Question
Economic Policy: What specific actions should be taken to lower the unemployment rate?
Answer
The answers to this related question might be helpful.
There is significant emerging evidence that large segments of the middle class in the developed world will basically become unemployable soon, leading to growing income inequality. What tools and services could turn this class into entrepreneurs?
To the existing answers to this and the other question, I'll add one potentially new suggestion: stop calling it the unemployment rate.
The metric, along with its alter-ego, GDP growth rate, has outlived its utility as a measure of economic performance.
What might you substitute in its place?
I propose simply treating people and/or households like corporations for the purpose of performance measurement: classify them as for-profit or non-profit and measure them in terms if revenues, margins, costs, DCF/NPV, etc.
This will also effectively help measure economic performance of people who are a couple of degrees removed from direct economic participation, like housewives, house-husbands and even children.
I've already started doing this for myself. It is amazing how much simpler household finances seem when you manage them using corporate rather than household accounting methods (i.e. double-entry book-keeping etc., instead of paycheck budgeting).
In fact, there is no really good reason to treat individuals and households any differently, with a different tax regime etc. Unify the corporate and household income tax codes. Call it a Class H corporation (H for household). People complain that corporations are treated like people when it comes to rights but not when it comes to responsibilities. Corporatizing households is the smart move. Households declare profits, and pay taxes on that. Having them pay taxes on paychecks and then claim a whole bunch of deductions is a convoluted scheme that effectively does the same thing (i.e. you tax revenue instead of income, and then do the costs subtraction in messy ways via deductions).
I have a whole utopian scheme based on this premise. It also takes care of healthcare etc. I have absolutely no hope that it will go anywhere. Except maybe to the screen as an indie movie.
There is significant emerging evidence that large segments of the middle class in the developed world will basically become unemployable soon, leading to growing income inequality. What tools and services could turn this class into entrepreneurs?
To the existing answers to this and the other question, I'll add one potentially new suggestion: stop calling it the unemployment rate.
The metric, along with its alter-ego, GDP growth rate, has outlived its utility as a measure of economic performance.
What might you substitute in its place?
I propose simply treating people and/or households like corporations for the purpose of performance measurement: classify them as for-profit or non-profit and measure them in terms if revenues, margins, costs, DCF/NPV, etc.
This will also effectively help measure economic performance of people who are a couple of degrees removed from direct economic participation, like housewives, house-husbands and even children.
I've already started doing this for myself. It is amazing how much simpler household finances seem when you manage them using corporate rather than household accounting methods (i.e. double-entry book-keeping etc., instead of paycheck budgeting).
In fact, there is no really good reason to treat individuals and households any differently, with a different tax regime etc. Unify the corporate and household income tax codes. Call it a Class H corporation (H for household). People complain that corporations are treated like people when it comes to rights but not when it comes to responsibilities. Corporatizing households is the smart move. Households declare profits, and pay taxes on that. Having them pay taxes on paychecks and then claim a whole bunch of deductions is a convoluted scheme that effectively does the same thing (i.e. you tax revenue instead of income, and then do the costs subtraction in messy ways via deductions).
I have a whole utopian scheme based on this premise. It also takes care of healthcare etc. I have absolutely no hope that it will go anywhere. Except maybe to the screen as an indie movie.