I want to rejoin a debate I’ve engaged in on and off with my colleague Peter Frase, about his signature issues of work and unemployment.

In his latest post, Peter  summarizes the debate pretty well. He has long argued, as he reiterates, “that in the quest for full employment, we ought to be less obsessed with maximizing job creation and more concerned with making it easier and better to not be employed.”

Now he advances the discussion by citing “the most persuasive argument” against his own view: the proposition “that unemployment is really bad for people, and they don’t like it, and therefore it’s very important to minimize its incidence.”