[ameliaquining]

Are economists obsessed with job creation? Government economists tend to focus on it because that's literally their job, but my sense of academic economists has always been that they're pretty good at not eliding distinctions like between employment and economic value.

[jacobwilliamroy]

100% employment is possible. Just look at any U.S. military base. Without poverty, capitalists lose some of the leverage over the working class which makes the current levels of exploitation difficult to maintain without massive price hikes. I think the U.K. had an experience with mass employment that convinced capitalists to raise the prices of their goods just to maintain the exploitation which poverty allowed.

[atemerev]

Sure, we once had an entire country with 300 million population, living like on a military base: barracks as residences, the same assortment available in department stores, symbolic salaries, some involuntary labor, and no freedom of movement. It was the USSR.

Not everyone liked this lifestyle. At least the personnel on military bases know when their contract ends, so they could return to life of freedom and opportunity.

[sokoloff]

Or maybe the increase in employment created surplus demand for goods and services which would raise the market-clearing price.

[whatshisface]

Capitalists can't just raise the price of goods, unless they're in a cartel which is illegal in most of the western world. They'd be unable to coordinate thanks to competition. It's a double-edged sword, they can't coordinate to save the earth or uplift humanity, but they also can't coordinate to stamp down the proletariat.