LUMP OF LABOR. Anthropology and Economics contemplates the erosion of manufacturing jobs.

Structural unemployment is a fact of our world, and it is a problem that will get steadily worse.

It's not a completely grim post. I submit that it's missing something. We're all structurally employed, compared to the founders of the City of DeKalb or dairy farmers in the pre-electricity era.

I suspect that talk of an eighty hour work week would have struck them as utopian (did that word exist in 1870?) in the extreme. Sunday might have been the Sabbath day, and the Lord might have rested, but those cows had to be milked -- by hand -- before and after church.

I could probably structurally underemploy myself very easily by no longer assigning homework and switching to scan-tron examinations, er, "objective assessments."