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A headline on the front page of the New York Times for March l9, 1997, one clearly designed to tug at our sentiments, proclaimed: "4,000 Hearts Full of Hope Line Up for 700 Jobs." And the article was effective. We learn of Gayle Blanding, who put on her best dress and kept repeating over and over: "I have great confidence. I have great skills." But the "38-year-old unemployed woman still trembled as she rode the A train from Harlem to midtown Manhattan yesterday" despite the fact that her l9-year-old daughter kept whispering into her ear: "You're going to get that job."
Lasidy Honoret had taken an unpaid day off from his $5-an-hour cook's job in order to apply for a position as a staff member at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, reopening soon after renovations. An 18-year-old kid? No, Mr. Honoret is 33, from the Dominican Republic, and a lawyer in his old life. He has worked in factories and supermarkets since he hit New York. He had had a dream of going to Harvard and of sending money back to his 7l-year-old mother. But now he's mashing potatoes at a Boston Market and wondering why he left home. Well, you get the picture. Seven hundred jobs. An explosion of applications. The hotel expected l,000 folks to show up. Four thousand did. The police had to erect barricades to help shuffle the surge of hopeful and desperate humanity along in an orderly way.
For most of us, this is an unhappy story. Seven hundred people will get decent jobs, at least by comparison to what they are now doing and earning. That leaves 3,300 hopefuls shorn of hope. It's the way the market works, we will be told. It's the way the market must work. But for us noneconomic types, something is amiss. We think there should be more and better jobs. We think that a trained lawyer should probably be doing something other than doling out mashed potatoes at a chicken chain. But then we remember other stories. This is America. You've got to start someplace.
A few of us recall tales told by our immigrant grandparents. My grandfather, who was bitter about this to his dying day, described his first Christmas Eve in America. A hired farm hand, he was forced to shovel frozen cow manure out of a barn on a bitter Colorado night, the icy blast off the dry plains chilling his bones and his spirit. He never got over it. It wasn't the hard, even brutal, and, to his grandchildren, demeaning work that got to him—that was to be his lot for years. By then, he had already learned that. The new country, this America, didn't have streets paved with gold. His bewildered, poor family had been greeted by no welcoming committee. Those in Nebraska, then Colorado, who worked the immigrants but also derided them (at least some did), mocked his awkward attempts to speak the English language. But it wasn't that which still rankled decades later. It was that he had to work Christmas Eve. Was nothing holy?
The answer, I suppose, is that nothing is holy in a world of perfect markets. Everything is up for sale. But markets never work perfectly. So some things are off limits. Or, at least, they used to be. No more, argues Robert Kuttner. He is joined by Margaret Radin, a law professor responding to the triumph of the "law and economics" school in her own profession. Kuttner, the economist, offers the clearer exposition of the move to redescribe nearly everything in our lives (families, churches, the law, bodies, and body parts) in econometric terms. But both Kuttner and Radin are arguing with or against the Chicago School, associated with Milton Friedman, now with Gary Becker and other important (and Nobel Prize-winning) economists as well as with such formidable exponents of law and economics as Richard Posner and Richard Epstein, also of the University of Chicago. So this is a Chicago thing, and my own position at that extraordinary institution only deepens the Chicago connection, here in a spirit of debate.
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