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Comment by enkid | Hacker News Reader

Every system has built in waste. If you have no waste, you have no slack room, which means when a system faces a crisis.

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Labor doesn't operate like that. If we wake up one day and suddenly need a ton of labor, we don't need idle worker. We can reassign active labor, like in World War II.

Also, it's weird to casually call people becoming homeless and starving and dying due to lack of work "slack". I'm sure the people desperate for money see that as a crisis more important than whatever abstract system crisis you are imagining.

The 60's were an era of labour shortage in the UK. Recently some British towns had a labour shortage, such as Reading. This means that garbage collection jobs pay well, which is a good thing for those that want to work and be home in time to collect the kids.

A labour market should have people dropping out for having babies, going to education, sickness, looking after elders of the family, going on adventures and self improvement, for example people that want to write their own app/book.

People who are not actively looking for work are not included in employment numbers (at least in the US). People voluntarily taking time away from working are not the reserve army of labor that our policies create to suppress worker power.

Fair point, although I found in the discussion that zero percent unemployment was considered bad, whereas, as I see it, there are always people dropping in and out of the labour market. My point was that not everyone works all the time.

This is a nonsensical understanding of employment! The reason there are unemployed people is a combination of transit times (if you lose your job as a programmer tomorrow you don't want to be allocated to a job as a hairdresser just because that was the next slot that opened up temporarily) and because some people would like to work at a specific job but can't get one right now, and would rather live off savings or welfare for a while rather than compromise (e.g. jobbing actors).

Attempts at full employment were tried, it resulted in dead economies. This stuff is basic!

I would counter that you have a nonsensical understanding unemployment. You are imagining that everyone unemployed is so by convenient choice and voluntarily holding out for something that meets all their preferences. That is not true.

Socialism doesn't require forcing programmers to be hairdressers. That's a huge strawman.

Mostly that's actually indeed the case, because of how statistical agencies define employment. People who are so terrible at work that they can't get a job anywhere eventually give up looking and fall out of the workforce entirely, so don't count as unemployed anymore (arguably they should).

For the rest, sure, there are some who search but cannot find work. But what that usually means is they can't find work that matches their specialism. Maybe they could go stack shelves for a bit, but if your prior work was as a senior lawyer it makes sense to take the time to find a job that matches your skills.

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