Can we collect benefits now?

11 November 2008, 0042 EST

Alex Tabarrok explains why government employees should be considered unemployed.

Some of you will, I expect, object that Tabarrock is actually referring to those ~~employed by~~ receiving money from workfare programs, specifically those, uh, affiliated with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the New Deal. Yes he is. But I fail to see why one class of government employees is actually “unemployed” while every other government employee is “employed.”

I suppose one could argue that WPA workers were only temporarily paid for providing goods and services. To my mind, that answer creates fascinating conceptual issues, such as whether someone who loses his or her job becomes retroactively unemployed whilst they were working. But, more to the point, it would seem to place many government contractors into the ranks of the unemployed. My wife, for example, has a one-year non-renewable contractor position. Somehow, though, I think any application she submitted for unemployment insurance would be rejected.

(h/t Henry Farrell)

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.