I somewhat disagree with the premise of this book. According to my research, the problem with the unemployment rate is that those who have failed to find a job for a few years and do not qualify for unemployment no longer count as unemployed, but rather as not employed, and thus over half of the country can be not employed, but the unemployment rate might be near-zero; this was the case just before the Great Depression, when it seems the country was close to full employment, but then the unemployment rate dropped rapidly in a few years as those who were not employed before shifted into the unemployment ranking as they finally made new attempts to find work, or found work, but were let go from short-term jobs soon afterwards. Instead of acknowledging this, Blanchflower’s book and most other mainstream accounts choose to see a problem in underemployment rather than the general mis-calculation of the rate. This book as advertised as being “about those who can’t find full-time work at a decent wage—the underemployed—and how their plight is contributing to widespread despair, a worsening drug epidemic, and the unchecked rise of right-wing populism…/ Blanchflower draws on his acclaimed work in the economics of labor and well-being to explain why today’s postrecession economy is vastly different from what came before… Blanchflower shows how many workers are underemployed or have simply given up trying to find a well-paying job, how wage growth has not returned to prerecession levels despite rosy employment indicators, and how general prosperity has not returned since the crash of 2008.” Another strange element here is that the author proposes that he utilizes the original “economic measure” or “‘economics of walking about’”, or simply “seeing… how ordinary people are faring under the recovery, and taking seriously what they say and do.” While researchers should definitely look at “ordinary people”, the results of such subjective viewings cannot be fairly represented in a scholarly study. Just because an individual observed is experiencing a set of problems does not mean these are shared by all other non-workers. And presenting such subjective observations as original is misleading; the author really should be acknowledging that much of the book is based on opinion rather than documented fact. It seems that Blanchflower is instead intentionally hiding his biases and double-speak misdirection, instead stressing in the summary that this is a “candid report”. Scholars are obligated to report the truth in scholarship, as objectivity is one of the pillars of proper scholarly study; so why would any scholar need to stress they are going to be “candid”. And why is he shifting blame onto “the young and the less skilled” as “the worst casualties of underemployment,” and away from “immigrants”? Saying that underemployment is a white-trash problem is as discriminatory as saying it’s the immigrants’ fault. The problem America is having is with runaway, unregulated monopolistic capitalism that is not responsible for the un or non-employment it leaves when it monopolizes industries, but such rhetoric has once again become un-American, as it was in the McCarthy era: whenever America’s government is so corrupt social debate is barred, most Americans return to Depressions and Recessions, while the richest .01% make billions. Instead of stressing the need for de-monopolization and regulation of unbridled industry, Blanchflower sets out to fix “the epidemic of unhappiness and self-destruction”: in other words, if somebody is poor, it is his or her fault, and they should cheer up about it. Naturally, Blanchflower is a privileged Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. If the poor were writing books like this one and working for the National Bureau of Economic Research, American policies might actually change in their favor, but…
The first chapter is called, “What the Whole World Wants Is a Good Job”. This title is discriminatory, biased and makes assumptions not based in fact. Most people can make more money and be happier if they become self-employed instead of being hired to do any job for anybody else. Working for a wage is a short step away from slavery, serfdom, and other gradations of exploitation; the proximity increases as wages decrease and as jobs grow less and less “good”. Nearly all American employers push workers towards extreme productivity levels and tend to avoid paying for overtime or for the added stress while increasing job insecurity to push workers to work even harder or risk the loss of these jobs. This stress culture means that Americans are miserable even in the best jobs in the market. There are plenty of places in the world with alternative work relationships, including communes or other alternative economic patterns. This title also pre-supposes that somebody is saying that the poor do not want work and instead want to be living on social benefits, and these people are supposedly proven wrong by this blatant statement. What if those who find out slavery-like employment system to be harassing are much happier on social benefits instead of being tortured at work; if they do not want the job, the jobs or employers have to change the system to make it more inviting for all people. Plenty of places in the world really have systems where people want and receive good jobs, but this does not exist in America, where Blanchflower looked. In America, there is no leave for pregnancy, no dental insurance, and older men and middle-aged women can be fired for no particular reason. Everybody might want a “good job”, but if none exist: why start a scholarly book with this fantasy?
The interior of the book considers associated problems such as the stagnated wage growth (50), but also proposes that policy makers have already spotted “underemployment” and addressed it (119). Given the problems I’ve noted with the author’s approach to this topic, it is ironic that he includes a section called, “Economic Forecasting Is Broken”: if it is, he is contributing to breaking it. The last paragraph in this section begins with a quote from the Bank of England’s economist that economists in general had “missed the financial crisis”; then he brings in a seemingly similar sentiment from one of his own rivals, David Miles, “who replaced me on the MPC”, who stressed that the Great Recession and its equivalents are “virtually impossible to predict”. The section ends with this childish, unsupported exclamation from Blanchflower: “I don’t think so.” The rest of the section might have touched on measures that predict downturns, but surely the other economists’ statements regarding the unpredictability of such events were taken out of context; the reference to Miles in particular seems to be carried out to spite a rival rather than for any scholarly logical reason. The next section is called, “The State of the Macro Is Bad”. He generally tends to divide things into “good” and “bad” dualities: extremely simplistic for any Ivy League economist dealing with complex numbers and formulas. If macroeconomics in general are “bad” we would be seeing a constant downturn in stock prices, employment and all other measures: so this cannot be true regarding the current “state” of the macro, making this claim nonsensical (165-8). Blanchflower might have had great researchers helping him gather data to insert into this study, but whoever polished or pulled all this information together and crafted the “good” vs. “bad” narrative is a horrid writer. Given these problems, I do not recommend other readers venture into this book, and I hope its editors will dig around, shovel garbage aside, and clean it up prior to re-releasing it for public consumption.