The CAN DO of work
The way the issue is reported, it’s easy to conclude that understanding employment is largely a mechanical exercise: When jobs are available, more people work; when jobs are cut, more people are unemployed. After taking some economics classes, we might develop a slightly more sophisticated understanding — that individuals also make calculations about work based how they prioritize income vis-à-vis leisure.
But recent events and research have forced me to see jobs, workforce, and training issues entirely differently.
Given my interest in education, skills development, civil society, decentralization, and culture — that is, in issues that can complement the traditional economic analysis of employment — I’m now thinking about our work problems in five categories. I call it “CAN DO.” It’s an acronym for Culture, Access, Necessity, Desire, and Openings. It moves to the front of the line two elements that I believe are too often pushed to the side. And, in combination, the five are meant to convey a sense of the possible if we take all of the pieces seriously.
Culture
I used to think that individuals and society would gravitate toward work without any nudging. But it’s probably the case that, even if we do have a predisposition for work, it needs to be fostered by a community. This includes, but is not limited to, adults’ explicitly teaching kids that work is a required component of adulthood (Sen. Ben Sasse has a new book along these lines) and that it depends on teachable skills and dispositions like perseverance; that, as AEI’s president Arthur Brooks has persuasively argued, we must dignify all types of work; that, as my AEI colleague Robert Doar, Harry Holzer, and Brent Orrell write, we apply some social stigma to non-work among the able.
But taking seriously the cultural elements of work-encouragement also requires flexibility and curiosity among public leaders. As our economy changes, national demography shifts, and technology evolves, culture must adapt to the work-related ripples. For instance, a new report from the Census Bureau shows that young Americans today are much less likely to live with a spouse and much more likely to still live at home — many of whom have a high school diploma or less, aren’t in school, and aren’t working. These are significant changes over the last 40 years, and they have complex roots and implications; in some cases, traditional explanations and responses may need updating.
Access
Probably the most startling and important fact about our current employment problem is that there are so many positions available while so many Americans are unemployed or out of the labor force. In other words, do the non-working have access to work? The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that 5.7 million jobs were open. A terrific recent WSJ editorial described how this touches construction, agriculture, and more. For some time now, my colleague Nick Eberstadt has been arguing convincingly that we’re suffering a crisis of non-working but available men. But my colleague Angela Rachidi recently wrote about the significant drop in women in the labor force as well.
I naively believed this was impossible; I assumed that employment opportunities and available labor automatically matched. So why aren’t they connecting? One big explanation is the “skills mismatch.” The currently non-working often lack the skills that today’s jobs demand. (And as Joe Lonsdale recently wrote in Wired, we should be humble about our ability to accurately predict the skills necessary for jobs on the horizon.)
A ton of smart work is currently going in to figuring out — via groups like the National Skills Coalition — how we re-orient high school and post-secondary to prepare students for good current and future jobs and how to “re-skill” adults who’ve lost jobs. Progress is being made: There’s exciting activity in career-and-technical-education schools, apprenticeships, community-college reform, work-site training, and more. But one of my big lessons-learned is that as our economy evolves and new jobs require more specialized skills, we can’t assume that the skids are greased for matching human capital and open positions.
Another important element of access is mobility. As my colleague Ryan Streeter recently wrote in USA Today working-age Americans aren’t moving like they used to. Place seems to be stickier than ever. There are lots of possible explanations: maybe their occupational licenses won’t be accepted in other states, maybe the cost-of-living is too high elsewhere, maybe they don’t want to lose the social capital they have in their current locations. But if people are geographically stationary, they might be especially handicapped by today’s economy because job growth may occur far from where they are. Books like The New Geography of Jobs and The Big Sort help explain how location and economic dynamism are more tightly related than ever. Indeed, a few years ago, I wrote about several jaw-dropping maps showing the heartrending, intergenerational economic immobility of swaths of the Deep South, parts of the Rust Belt, and on reservations.
Necessity
For many, work is something you must do to survive. But changes in society and policy can decouple the two. As federal data show, there are now lots of young adults who neither work nor go to school because they are living with their parents. We’ve also seen a skyrocketing in American’s substitution of disability benefits for work. In a recent outstanding talk at AEI, Iain Duncan Smith, the UK’s former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, explained how his country had to fundamentally rethink a government-benefits system that had made work seem superfluous to many. AEI’s Robert Doar has been a leader in this area, encouraging us to embrace a safety-net approach that supports, instead of replaces, work.
Desire
Among the most worrisome statistics I’ve come across is that growing numbers of Americans apparently don’t want to work. This raises profound questions — like in this good TED talk — about why people would want to work. Perhaps people now attach more value to leisure; we know that addiction can cause people to elevate other desires above work. Maybe video games are crowding out more productive activities, or maybe not. But it does appear that Millennials are the least entrepreneurial generation in recent times; if you believe that entrepreneurialism is an indicator of “want-to,” this isn’t a good sign for the nation’s love-to-work prospects.
Openings
Typically, discussions about work usually begin with the latest BLS statistics on job creation and unemployment rates or a major outlet’s analysis of recent data. Of course, all of that is important, but, for the reasons explained above, I’m increasingly seeing those things as the last part of the conversation. That is, job openings can only be understood and filled once we get a handle on the how society supports work, how accessible work actually is, how necessary work is to our lives, and whether people want to work.
In other words, I’m now thinking in terms of “CAN DO” because it now seems to me that, when it comes to addressing our jobs and job-training problems, culture is upstream of politics, policy, and practice.
First published at AEIdeas.org on Monday, April 24, 2017.
