You're not really free to pursue long term projects since you have to be available to work/look for a job. You are also stressed because the future is very uncertain. You do not earn money so you have to do activities that are really cheap. You are looking for a job, but a lot of that is just waiting for replies on resumes you have sent out. There is also some social isolation because of the negative stigma that comes with being unemployed.
An example: It's hard to start a business with no money, that you might have to give up next week because you might have a job then and won't have the time for it. It's not making any money yet and you need to pay the bills! You need to focus on looking for a job. Meeting the right people would help get it started, only you're socially isolated and most people are working during the week. You can't think of all that right now. Your mind is preoccupied with job and money related worries. You watch some TV while you wait for replies from companies, it's free and stops your mind from worrying.
2) We're ~5 years after the last economic collapse, but with minimal actual economic recovery. I don't have the statistics handy, but IIRC U6 went up significantly during that period. A _lot_ of people simply gave up trying to find a new job after being unable to do so for so long. We would want statistics on what portion of the unemployed fall into that category too before making an opinion.
Here's a succinct explanation for those of us who are not fluent in Americanese :D
Sorry - this line triggers a knee jerk response from me. Please feel free to ignore the rest of this post.
There are very few people who are so disabled they are unable to work.
There are people who face discrimination; or who have learnt patterns of livingthat are not compatible with work; or people who have learned helplessness. Employers are understandably nervous about employig someone with no work in the past three years (and even if they're not nervous they usually get to chose between the person with large gaps and the person with recent work history).
Modern approaches to getting people with disability back into work concentrate on "place then support" - you get someone a jon and then you provide support to them and their employer to keep them in that job. This is prefered to "train then place" where you put people through work-preparation courses and then eventually try to get them a job and don't support them in work.
I'm particularly interested in barriers to employment for people with mental illness. When someone has a leg amputated there is a period where they are rehabilitating and having prosthetics fitted, but then they can return to work. From time to time they may have problems with their stump and they will need new prosthetics. We don't expect those people to never work again. So it's weird to me why we don't see severe mental illness as havig similar times of illness and wellness.
This organisation has good quality information about curret best practice. http://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/employment/index.asp...
And there are also people with crippling depression, fibromyalgia, and/or pain disorders.
>I'm particularly interested in barriers to employment for people with mental illness. When someone has a leg amputated there is a period where they are rehabilitating and having prosthetics fitted, but then they can return to work. From time to time they may have problems with their stump and they will need new prosthetics. We don't expect those people to never work again. So it's weird to me why we don't see severe mental illness as havig similar times of illness and wellness.
Maybe it's better in the UK, but in many countries, employers simply don't want to hire someone with a history of chronic semi-disability. This can be particularly bad in the United States, where disability and health insurances are provided by the employer instead of the state.
Among my symptoms are visual hallucinations, paranoia, delusions (other than paranoid delusions), depression which can be suicidal, actual suicide attempts - no suicide completions so far :-D - a euphoric state known as mania, which can feel good to some extent but, when extreme, is far worse than all the other symptoms - sleep disturbances (at times insomnia, other times hypersomnia), catatonia and flat affect, that is, an inability to outwardly express my emotions. My flat affect makes it difficult to connect to other people, which itself can lead to depression.
However, the specific reason that I work as a coder, is that computer programming accomodates my illness in a way that physics does not. (My degree is in Physics, not Computer Science.)
I hated coding with a passion at my first full-time programming job, I wasn't any good at it, and fully intended to do just about anything else once I was able to find a "real job".
However I happened to notice that I could still write software even when I was floridly paranoid. I mean like that NAZIs having Panzer exercises in the office parking lot. I didn't see any soldiers or weaponry when I looked directly out the window but when I turned away I could feel their presence.
I decided to stick with programming in part because of that, as well as some other reasons.
These days I am contemplating going back to complete my Physics PhD. What I find these days is rampant age discrimination, as well as no one believing that my resume is for real.
I wrote my first computer program in 1976, in FORTRAN, with a pencil on a coding form, then typed it into a paper teletype terminal, where it ran on an IBM 360 mainframe. That box was so expensive that the University of Idaho had just that one computer for the entire campus to share. I'm pretty sure it had magnetic core memory.
