Where Have All the Workers Gone?

Surely, it matters that the Biden administration is paying people not to work. Surely, this explains, in part, why so few people are willing to go back to work. Apparently, the lure of working pales in comparison with free money.

Daniel Henninger explains in the Wall Street Journal this morning:

Still, it is impossible not to be struck by how many employers say that former and prospective employees—after a year of forced unemployment—simply will not work.

Henninger’s more salient point deviates slightly from the economic determinism argument. He suggests that what with all the constant calls for more work/life balance, with the notion that life should be more a party and less a job, it makes sense that people are not rushing back to the office or the local canteen. Therapy culture has been warring against work and the work ethic. Now we see the results.

Henninger explains:

Ideas have consequences. By making unemployment insurance competitive with market wage rates in a pandemic, the Biden Democrats may have done long-term damage to the American work ethic.

We will spend years discovering the altered patterns of behavior caused by politicians on the advice of epidemiologists ordering the nation to go home and stay home. Some are identifiable, such as large migrations out of big Northern cities. Less clear is the pandemic’s long-term effect on where people are willing to work—or whether they are willing to work at all….

I believe the pandemic accelerated a transition evident for years—away from the basic concept of daily work and toward an emerging idea that life is less about work and more about play. 

In truth, and for the purposes of this blog, the push away from work and toward generalized decadence has been a long time in the works.

Every time some television commentator or academic theorist starts talking about the good life, about your best life he is saying that too much work will make you mentally ill. Go out and party. Lounge around the house playing video games or watching porn. It’s the good life because it does not involve too much work.

So, the American work ethic is now on life support?

But the scale of effects from the yearlong pandemic shutdowns, combined with the government’s trillions in direct payments, has pushed the work ethic in the U.S. to a tipping point. Describing what we do now as “remote” and “virtual” means we know our attachments to the pre-pandemic world have become tenuous.

This means that our social connections have also become tenuous. It is not a good thing.