The Part-Time Job Economy

As we find ourselves in the midst of the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, it would benefit us to reflect on the current job structure all too prevalent in our economy today. Part time jobs, once seen only as a transitional way station, have now become an integral part of the economy, a part that is having devastating effects on concrete human lives.

Despite the dire situation we currently find ourselves in, we must also find in it some redemptive power, the power to change our fundamental economic structures while the time is ripe and calls for change are echoing from sea to shining sea.

The arguments in favor of this economic structure tell us that it enables us compete with foreign labor and buy cheaper products. This is, of course, bogus. Businesses often resort to hiring many part time workers to save costs and enlarge their already excessive profits. It also looks good for official employment statistics and covers up a glaring problem of how many people are being reduced to working part time jobs with no prospects of future advancements and any meaningful benefits.

Academia, that great social institution, is not immune from this employment mirage. Colleges continually raise their tuition rates and on the obscene underside raise the rate of adjuncts to full time faculty, which leaves adjuncts in a precarious position, but surely saves the colleges costs.

It is not even clear that the part time economy benefits the economy as a whole. In fact, it might even lower overall GDP output and result in a reduction of possibilities of economic development.

To expand on the aforementioned illusion of official employment statistics, the proposition defended by most economists is that part time jobs benefit younger workers and are jobs that otherwise would not exist if they were to be full time. When you mention to economists how many adults end up having to work multiple part time jobs without the benefits that comes with full time jobs, economists will tell you that adults who work part time jobs are, at bottom, losers.

Economists generally ignore the important influence of the structure of society on the development of individuals. Different socioeconomic structures generate different distributions of types of people. No one knows why one individual falls here and why the other falls over there, but the structures are evident and reveal pervasive systemic injustices in the way the current economy is configured.

The above makes it clear that it does no good for society to hold on to Ayn Rand's ethical egoism, which is a blatant contradiction in terms. For someone who was such a devoted follower of Aristotle and non-contradiction, Rand should have checked her premises and all her followers should do the same.

The economic doctrines of rational self-interest and market efficiency have not borne out well in reality. Behavioral economists have shown that investors are led by Keynesian "animal spirits" just as much as anyone, and the massive market failures around the world should put the efficient market hypothesis into the garbage heap of intellectual history.

Our latest man-made economic catastrophe has largely to do with this naive belief in the heroic efficacy of man's rational economic pursuits and the utopian belief in the workings of the free market devoid of regulation. Nowhere is man's imperfect rationality more fully revealed than in banking panics.

Shocks to the financial system are uniquely destructive, instantly putting economies into harsh recessions. Regulations were implemented to mitigate the animalian behavior of the thinking that because one bank goes bad all must go bad.

Market fundamentalists were responsible for deregulating financial institution and, even more abhorrently, blocking the implementation of regulations on new financial developments. The rise of the shadow banking system and its great fall are a testament to the economic philosophy of the free market fundamentalism promoted by Milton Friedman and the rest of the Chicago boys; it's empty mathematical idealism.

If we want to create a more socially and economically just society, we need to do the right thing. Doing the right thing entails rejecting the selfish greed of those holding to Ayn Rand's distorted philosophy and any philosophy resembling it. Doing the right thing calls for a proper, truly progressive taxation policy and more universal benefits, including healthcare, for the poor. Last but not least, doing the right thing demands that we join together into more perfect unions in order to fight for more full time jobs and to put an end to the part time economy.