But I don't know what the numbers look like at any given point in time. I imagine someone who understands the U1-6 scale would probably have a slightly better view.
But my point was merely because a study that says overall people who don't have jobs watch tv shouldn't be taken as a statement of unemployed laziness until someone has actually taken demographic data of the people within that group, as "unemployed" is a huge group. I can think of numerous possibly-counted-as-unemployed groups where one of the few common denominator activities would be TV, like, say, students.
We do. In fact, many people who I personally know have gotten off social security and back into the workforce. People with mental illness. They even allow you to make a small amount of money while collecting social security to get some people slowly back in the workforce. In fact, I would say most people I know returned to the workforce. I'd like to see some stats on that.
It is a very complicated situation with a lot of variables. I think wage stagnation and a decrease in collective bargaining may be a part of it.
If you only hang out with over-achievers, you might be able to convince yourself that, once freed from the need to earn income, people will become super productive. (Although my own experience at MIT, over-achievers all, was that many people will stop working if they can.)
And once you have defined the ground-floor as people sitting around watching TV and playing video games, what kind of lifestyle do you have for the people manning the fast food restaurants being patronized by those video game players?
So, in the new system you'd still have a quarter of the population watching TV but you'd also have a bunch of bureaucrats and money free to spend on, say, healthcare and health promotion.
I accept that I am overly optimistic about this.
People right now would sometimes be discouraged from earning a little money if it reduces benefits. What else can be done? Volunteering, experimenting, even education (if not 100% applicable for job-hunt) is not encouraged or regarded highly as people are under pressure to find work. Finally, being unemployed is automatically a failure on some level, and if that persists, hopelessness and maybe a mild depression might set in.
So the idea would be to remove that pressure and see if people are really intrinsically lazy, or in general let's see if that changes society in a cool way.
Maybe some stable, smaller country could go ahead and try it out?
I ride without paying all the time. I just dress respectably. Like today I'm wearing a dress shirt and silk necktie.
I've never been cited. I got caught red-handed once by a cop; when I told him I was on my way to see my doctor, he pulled a transit pass out of his pocket, popped it in the validation machine, handed it to me then requested I pay for my future train rides.
The main reason I do ride around the trains without paying, is that I am more effective at looking for a job when I take the train to downtown Portland. Most of the places I've lived around here haven't been so conducive to my work productivity.
When I get some steady work, I'm going to send a big fat check to the TriMet board, along with a letter of apology.
Also, while I'm burning karma: the point at which 50% of men are awake is 39 minutes later than for women, and the point at which 50% of each sex are asleep is only 13 minutes earlier for women. I.e. men are sleeping substantially longer, in addition to watching a lot more TV and doing a lot less housework, shopping, and child/elder-care. Says a lot about how our culture coddles men.
Care to poll a coal mine or oil rig?
The societal expectation is that men do hard/dangerous work, while women do housework and childcare. Technology has automated away most of the former jobs, such that only a tiny minority of men are working in a coal mine or oil rig. Technology has yet to do much to automate childcare. The result has been a windfall for men--they have five more hours of leisure time per week than women.[1] Judging by these statistics of the non-employed, I imagine such trends will only be magnified with increased automation, and under policies like guaranteed minimum income.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/10/another-gend...
Indeed, if you add up work + leisure, and subtract out 8 hours a day of sleep, there's 32 hours a week left over for men, and 38 left over for women. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this time precludes leisure activities because of the "on call" nature of being the primary care-giver.
Moreover, simply adding up housework + childcare time doesn't quite capture the situation. Spending a day taking care of a kid is much more exhausting than working at a typical white-collar job. It's blue-collar work that cuts across the economic classes in a world where most men aren't doing blue-collar work. Last year I had a 9-5, while my wife had a busier schedule. So I'd cook and watch our daughter until she got home. At 8:00 when my wife got home, she had much more energy for leisure activity. I'm a guy who regularly works 70-80 hour weeks, but a day taking care of our toddler puts me right out.