For example: is a person doing 4hrs of voluntary work per week employed? I would think not. A labour economist, even counting carefully, might have another view, if s/he worked, dutifully, for the Howard government.

Is a 16 year-old doing a few hours at a fast food outlet employed? I would think partially. Are there sufficient fast food outlets in say, Ballarat or Coffs Harbour to employ all the 16-year olds partially. Not at last count.

Can the official figures for employment be believed? I would think not, if the ordinary sense of language was used.

Is economics an area in which special language which says the opposite of what is the manifest case permissible? I would think not.

Could a simple census-style exercise establish reality? Not hard. Even Roy Morgan could do it.

However the problem would be the definition.

Might AWE figures by postcode, say, suggest that some areas seem to not enjoy as much of the “good or service” of employment as others. I think so. Try Brunswick, parts of Dandenong, etc.

This is actual data and the Parliamentary Library is good at its supply. The librarians are of course not labour economists.

Do labour economists live in downmarket postcodes where there is rampant unemployment I don’t know.

I also don’t know what the ‘call’ for a dedicated labour economist is in Brunswick or parts of Dandenong.

But is there a call for a job? And not many jobs?

Anecdotally, at least.

Paul, the first sentence is offensive to all those government statisticians and economists who spend their careers trying to get a picture of what’s happening. It’s also completely untrue – for one thing, doctoring official statistics very rapidly becomes a self-defeating game that is easily detected (IIRC the official figures on growth in rice production during Mao’s time implied a final average production greater than the mass of the earth). Governments do, of course, spin the interpretation of these statistics, often in indefensible ways. And statistical agencies are often slow to change their methods in response to changes in the world. But neither of these implies the figures are lies.

I’m certainly a believer that most economists don’t put enough weight on problems of data collection and the way they can cause data to mislead before they start analyzing, but labour economics is probably the sub-field that suffers least from this – in fact labour economists tend to be looked down on a bit as “not being theoretically rigorous enough” – ie not building elegant castles on foundations of sand.

Seems to me your response is “bugger the evidence, everybody knows that …”. It’s the same attitude the Bushies had on Iraq.

Tim Worstall

Well, don’t want to sound flippant, but there were over 100 (120? 140? – can’t remember) public holidays a year in Imperial Rome (unsaustainable and based upon slavery I know…) They were slightly less than that in the Middle Ages, with all the Saint’s days and whatnot. One of the big challenges of industrialisation was acculturating the workforce (recently employed in agriculture) to do without all those festivals and holidays.

Are we seeing another attempt here to acculturate the Australian worker to the new regime?

Today, the Kalahari Bushmen live in a society with the lowest hours of work around. Of course, they also live without healthcare, TV or Tamagochi, so you make your tradeoffs… ;)

For myself, I like Tyler Cowen, who offers stern medicine, but his colleague Alex Tabbarok, who is no doubt just as enlightened, appears to be a tad more ‘red in tooth an claw’ about the old ‘free market’.

I listen to Tyler, I am sceptical of Alex. He is just a bit too ‘keen’ for an idea that Galbraith pointed out, rather a long time ago, doesn’t really exist.

The free market that is. All markets are part-managed by marketers. Some are more powerful in doing so than others. Governments lie about employment figures. Economists take official figures as gospel, and don’t do much original research on the ground, in the everyday, with real people.

As to substance: well, the merest walk around in the everyday world and the odd bit of head counting would show that unemployment figures are understated. That would be actual evidence.

Moving to the idea of partial employment as a partial panacea: the same process of actually counting heads, and asking a representative sample would show that part of the cost this kind of constrained maximisation for rather a lot of people, in rather a lot of sectors, is desperation.

But someone like me would say that, DD.

That said, the impact of changes including the IR reforms is in this direction. How this interacts with the economic cycle is harder to gauge, but I’d guess the biggest impacts will be in the early stages of a recovery, when employers will be able to offer ‘take it or leave it’ contracts.

Look, there are plenty of things we could do to make labour markets work better but all carry costs as well as benefits (life is a series of problems in constrained maximisation). When you’re willing to look at the evidence, including its weaknesses, we can talk.

Meanwhile your bigoted and automatic dismissal of all data you don’t like as spin produced by hired guns means there is literally nothing to talk about.

Employed economists (often with a public purse stipend) tend to be rather silent about the fakery of official figures.

This is surprising. The smallest amount of exploratory anthropology might show that genuine figures are required to begin to define the ‘problem/opportunity’.

The conservative push to repurpose the potential workforce as disposable, especially in terms of worker benefits, has been quite successful.

To ‘shift’ this into a ‘that’s what the workers want’ box is bizarre.

Economist jokes, anyone? Or where are Ross Gittins, and crusty old Ken Davidson?

At any given time there’s plenty of part timers wanting more hours, but if anything this mismatch been falling as part time work has become more popular. What this means is that, while the level of unemployment underestimates the amount of labour market slack, trends in unemployment are a reasonable indicator of trends in slack (ie it’s falling in Australia). The rise of part time work is not an indicator of increasing slack, because mismatch between desired and actual hours is not increasing. I don’t know the US figures on this stuff though – the case could be different there.

And, John, its this argument that leads me to think that your implicit argument that part time work is increasingly a refuge for those wanting full time work doesn’t quite stack up now – though it may have a decade or two ago.

No disagreement about the late 1990’s, but the ‘early noughts’? What country are you talking about?

On the second, I didn’t put forward any explanation of the rise of part-time work, just noted it as a fact. I agree that taken in isolation, your last sentence is probably right. Relative to a hypothetical alternative where more old-style standard-hours jobs were available, I think the opposite is probably true, particularly for single adults and men.

I get really annoyed with monocausal explanations of the rise of part time work. We don’t have all the data on these things we’d like, but such as we have (job satisfaction surveys, trends in desired hours of work, etc) gives little support for the theory that it’s mainly driven by employer demands. Changes in labour supply, from a variety of causes, seem to be very important. Cutting to the chase, it is likely the increase in part time work represents a net welfare gain for workers doing it.

In Australia, growth in full-time working hours has been offset by increasing reliance on part-time work. The problem is not so much an increase in aggregate labour input as the transfer of control over time implied by both long hours in standard jobs and ‘flexible’ rostering of part-time jobs.