# The war on work

By [Brandon Donnelly](https://paragraph.com/@brandondonnelly), 2016-07-01

creating-jobs, ed-glaeser, employment, entrepreneurship, income, income-stagnation, job-crisis, jobs, manhattan-institute, minimum-wage, uncategorized, unemployment, wage, war-on-work, work

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Air Canada bumped me from my flight this morning and so I am spending the day hanging out at Toronto Pearson Airport. I can think of more enjoyable ways to spend Canada Day, but at least there’s a nice seating area in Terminal 1 with free wifi and lots of plugs.  

I just finished watching the below talk by Harvard economist Ed Glaeser at the Manhattan Institute. His overall thesis is that unemployment is a far worse problem than income stagnation and that the US needs to stop creating incentives for people _not_ to work. He refers to it as a war on work.

He addresses a few topics that we’ve talked about here on this blog, such as [guaranteed basic incomes](http://brandondonnelly.com/post/144954786388/should-switzerland-adopt-an-unconditional-basic), as well as others that we haven’t talked about, such as raising the minimum wage. To give you one spoiler: He argues that a higher minimum wage has been shown to cause an overall drop in employment, which he, again, believes is a deeper problem.

Glaeser delivers a passionate performance. So if you have 30 minutes to spare – perhaps you’re stuck in an airport somewhere – I recommend you give it a watch. If you can’t see the video below, [click here](https://youtu.be/8xaNV_6wgak?t=2m37s).

\[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xaNV\_6wgak?rel=0&w=560&h=315\]

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*Originally published on [Brandon Donnelly](https://paragraph.com/@brandondonnelly/the-war-on-work)*