Fishing for a Job

Here is my interpretation. I see an analogy between job search and fishing. Job search is like fishing in two ways:

You can put your line in the water all day, but if the fish don't bite you'll still go home with nothing.
The more fishermen there are, the less productive any individual fisherman will be.

And that's a key point. As the fisheries become more congested with more and more fishermen going after the same or fewer fish, each fisherman's effort gets less productive. The increasing number of fishermen and increasing fishing effort creates an "external cost," to use some microeconomic jargon. This leads to "overfishing" -- an inefficient overcommitment of resources and effort to fishing that leads to declining schools of fish and a decreasing catch.

Fishing is an industry in which well-conceived government intervention can be efficient. By limiting the catch, through regulation or taxation, government intervention can give us more fish cheaper. In that sense, "overfishing" is inefficient.

Job search, too, becomes less productive when the job markets are more congested with many unemployed people, and this, too, is an external social cost. I would argue that free-market levels of unemployment, like "overfishing," are usually inefficient, and for similar reasons.

However, there are also differences between unemployment and fishing. Efficient government policies to deal with overfishing are policies to reduce the number of fishermen and the fishing effort, shifting them to other, more productive work. But it doesn't make sense to try to limit the number of people seeking work, and there aren't other fields to try to shift them into. This is an inefficiency that has to be dealt with in other ways.

Permanence, again