Rights

This constant acceleration in productivity maps precisely onto the economic assumption of infinite growth as the mark of a healthy economy. It is, thus, no surprise that Arendt reserves particular disdain for economics:

The reliance of economic analysis on statistics (notably, much of current economics, half a century afterArendt’s work, is completely absorbed inmathematicmodelling) drewparticular concern from Arendt. Statistics, which she called ‘the mathematical treatment of reality’, denote an era of conformism, behaviourism and automatism in human affairs. The harmof this view of the world is that it transforms our way of knowing and experiencing reality:

This sharp critique could have been aimed directly at the idea of a labour market: a mathematically based economic fiction. All efforts to improve temporary labour migration programmes, by improving our understanding of labour markets, rely on having better statistics. Arendt’s insights help us understand the harms of this formula for improvement: if the labour market is a representation, not a ‘reality’, a clearer understanding of it offers little for improving circumstances of individual human beings. Arendt’s insights, besides simply raising a general scepticism, locate this concern with the shift throughwhich labour has come to predominate over other aspects of the human condition. This returns us to a central problem in recrafting temporary labour migration programmes: they reduce people to labour alone. Arendt’s understandingof the social realmas an impoverished setting for human interaction is also predictive of key pitfalls in migrant labour programmes because a diminishing of family rights and a loss of privacy often parallel the exclusive focus on labour and skill levels.