Economists like to tell a possibly apocryphal story about Milton Friedman. The prophet of free markets, visiting an Asian country in the 1960s, witnessed a public-works project that had people making a road with picks and shovels. When he asked why they didn’t use earth-moving machines instead, a local official responded that the goal was to provide people with jobs. In that case, the economist asked, why didn’t the government just have the workers use spoons instead?
This parable elicits a chuckle from many economists, who use it to contrast the hard-nosed, efficiency-minded thinking of their discipline with the ineffectual mandates of bumbling bureaucrats. But to many outside the profession, the story demonstrates a willful ignorance about the importance of work and human dignity. I recently wrote that the government should focus on getting people jobs instead of just mailing them money. Ideas for doing that range from government employment guarantees to public-works programs to tax incentives for corporations that hire more employees.
Inevitably, the people who chuckle at the “spoons” story are going to label these programs as make-work. If the market isn’t willing to pay people to do a job, they’ll say, it isn’t worth doing. Already I’ve received a few responses along these lines. People who take these jobs might do it for the money, they say, but they’ll know the work wasn’t really needed, and they won’t derive dignity or self-respect from doing it. Better to just mail them a check.
I think this kind of thinking is very wrong. Yes, if you gave people spoons to build a road, they would realize it was silly. But it’s absurd to jump from that to the conclusion that any worker who gets paid more than what the market will bear is just a welfare recipient with a made-up job.
If we work hard and produce something of tangible value, we tend to feel a sense of self-worth when society rewards us for it with a decent, middle-class life. This was the essence of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal — if you work, you eat.
The continuing power of this idea is visible everywhere. Witness Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the city gave homeless people jobs and it made them feel “human again.” Or look at the Job Corps program, where giving poor people jobs made them more likely to get married. If you give people work with tangible, visible value, you give them dignity. This, of course, is a reason the U.S.’s falling labor participation rate is such a concern — so many Americans are out of the workforce and are missing out on the dignity that comes with a job:
So is there work to be done in the U.S. that produces tangible, visible value? Of course there is. To realize this, just take a one-week trip to Japan. Where American sidewalks are cracked and uneven, Japanese ones are neat and beautiful. Where tables in American Starbucks are littered with crumbs and dirt, Japanese Starbucks tables get wiped down after every customer leaves. Where American cities like Chicago and Detroit are full of broken windows and crumbling facades, Japanese cities are clean and modern, with well-maintained, reliable public transit.
These are all jobs that produce real, tangible results. When you fix up a building or build a train station, you can see the fruits of your labors.
The free-market age has made the economy more efficient, but it has come at a dramatic price — lost dignity for so many. The U.S. has moved away from the idea of a social compact with work at its core. That’s something that deserves to be reversed.