“Full Employment . . . has become an aim of Conservative policy and the strongest argument against socialist critics.” That’s famed economist Joan Robinson, in 1962 trolling to her left and her right. British unemployment had been below 2 percent for most of the period since the war, without runaway inflation. Keynes had solved the problem of unemployment, converted the Conservatives, and stolen the communists’ best argument. Capitalism apparently didn’t need a reserve army of labor after all.

Just fifteen years later, like a Star Wars opening crawl: “The hopes which accompanied the Keynesian revolution, of reforming capitalism so as to ensure continuous prosperity with full employment, are now all but extinguished. The slide into crisis in the capitalist world has re-established the pre-Keynesian orthodoxy as the conventional wisdom at both national and international levels.” The rentier strikes back.

Two generations have since come of age in a world where getting a job and building a career is a fierce competition against your peers. Even the winners are anxious. Comfortable spots are precarious; the losers have nothing to blame but their CV. In a buyer’s market it seems like the employers are bringing the goods; they create the jobs, we just work in them.