Go West, Young Slacker

Matt Yglesias on unemployment:

... The great absurdity of the American system is that we tend to treat unemployment as a symptom of laziness as if someone who gets laid off could always just go move west and start up a Homestead Act farm. We know, however, that the nature of the modern business cycle is that events set in motion in 2008 have essentially guaranteed that a much larger proportion of the population will be jobless in 2009 than was jobless in 2007. ...

For indeed, one cannot just get a farm for the asking, save up some seed, get some animals and take it from there. It isn't that 'easy' to provide for yourself.

Which brings up again the point that in a modern society, wage employment at specialized tasks is the only thing that stands between most people and starvation. If no one wants to hire you, or has any use for you, or they won't hire you at a wage you can live on, you're just screwed and there's very little you can do about it in many cases besides resign yourself to a cheap diet of soda and junk that will inevitably make you unhealthy by tucking lots of nutritionless calories into your every meal.

You can't just move west and start a farm. Those days are past.

You can't even necessarily move anywhere. Do you know how much it costs to move from city to city if you want to take more than yourself and a couple pieces of luggage? A lot. And that move means losing whatever social network you'd already built, the cost of which is considerable, if impossible to account for until it's gone.

Solutions like the urban agriculture program in Detroit and other cities, like the Growing Power project that's spreading from its Milwaukee home, are going to therefore be an important part of an economic recovery. Giving people the ability to provide for their basic subsistence by doing necessary, intellectually challenging work (of a type which human beings are very well suited to do), that's a little outside what may be an entirely collapsed local wage economy, this is going to be necessary.

We may need to homestead right here at home, wherever that is, to beat this economy.