(cc photo by MPD01605)
Mike Konczal has written about what he sees as the problems with “pity-charity liberalism, where the goal of the liberal project is to give some sort of ex post compensation for brute bad luck instead of giving workers agency or power.”
Somewhat in that spirit I want to complain that in response to overreaching rightwing attacks on public services, I feel like I’m seeing a lot of people come dangerously close to explicit advocacy for what I’d call “make-work liberalism,” where the goal of the liberal project is to offer direct public sector employment to as many people on as generous terms as possible rather than try to actually make the economy work. This is brought to mind by recent blogospheric interest in technological change and the ever-recurring question of where the jobs of the future will be as automation allows for less labor-intensive production in many sectors of the economy. One potential answer to that query is that public sector work can be made as arbitrarily labor-intensive as you like. A town can always hire an extra teacher or firefighter or bus driver. You can simply decline to replace toll booth attendants with EZ-Pass machines. And public sector works exists in an appealing way all up and down the skill spectrum. There are lawyers and doctors and college professors working for public institutions, but also janitors and road construction. There are butch jobs (cops) and femme jobs (nurse) and above all else there are the stable middle class career paths of alleged yore with stepwise raises and a pension at the end.
There’s a lot to like about this, but it’s important to recall on some level that a world where ten rich bankers pay the taxes to finance make-work jobs for ninety other people isn’t an alternative to a pity-charity version of economic justice it’s just a way of hiding the ball.
I think it’s important not to do that. The important thing about public services is the provision of services, not the provision of jobs. The right question to ask about firefighters’ pensions isn’t a moralizing one, it’s a practical one"”will reducing them imperil public safety in some important way? The answer is sometimes that, yes, you really do need to stand up for the public sector. Congressional efforts to “de-fund” various regulatory agencies and/or push for staffing reductions or salary freezes is a clear effort to do an end-run around enforcement of environmental, labor, civil rights, and financial regulation. But the point of our local transit agency is to provide transportation services, not to improve the living standards of bus drivers and it’s possible for public sector personnel expenditures to be wasteful even without it being the case that the janitors at the DMV are the real fat cats of our time or any such nonsense. Over the longer run if you can make the private economy work to provide growth and jobs and income, then the public sector needs to be generous to be competitive. But the reverse strategy of building up a generous public sector as the lever for producing an income-generating economy doesn’t work.
I hear this, but I also believe that there is value to society in honoring honorable work done well. Paying public employees the lowest wage someone will agree to, with no job security or career advancement, is not going to produce outstanding public services, and it is not going to produce the social infrastructure that allows for growth in the society at large.
So once again we see Matt coming to the same conclusions as the right-wingers, the only difference being he claims to do so more in sorrow than in anger.
So you must really hate the concept of the CCC huh?
Me, I don’t think something like that would be such a bad idea today. Let’s say we could put, for example, half a million young Americans to work in needful jobs that provided vocational training in any number of fields in exchange for tuition credit, etc etc. And to do all that without firearms involved!
Is that “make-work”? Kinda. Are there lots and lots and lots of projects in those country that could use such a pool of labor? Of course!
“But the reverse strategy of building up a generous public sector as the lever for producing an income-generating economy doesn't work.”
Wrong!!!
Explain why it doesn’t work. How is a public sector job different than a private sector job?
Do medical advances from NHS count for less? How about that internet thing?
The difference between private and public employment is in who gets the surplus (profit) from the labor. Otherwise they are the same.
“The right question to ask about firefighters' pensions isn't a moralizing one, it's a practical one"”will reducing them imperil public safety in some important way?”
According to the National Fire Protection Association, 71 percent of firefighters in the United States are volunteers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_fire_department
Yeah, what Ron said. And what the heck is this “income-generating economy”? It doesn’t sound like you understand what the world ‘economy’ means.
When Matty learns technology he’s going to finally get it!
This:
“But the reverse strategy of building up a generous public sector as the lever for producing an income-generating economy doesn't work.”
…is exactly right.
Even this:
“Over the longer run if you can make the private economy work to provide growth and jobs and income, then the public sector needs to be generous to be competitive.”
…is exactly right.
Matty just doesn’t understand the methodology of productivity gains.
Where the mechanism to create more valuable public services – meaning more bang for the buck – a system that specifically rewards the innovators in public service.
So, someone like a city manager needs to be able to decide to go to a virtual office, having everyone work from home, firing those people who don’t do it well, and is able to mothball a public building.
And the system has to allow that there will be some mistakes, that there will be some misfires and CELEBRATE improvement enough that public service folk become risk takers.
I would definitely have to be paid to intervene if Morgan’s house were on fire.
Don’t you see? Putting millions of people to work repairing crumbling highways and bridges is make-work. Putting millions of people to work cleaning up the Gulf Coast? Make-work! Heaven knows, in times like these, the last thing we want the government to do is make work.
I think what Matt’s saying is that it doesn’t make sense to employ people to do things that the public sector can do better–that is, it doesn’t make sense to have them be tollbooth operators if we can have EZ-Pass do that instead. Then it essentially becomes make-work, like paying them to dig a ditch, then fill it back up.
And I agree. But this seems to me to be a problem that doesn’t actually exist. There are tons of things we could productively employ people to do in this country, so we should be doing that.
I’ve recently taken to reading the comments on this blog, and it gives me the impression that none of Matt’s readers actually agree with him.
But the point of our local transit agency is to provide transportation services, not to improve the living standards of bus drivers…
Sure, and the point of a private sector corporation is to make profits for its investors, not to provide a high standard of living to its employees.
But one of the primary goals of the political left is to promote a higher standard of living for people regardless of where they work. And your preferred policies don’t seem to be doing that.
You want to tax rich people and give money to poor people. I’d rather see some of that money put toward creating jobs that provide services which are useful but not necessarily profitable. Right now we have a shortage of jobs. Providing a job when unemployment is 9% is, in and of itself, a service.
We already have an industrial policy. It already promotes pointless make-work. It’s called the Department of Defense. Taking even a quarter of the least-useful expenditures there and shifting them to providing civilian services would be a nice start.
Are you talking about the short term, or the long term? About “stimulus” or “the economy”? I don’t quite understand how you can believe at the same time that just dropping money from helicopters is a worthwhile economic stimulus, but that a public sector creating make-work is a problem.
Being a volunteer fireman takes what, a couple weeks of training courses? My dad said it was a popular activity at his high school, because they let you out of school for the training.
The key statistic is how many fires are actually put out by volunteers vs. paid professionals.
Relying on “technology” to provide ponies is no kind of economic program. Not even one of “productivity”
In addition MattY has said numerous times that it would be better to just give these people money than create useless jobs. If you want to spend money on infrastructure or environmental cleanup then spend it effectively, don’t do it just so that there is work for people.
…where the goal of the liberal project is to give some sort of ex post compensation for brute bad luck instead of giving workers agency or power
That sounds about right, actually.
The important thing about public services is the provision of services, not the provision of jobs.
To people who perform public services, the other important thing about public services is the provision of their jobs. They have the right to organize and collectively advance their interests, it’s right there in the universal declaration of human rights.
It doesn’t work, and the Soviet Union proved it. There is a limited number of things that the government does better than the private sector.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the TSA is meant to provide a salary to the nearly unemployable.
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