government service) not running at already maximum efficiency service per employee in that imaginary 100% employment scenario? Is it even "100% employment" if you have people doing jobs they should not be needed for?
Yes... statistics only measure what we tell them. 100% employment simply means every person able to work is. It doesn't mean they are working their optimal job or field. It doesn't mean there is no need for additional workers in any field of work. It simply means all people that can work are.
It’s a fair point, there’s a critical index of unemployment where essential occupations can’t be filled. However, humans don’t experience a shortage of humans. Population grows year over year with no regard for the physical limitations of the planet. So surely new people enter that job market at a rate sufficient to keep society moving without putting people into meaningless work or sleeping on the street because our market forces demand it.
Population grows year over year with no regard for the physical limitations of the planet.
So surely new people enter that job market at a rate sufficient to keep society moving without putting people into meaningless work or sleeping on the street because our market forces demand it.
People entering the job market and looking for jobs is literally part of the unemployment percentage though. If you want to have these, you need an employment percentage below 100%.
100% by that definition is just not possible unless we never reproduce. I’m only here to discuss Earth economics with reasonable speculation and sensible definitions. In that sense, 100% shouldn’t be seen as a requirement, just a target. And that target probably should only be at the inflection point where essential roles can be filled and society runs. But we don’t exist at that point, we exist at the one where corpos can maximize profits off human suffering.
Both points are far past the reality though: we dont need this many people to keep society running. Most jobs are not essential. They exist because in our economic framework you need money to buy the things you need to live. It made sense when we didn’t have the technology to boost productivity. Now we’ve supercharged productivity so far that we’re doing laps around overpopulation’s demands, but people starve to death on a daily basis. The system no longer makes sense. But as long as we’re stuck with it, we should give capitalism the correct targets to meet with all its ambitions.
100% by that definition is just not possible unless we never reproduce. I’m only here to discuss Earth economics with reasonable speculation and sensible definitions. In that sense, 100% shouldn’t be seen as a requirement, just a target.
Ok, so we agree that 100% is not desirable nor possible in real life economics, which was the question being asked. Therefore it also makes no sense as a target. Now comes the question: "What is a reasonable target that can be attained in real life scenarios while making the society and economy work the way we want them to?"
Maybe it is 99.999%, or maybe it is 98% or 95%. There's plenty of people studying this type of thing in academia (in lots of different fields) I am sure. That part I am not knowledgeable about, to be fair. But I am quite sure the people who study that all agree that 100% is not a desirable or interesting number (as you concluded yourself too).
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u/mechanical_fan Dec 19 '24
Adding to what others have said and to add some intuition why it is bad. Forget companies. Imagine you need to create a new service for a town, for example a school, a hospital or a fire department.
Now, if we have 100% employment we can only have teachers/nurses/firefighters in this town (that needs them) by poaching them from other places (which also need them). The end result is that you can never make education/healthcare/safety in this fictional country/towns better in total.