If full employment is a pipe dream, why are we routinely treating unemployment as a personal failure?

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In all seriousness it’s because employers hold nearly all of the bargaining power and mindshare. The recent focus on central banks raising interest rates to decrease economic activity with inflation as a primary target and restraining wage growth as a secondary target shows that decreasing workers’ average bargaining position is official government policy. In the US they sugarcoat it by saying they’re trying to control inflation and only have unemployment go up marginally. In New Zealand they’re more explicit and say tens of thousands of people need to become unemployed to stabilize inflation.

We don't, but we do consider prolonged unemployment as a personal failure.

Having Short-term unemployment is fine and a sign of a working economy where people move between companies. Long-term unemployment is something else entirely: it's a sign of people quitting the labor market and deciding not to contribute to society.

People here love Marx, yet they keep forgetting what he had to say on that issue: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Long-term unemployment means you're not giving according to your ability (and thus shouldn't receive according to your needs).

> Long-term unemployment means you're not giving according to your ability (and thus shouldn't receive according to your needs).

Or there are literally not enough jobs because of failed economic policy. We have this situation in Germany right now. There are about 2 million job openings, and official statistics report about 2 million unemployed. That makes it sound like it's only a matching problem (i.e. if we just enticed the unemployed to retrain or relocate, everything would sort itself out). But the statistics are "optimized" to look nicer than they actually are: Unemployed over the age of 58 are just taken out entirely, as is everyone currently undergoing retraining. (It's a meme in Germany that the unemployment office will send people to Microsoft Word courses for the 10th time because being in the course means they don't show up in the statistic.)

And then there's also the issue of people working part-time who actually want a full-time job. When you add all that up, we have around 4 million unused FTEs in Germany competing for 2 million open positions. That cannot possibly add up. If the politicians were serious about getting everyone into a job (which they sure say a lot into microphones), economic policy would need to be changed to incentivize job creation a whole lot more (e.g. by cutting down on NIMBYism in the construction and renewable energy sectors).

> UBI would bankrupt the nation, so would a large scale job guarantee program as described. > When asked to put a dollar value on a program the overeducated go on bleeting about higher order non-sense.

Being overeducated, I'll take a shot: 6 million US unemployed x $15/hour x 2000 hours/year x 2 to cover benefits, SSI, Medicare, etc works out to 360 Billion. Which is about 1/4 of the defense department budget. A lot of money but not disproportionate to what we spend on other things.

Just an aside here, that if that UBI was in exchange for ten or twelve hours a week of mostly-unskilled work from the unemployed on whatever the city or town decides is valuable, it might make a very visible improvement to community life.

1/4 of the defense budget used to protect the entire world. If we didn't have to do that, I'd agree.

I'm gonna take a long shot and say your education did not cover that part of world history.

You appear to think I meant to take 1/4 of the defense budget. That was only to illustrate the magnitude. You could cherry-pick your favorite US budgetary item instead and spare history.

I think there's room for distinguishing between full employment and job guarantees: providing a job for anyone who wants one doesn't have to be the same as requiring everyone to work.