Why do we assume everyone should be working?
The article questions the assumption that everyone should be employed, arguing that economics does not always support universal labor participation. It cites research suggesting that forcing employment can reduce overall welfare and that the economy may sometimes benefit from leaving certain workers out of the labor force. The author calls for reconsidering tax and benefit policies in light of these findings.
- ▪Labor, like any resource, is not always optimally utilized by employing every individual.
- ▪Research by Acemoglu and Restrepo (2026) indicates that the assumption of universal employment has been detrimental over the past four decades.
- ▪Negative oil prices and negative interest rates illustrate how the economy can signal excess supply and choose to reduce production or spending.
- ▪Current tax and benefit systems assume full employment, which may constrain economic efficiency.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Wilsons Blog |
| Canonical URL | https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/08/10/why-do-we-assume-everyone-should-be-working/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 10 Aug 2026 05:16:26 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-10T06:05:42.052Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-10T06:05:42.052Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | nNv8mCe3u_LG · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Why do we assume everyone should be working? I was talking to a friend of mine and I asked this. She said “of course everyone should be working, I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff” In that statement though there really is a non obvious implied logic. So the next question: does economics support that statement always? That if we want more stuff, and better lives, everyone should be working harder? No, only sometimes; in economics, utilizing a resource to it’s fullest at all times is not a given. Labor is a resource, like water, and yet we do not drain the oceans with the same fervour as we employ people, trying to find a job for every drop. When we have implicit assumptions such as these, it drives our decision-making.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Wilsons Blog.
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