Research

My research examines the history of international economic development, the transformation of global labor markets, the history of the United Nations and other international institutions, and the history of transnational projects of social and economic statistics-making. I am interested in historicizing economic categories as a way to open up space for rethinking the ends and aims of economic institutions, particularly around the question of the place of work and labor in social life. Since I am trained in both qualitative and quantitative research methods, I am able to approach these issues from two angles. I discuss both statistical changes in patterns of employment and what such employment statistics conceal, namely the expansion of forms of informal, precarious, and non-standard work that are difficult to categorize within the terms of the unemployment/full-employment framework. Here are some of my ongoing research projects.

A Global History of Unemployment

This project follows a network of economists, statisticians, and policy advisors at the United Nations and other international institutions who set out to eradicate unemployment on the world-scale, after WWII. I look at how these officials operationalized their political visions in new statistical measures of employment and unemployment, paying particular attention to the difficulties they encountered in trying to export their vision to the post-colonial world. I then focus on how their labor-force constructs went into crisis in later years.

Most scholars date the crisis of full-employment policies to the last quarter of the twentieth century. My research shows that the crisis of this framework began earlier, in the 1960s in the global South, before spreading to global North regions in the decades that followed. As levels of unemployment rose, increasingly many workers were forced to take forms of work that were difficult to categorize. Government officials and international actors came to face a dual, economic and epistemological crisis: they had trouble conceptualizing the forms of labor insufficiency that workers were encountering.

I tell the story of the origins of alternative measures of labor underutilization, such as ‘informality’ and ‘atypical’ work, and examine how these were deployed in shifting policy discussions. Governments worldwide began to encourage workers to take the sorts of precarious jobs that the full employment framework had tried to eradicate. That in turn made it ever more difficult to deploy unemployment and GDP-growth statistics as indicators of the overall state of the economy, even as these measures continued to shape policy debates.

This project intervenes into contemporary literatures on international development and economic statistics, as well as discourses around the history and future of work, to reveal how the political vision of full employment—with its implied relationship between job growth, productivity growth, and GDP growth—shaped the postwar world and remains with us today. I also discuss alternatives to the full employment project, which were considered in the postwar era.

A World without Work

Why are there so many people all around the world today who need to work but cannot find steady jobs? I examine the causes of, on the one hand, a worsening global oversupply of labor, and, on the other hand, a persistent global underdemand for labor. This project provides original analyses of demographic growth, agricultural modernization, global industrialization and deindustrialization, the rise of service-sector employment, East Asia’s economic success, and the precaritization and informalization of global labor. I also examine a range of solutions, including Keynesian demand stimulus, jobs guarantees, work sharing and work reduction, and guaranteed basic incomes, as well as solutions that involve more major transformations in the nature and organization of labor markets. This project builds on my book, Automation and the Future of Work.

Other Research

In the future, I plan to conduct studies of the history of unemployment since 1800, starting with the early 19th century socialist theories of the ‘industrial reserve army’; of the global persistence of the old regime; of the history of utopian thinking regarding the redistribution of work and leisure since More’s Utopia; and of the history of the European labor movement since 1890, in relation to processes of industrialization and deindustrialization.