Monday, October 10, 2011

Desemprego, "The 99%" e a "Geração à Rasca"

Um post de Megan McArdle sobre o desemprego e o movimento "We are the 99%" (associado ao "Occupy Wall Street"). Creio que é ainda mais pertinente para a nossa "Geração à Rasca", cuja reivindicações (e auto-identificação) giram ainda mais à volta do tema "emprego":

The 99%

I spent quite a lot of time on the "We are the 99%" website last night and this morning.  There's been a considerable amount of carping about it from the conservative side, and to be sure, some of the stories strain plausibility (the percentage of people in the sample who have either taken up prostitution, or claim to have seriously considered doing so, seems rather high, for instance, and as far as I could tell, not a single person on the site had been fired for cause).  Many of the people complaining made all sorts of bad decisions about having children, getting very expensive "fun" degrees, and so forth.

But quibbling rather misses the point.  These are people who are terrified, and their terror is easy to understand.  Jobs are hard to come by, and while you might well argue that any of these individuals could find a job if they did something different, in aggregate, there are not enough job openings to absorb our legion of unemployed. (...)

When the gap between the number of job openings and the number of people who are out of work is so large, there are going to be a hefty number of unemployed people.  Maybe these people individually could have done more to get themselves out of their situation, but at the macro level, that would just have meant that someone else was out of work and suffering.

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