Chris Rudnicki
Sep 4, 2018 · 1 min read

Marley, thank you for this response. I generally agree with much of your analysis. One way we might think of the very real — but often unmeasured and therefore forgotten — costs of the “emotional, financial, and psychological traumas inflicted upon the workforce” is to treat them as a kind of externality that we should ask companies to ‘internalize.’ Similar to how concerns about the environment have prompted us to make changes to how we hold companies accountable for the carbon they admit (basically, we are starting to make them pay something for it), one could imagine holding companies accountable for the suffering they cause when they churn through workers. There are certainly issues with such an idea (how do you measure suffering, how do you ‘price’ a layoff?), but they don’t seem insurmountable to me. The alternative — let government, nonprofits, and families/communities — ‘clean up’ all this quiet suffering is what our policy has been. Needless to say, (like you) I’m not really convinced that has really worked.

Policy proposals and economic jargon aside, I’m glad you enjoyed the article — thanks again for the thoughtful response!

    Chris Rudnicki

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    Project Tugboat, Harvard business & public policy