When work disappears: What do we do with people whose livelihoods are destroyed?

It’s impossible to look at what’s happening to the bottom half of American society and not worry. Some of the breakdown is cultural–a fraying of the basic ties that keep people connected and cared for. Some of it is economic, the disappearance of steady employment that allows people to do the bourgeois work of planning for the future. And in some ways, those trends are reinforcing each other. A community cannot insist that its members work hard and plan for the future if there are no jobs available; the resulting erosion of work and education ethics makes unemployment worse.

The problem is that all the proposed solutions ring hollow. Until roughly the last five years, it was possible to believe that education would be the solution: send more kids to school, retrain people for new jobs. But college graduates aren’t finding it so easy to obtain solid employment either. It’s true that having a college diploma is still much better than not having a college diploma, but that doesn’t mean that by sending more kids to school, we’re actually making the workforce more productive, much less mitigating the problem of economic change; we may just be forcing people to jump over a higher bar to gain access to a shrinking number of jobs. Paul Krugman points out that these days, highly educated workers still have to fear having their job disrupted.

And retraining only works to a point. For my forthcoming book, I interviewed a Danish photographer facing a career crisis. Could he take advantage of Denmark’s generous retraining programs, I asked? He was glum. Your forties are a bit late to be tackling a whole new career; the payoff to investing years in education is simply inherently lower than it is in your twenties. Besides, he had a new baby. What would he and his wife live on while he spent a few years in training?