The first problem with the way we talk about our economy is that we use phrases that don’t mean what we think. The second is worse.
The phrase “full employment” is intended to communicate an idea that is fundamentally relative.
But the phrase is an absolute. It means full, 100% capacity, no more room. Everybody, every last body, has a job.
While few truly believe it is truly possible to give every American a job, we use a phrase that implies the opposite.
Of course, economists have already factored this as an impossibility. They expect a certain percentage of people shouldn’t be included in the total number. So full employment excludes a small percentage of the population it assumes will never have a job. [We might call it the victory of pessimism.]
In other words, “full employment” is something like 95%.
However, this is after we have already excluded the retired, the disabled, and the children not of working age. The working population of the country is already under 70% of the whole population as it is.
So, while full employment sounds, first: like the whole population. Then: the working-age population.
What it doesn’t sound like is 95% of the working-age population. In other words, most of a subset of a subset.
So anyone keeping score can see that we have multiple measurements sets and data and exclusions.
None of which sound like what the phrase implies.
I’m not quibbling with the idea that we should expect a certain percentage of the population not to work. I’m saying we shouldn’t talk about it as if these people don’t count.
People with lives, families, and aspirations.
I know people who can work, but employers don’t want to accommodate them. They are too much trouble; what with communication barriers and undiagnosed disorders.
I also know people who shouldn’t work, but disability won’t cover them.
We are making everybody fit into a system that doesn’t work for everybody and then blaming them for not making it work. This isn’t more logical than making the system better.
Employment is a tricky enough subject. But then we make it more complicated with linguistic shortcuts like full employment. Shortcuts which distort our assessment of the situation. Which often prevent us from taking a full accounting of that insufficient system that fails many of us.
We’ve done the same with unemployment, which does not measure people without jobs, but only people who “lost” jobs recently. The long-term unemployed also get removed from the count.
Even the concept of work or having a job is linguistically complicated.
We rely on the precision of these words while we are making them imprecise.
Which begs the question: who gains by this imprecision? Certainly not the un- or underemployed. Or anyone vacating the workforce.
This is mostly all political theater. But we are making our communication less precise on the backs of those with less political power. And for the benefit of those who have it.
It also wasn’t that long ago that politicians argued for fewer people in the work force; family flexibility to raise children, and the virtue of taking time as a caregiver to family members.
Social scientists have long tried to communicate that our words around caregiving demonstrate a refusal to honor the dignity of it as work. But this also offers us a clue to the broader problem of how we talk about work, family, and living a life of true consequence.
We obviously want to communicate the relative health of our economy. But we are doing so in ways that neither communicate accurately or compassionately.
Consider this the next time you read an article about “The Great Resignation”. Even one that digs below the surface. Because much of what we’re doing is taking each other for granted.
And it isn’t only the words which fail us.