There’s a joke going around, due originally to Daniel Davies*, to the effect that unemployment is an extremely low productivity “industry,” and that “There have been no major efficiency gains in unemployment in the last hundred years.” All of the linked bloggers use this to make a case for an “industrial policy” of sorts, oriented toward moving people out of unemployment into some higher-productivity activity.

That’s all well and good, but it made me think: maybe we should also be figuring out ways to increase the productivity of unemployment! That’s a point that’s sort of implicit in some of my recent posts, where I argue against the standard paradigm in which wage labor seems to be the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. If you believe, as I do, that it’s a good idea to reduce the amount of time people spend in paid employment, it would also be nice to increase the productivity of whatever they do in the time thus freed up.

And I would argue that we have, in fact, seen improvements in the productivity of unemployment — or at least, of non-employment. People without jobs can work in a community garden, or contribute to Wikipedia, or post funny videos on YouTube. Those may be small things, but they do improve our collective well-being — and two of them would have been impossible ten years ago.