I’ve argued on various occasions that in the quest for full employment, we ought to be less obsessed with maximizing job creation and more concerned with making it easier and better to not be employed. The most persuasive argument against this view is that unemployment is really bad for people, and they don’t like it, and therefore it’s [...]

It’s far to soon to say what the elections in France and Greece mean for the future of austerity in Europe. François Hollande may turn out to be a meek Sarkozy-lite—or he may be pushed in that direction by the German government, the bond markets, and the European Central Bank. Greece, meanwhile, is still in [...]

I’ll blame my recent silence on the fact that I was moving again—as of Tuesday, I’m back in the Grand Duchy. Clearly either the spirits of the Haymarket martyrs or the exploited employees of British Airways were punishing me for traveling on May Day, because I ended up spending the better part of 24 hours waiting [...]

I don’t usually write about education. I don’t have any special expertise or knowledge about it, and anyway, fellow Jacobin writers Andrew Hartman and Megan Erickson are on the case. But this story (via Slashdot) touches on some of my more typical themes. The linked post is written by Rob Krampf, a science educator in [...]

The New York Times brings us once again to Foxconn and China’s manufacturing industry, in a story reporting that “there is a growing shortage of blue-collar workers willing to work in China’s factories.” This, we are told, is “a big factor in the long shifts and workweeks manufacturers have used to meet production quotas.” The [...]

As I said in an earlier post, my essay in the forthcoming Jacobin is structured around a review of political theorist Kathi Weeks’ new book The Problem With Work. It’s a timely and interesting book that effectively ties together a number of my preoccupations: the critique of wage labor, the deconstruction of the work ethic, [...]

Matt Yglesias has responded to me, although in a way that sort of misses the point I was trying to make. Part of his post is given over to reiterating the position that increasing the amount of housing stock in desirable cities would be a correct and egalitarian thing to do, even if it inconveniences [...]

My Twitter feed is alive with the sound of indignation about an ad agency at South by Southwest that is using the homeless as human 4G wireless hotspots. The idea is that you see a homeless person with a t-shirt reading “I am a 4G hotspot,” and then you pay them a small fee to [...]

If you enjoy the writing of me or Mike “Rortybomb” Konczal, you’re sure to love staring at our big bald white heads as we jabber about politics. Behold, my first appearance on bloggingheads.tv, as Mike’s guest on the new Roosevelt Institute series “Fireside Chats”: We get into the state of the left, capitalism’s inherent tendency [...]