New Service Jobs . The 10 Services of Solidarity
If unemployment doesn’t stop growing, important needs, notably in terms of social services and administration of natural resources, will remain unsatisfied. Do these not constitute, as has long been asked, important layers of potential employment, contingent only on effective demand ? Or, by default, that the needs be clearly identified and the corresponding functions be taken in charge, in whole or in part, by the collectivity ?
The idea in itself is not new and has often been evoked, along with the wish that rather than paying the unemployed to do nothing we have provide them with some useful social function. Curiously enough, nevertheless, no precise evaluation has been made up to now of the probable costs and benefits of measures adopted to this end.
This article reports on the results of a first simulation, at the micro and macro-economic levels, of those costs and benefits. Even if the exercise is fragile, as all simulations necessarily are, the merit of the authors is high by reason of the hypotheses they have tested. They give us a notion of the direct effects and costs of a policy that aimed to develop some jobs which, even if not immediately profitable, would certainly not exceed the fiscal and social costs of either high unemployment or the other far less appropriate measures which are often taken.
