On the Friday podcast, we took up the idea that layoffs might be good for our economy -- even if they're not necessarily good for the people involved.

For now, I'll run three letters on this, two after the jump: Jaimee writes:

I was laid off not once, but twice, by the age of 30. While both were very hard on the ego, I came out of both experiences actually better off. I tried new things, new types of employment, and am now in a very steady, secure, albeit boring job. Its scary, there is no doubt. In both experiences I had responsibilities, mortgage, car payment, then COBRA on top of that, but it is a chance to re-evaluate like your definition at the top of the show eluded to. Sometimes you need to see things as an opportunity, God's way of getting out the crowbar, wedging you out of a mire and making you take a chance. Sorry to sound so Pollyanna, but it helped me a lot (once I got past the initial being p****d) to think of it this way.

David, who just graduated with an MA in economics, writes:

The view that layoffs are good or even natural is intellectually grounded in the idea that there is a "natural rate of unemployment" which is revealed to us by the "Phillips curve." These are in fact very controversial concepts not at all universally accepted by economists (see for example James K. Galbraith's excellent critique in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997), and in that sense I believe that it might have been useful to know that the view that layoffs are good comes from a particular and indeed conservative set of highly abstract neoclassical economic arguments fraught with controversy.
In my view the argument that layoffs are bad for the individual but somehow good for the economy should be put in its intellectual context, and perhaps next to some critiques not just from the individual perspective, but from opposing academic perspectives.

And here's a letter from someone who has traveled my road. David writes:

I agree with the economist who said that layoffs are a necessary factor for growth in the economy. Creative destruction and all that.
However, as someone who has been laid off twice in the last 4 months, it seems that the current large numbers of layoffs are not the result of archaic industries being replaced by new efficient innovative companies but more of a systemic meltdown. I wouldn't mind retraining for the next big thing (whatever that is?) but there is precious little safety net in our system and it isn't clear any significant hiring is going on anywhere ( I'm too old to join the military!).

categories: Letters

1:54 - December 8, 2008

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