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Is productivity at odds with full employment?
If the goal of a business is to be productive (to spend as little as possible to bring in the most money), isn't that at odds with employing enough people to reduce the unemployment rate?
Is this a paradigm that needs to be changed? And if so, how?
Econ 101 or not, I know that 40 years ago more people worked at jobs to produce whatever product a business was producing.
An office that required 3 full time employees 40 years ago is now run by a single individual and a computer.
Today employees take it for granted that they'll work lots of overtime (often without extra pay) to get the job done. That expectation, coupled with technological advances has reduced the demand for workers. From the point of view of a business, that's the goal: reduce employee expense if possible.
@ inspired: I don't hate businesses or business owners. I have a small business of my own, and my father was an entrepreneur. But the question is real: right now our culture is obsessed with cost effectiveness and price, to the extent that we've all started to buy crappy products at lower costs just to have the stuff, and the very big businesses that have made that happen have cleaned up at the expense of smaller businesses that were trying to maintain the business model you describe.
4 Answers
- Anonymous10 years ago
What makes you think a private business owner is obligated to hire anyone at all?
Sometimes a business has to cut expenses to survive. Especially small to medium sized businesses.
By the way, your assumption is wrong. While a good business owner doesn't like to over spend, it's common to buy a higher quality item in order to provide a better product or service.
The leftist movement in this country has caused so many people to blindly hate business. Fact is, most business owners I know are good people who treat their employees well. Like anything, there are always a few bad eggs, but that doesn't mean people like you should start hating all business people.
- ?Lv 410 years ago
On one hand you want ot be as productive as possible and keep labor costs down.
Once accomplished, if you can increase market share, you want to employ as much as possible to acheive the increased market share, that;s how economics work.
- Anonymous10 years ago
Of course not. Less than full employment is obviously wasting resources, and is unproductive by definition. Unfortunately, that's Capitalism for you.
