The best job I ever had (apart from this one) was in a labyrinthine second-hand bookshop. The old house had books crammed into every room from the cellar to the attic. My job as a teenager was to shelve books, organise the ever-unruly sections and run the coffee shop. The house was so big I clipped a baby monitor to my jeans so I would know when someone rang the bell for service. There was a lot of running up and down stairs, but there was always time for tea and conversation with my elderly boss, who was clever, funny and kind.
Economists are increasingly of the opinion that the quality of jobs matters as much as their quantity. Dani Rodrik, an economics professor at Harvard, believes one of the “fundamental problems of contemporary capitalism” is “its failure to produce adequate numbers of good jobs”. He sees evidence for this in polarising labour markets, rising geographical inequality and declining job stability.
Daron Acemoglu, an MIT professor, argues that “no known human society has created shared prosperity purely through redistribution” and that “it is good jobs, not redistribution, that provide people with purpose and meaning in life”.