Today Drudge linked to a story about an open mic picking up a private conversation between Barack Obama and David Cameron (yeah, that David Cameron). Oh crap, right? Private conversation, on tape – this can’t end well. Actually, though, it’s fine. It’s just a simple conversation about dealing with a high-stress job and finding the right level of delegation. There’s nothing magical about it, but there’s just enough that you get a small reminder of why you like Obama.  (Cue cheap shot: you may remember some of Bush’s candid interactions with political figures: with Blair, in which our dear leader channels Alanis Morissette; at the same conference, with Merkel, in which he channels Glenn Quagmire; with Cheney, in which we had an early preview of this administration’s attitude towards the press; and of course, at the latest G8, with the whole crew, in which he tacitly admits he’s going to nuke Iran on January 19th, Major Kong-style.)

Someone left a comment on the Obama story which ascribed the 200,000-person attendance for Obama’s July 24th speech to Germany’s 12% unemployment rate, which itself is evidence of the evils of liberalism. This is stupid, for a variety of reasons (for one, Germany’s most recent unemployment rate was only 7.4% in May), but it did make me stop and think a little. What are our goals as a society? Not that anyone besides this one random person thinks this way, but (stepping back from the specifics of “Obama speech”) the idea that there’s some kind of moral imperative for people to be at work instead of participating in a potentially historic moment is plainly ridiculous. Where does the line get drawn, though?  How “productive” do we expect a person to be in order to “deserve” the benefits of society?

This is one of the issues that has driven the capitalism-vs.-socialism debate that drones on and on, which I don’t want to rehash. I’m interested in how technology shapes the question, though. Right now it seems like globalization is the primary scapegoat when the plight of American manufacturing or the threat to the American IT industry is addressed, but in my mind, globalization commutes where technology compresses: globalization replaces a job in Cleveland with a cheaper job in Chengdu, while technology completely eliminates the need for that job anywhere. In the former case, the long-term effects would seem to be globally homogenous labor prices, where in the latter, the long-term effects would seem to be a lot more people without jobs.

High unemployment is, of course, bad.  It’s bad for the unemployed, because they have bills to pay. It’s bad for the economy at large because fewer people are participating by spending. It’s bad for communities where there is high unemployment, because that can translate into higher crimerates, lower quality of tax-funded services when they are most in demand, etc. It’s just obviously bad, right?

But what’s so great about full employment? Full employment means that a lot of people have crappy jobs that revolve around braindead or soul-crushing tasks. It means there are parents that can’t spend the necessary time with their children, creative people who can’t create because they’re busy flipping burgers or filling out spreadsheets, people with health problems driven by job stress. A whole class of things that have value that we haven’t figured out how to compensate properly (How much value is a parent creating when they do a great job raising their kid?) are neglected in an employment-based economy.

We put up with the drudgery of an employment-based economy because we see the costs of unemployment as worse, which is admittedly a great little piece of circular logic. But if high unemployment rates become an inevitable consequence of technological progress, what happens?  How would we protect against the ills of unemployment that we see today?