What if there was a recovery and nobody got a job?

What’s a job, Daddy? Where do jobs come from, Mum? What am I going to be when I grow up? Apart from disillusioned?

But seriously, why is there so much unemployment? Because the economy’s gone down the Swanee. So if it recovers and comes back up the Swanee again, will it bring lots of jobs with it? Is there any reason on earth why it should? All over Europe there are repeated sightings of “green shoots”, although it usually doesn’t take long for EU corruption and incompetence to pour paraquat all over them. But one thing common to all these mini-recoveries is the absence of a surge in employment. Who needs ya, baby? the 21st-century economy is saying to us all. What can’t be automated can at least be severely rationalised. The extent to which both manufacturing and service industries can be outsourced seems to acknowledge no limits. Even newspapers are increasingly putting themselves together without the aid of journalists.

To a certain extent, work has become just soooo 20th century. One of the last Prime Minister’s strongest convictions was that this tendency must be resisted; that work was good for us all, personally, economically and socially. In the run-up to losing the last election he was repeatedly lambasted for creating thousands and thousands of jobs, or possibly non-jobs, in the public sector. These must go, we are told; they are unnecessary and their holders are all parasites on the private, wealth-producing sector. The fact a lot of these voices ignore is that an enormous part of the private sector is equally upheld by government expenditure whose necessity is equally spurious. The new government, with its cuts programme, is going to have to face up to the fact that large cuts in expenditure means large cuts in jobs.

In my view the biggest disaster of the last administration was PFI. The economics of it never made sense; most of the private-sector bids for government contracts would never have been considered if the rules hadn’t been stretched to favour them. And if (if??) the contractors find they need more money halfway through the job, they have the government over a barrel. But PFI keeps a huge number of consultants and contractors afloat, supporting millions of jobs. (With no detriment to the public sector, as the public servants who would otherwise have done those jobs were retained in any case; so civil servants on modest salaries were not replaced, but actually augmented, by private sector wallahs on two or three times the screw.) This has cost an absolute fortune, with open-ended commitments extending into our grandchildren’s time, but Gordon Brown thought, rightly or wrongly, that this was better than having all those people on the rock ‘n’ roll. (I would guess that the abolition of all unnecessary public and government-supported-private sector jobs might bring unemployment to around fifteen million.)

So was Gordon right? (I am aware that a lot of my readers think that Brown could not be right if he announced that 2+2=4.) But just supposing – I know I could never prove this – that an efficient modern economy could now be run with 10% of the population engaged on serious productive activity, with say 15% in various ancillary functions. What are we to do with the other three-quarters? Redistribute the proceeds of the economy to keep them fed and happy? Or disenfranchise them and leave them to starve? I am not hurling imprecations at those who take the latter view; I am merely asking how much they would enjoy living in gated communities policed like the Baghdad Green Zone. The Molotov cocktail will always get through.