There’s a joke going around, due originally to Daniel Davies*, to the effect that unemployment is an extremely low productivity “industry,” and that “There have been no major efficiency gains in unemployment in the last hundred years.” All of the linked bloggers use this to make a case for an “industrial policy” of sorts, oriented toward moving people out of unemployment into some higher-productivity activity.

That’s all well and good, but it made me think: maybe we should also be figuring out ways to increase the productivity of unemployment! That’s a point that’s sort of implicit in some of my recent posts, where I argue against the standard paradigm in which wage labor seems to be the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. If you believe, as I do, that it’s a good idea to reduce the amount of time people spend in paid employment, it would also be nice to increase the productivity of whatever they do in the time thus freed up.

And I would argue that we have, in fact, seen improvements in the productivity of unemployment — or at least, of non-employment. People without jobs can work in a community garden, or contribute to Wikipedia, or post funny videos on YouTube. Those may be small things, but they do improve our collective well-being — and two of them would have been impossible ten years ago.

Improving the productivity of non-employment is what I think Juliet Schor is on about in her recent book, Plenitude:

It’s based on an idea that’s novel to the sustainability discourse, but is has been around in standard economics since the 1960s: when the returns from one activity fall, shift one’s energy and time into others. This is the theory of time allocation pioneered by Chicago economist Gary Becker. It’s also just plain common sense.

In the year 2010 this approach counsels shifting out of [Business As Usual] jobs, to local, small-scale activity that helps reduce dependence on the market system and lowers ecological footprint. Why is this attractive? One reason is that the BAU market has less to offer. It is failing to provide adequate jobs on a staggering scale. An estimated 26 million Americans are either unemployed, under-employed or have gotten discouraged and stopped looking for work. That problem won’t go away even if the recovery continues. Incomes have fallen and government services are being cut. Wall Street and the wealthy have protected their outsized share of society’s production, but for the vast majority the prognosis is austerity.

There’s some localist, “small is beautiful” stuff going on here that I don’t particularly care for, but this is still a valiant attempt at crafting a new paradigm. And Schor does at least understand the importance of replicators.
*By the way, Daniel Davies is the best blogger in the world. That’s just a fact, you should read him if for some reason you don’t already. Who are the greatest bloggers of all time? Think about it. D-squared, d-squared, d-squared, d-squared and d-squared. Because he spits hot fire.