Today’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the unemployment rate continuing to hold close to its lowest level in 70 years, despite a slight uptick last month. This might seem like good news, but it has two groups of Americans deeply troubled. One is the business community, which counts on a surplus of available workers to keep wages down. The other, unfortunately, is mainstream economists—and the policy makers who listen to them.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has linked low unemployment to high inflation, publicly discussing the need to restore “balance” to the labor market—meaning increase unemployment and suppress wage growth—to tame consumer prices. A director at the American Enterprise Institute, a corporate-friendly think tank, recently called for “a pretty big increase in the unemployment rate.” Republicans in several states have introduced legislation to loosen child-labor restrictions as a way to expand the labor supply.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, seems to agree that low unemployment poses a problem, and to see immigration as an answer. In December, Axios reported that Biden’s “top economic aides are concerned that the lack of immigrant workers is leading to labor shortages.” Last month, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas called for immigration reform on the grounds that “there are businesses around this country that are desperate for workers” and “desperate workers in foreign countries that are looking for jobs in the United States.” Apparently our own workers aren’t desperate enough.

[Derek Thompson: What does the shocking unemployment report really mean?]

To the average person, opposition to low unemployment and rising wages is deeply counterintuitive. But it has long been central to economic policy. As Glenn Hubbard, a Columbia University economist who chaired George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, has written, “Since the dawn of their discipline, economists have understood the goal of the economic system to be optimizing consumption—producing goods and services as cheaply as possible and getting them in the hands of individuals who want them to improve living conditions.” In this way of thinking, labor is just another commodity, like wood or oil, and Americans are best off when it is plentiful and cheap.

American public policy has largely managed to keep things that way. Over the past 50 years, as both parties supported the entry of millions of unskilled immigrants and the offshoring of entire industries, America’s per capita gross domestic product more than doubled after adjusting for inflation. Productivity of labor rose by a similar amount, and corporate profits per capita nearly tripled. Yet over the same time period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly earnings of the typical worker rose by less than 1 percent.

In the coronavirus pandemic’s aftermath, for the first time in a long time, many employers are discovering that they can’t fill jobs at the low wages they’re accustomed to offering. “We hear from businesses every day that the worker shortage is their top challenge,” Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said last May. This is the precise circumstance under which wages might finally rise. Instead, the business community is looking to government to get them out of a jam, and leaders on both sides of the aisle seem only too eager to help.

This is a grave mistake—politically, economically, and morally. If employers are struggling to find workers, they should offer better pay and conditions. If that comes at the expense of some profits, or requires some prices to rise, well, that’s how markets are supposed to work. In most other contexts, capitalism’s proponents celebrate how the market creates incentives for businesses to solve problems. In that respect, a labor shortage is a great problem to have. Only by challenging employers to improve job quality and boost productivity will we find out what the market’s awesome power can achieve for American workers and their families.

The notion of a “labor shortage” in a market economy presents something of a puzzle. The basic principle of supply and demand suggests that, if employers can’t find enough workers, they’ll simply have to offer higher wages or better working conditions. Perhaps in the face of a sudden shock—say, in the middle of a pandemic—a temporary shortage might arise. The labor supply could shrink faster than businesses could adjust. But that’s not the situation today. Labor-force participation has returned to 2019 levels; real wages have been falling after a brief bump early in the pandemic. When employers say there isn’t enough labor, what they really mean is that they can’t find enough people willing to work under the terms that they want to offer—and that they're doing a poor job increasing productivity with the workers they have.

The irony is that the most fervent free-market economists and business leaders are often the first to complain about labor shortages and overheated labor markets. So they need some explanation for why supply and demand suddenly don’t apply. Thus the trope of “jobs Americans won’t do.” The idea is that wages are determined by some objective measure of productivity. You get paid what you’re worth to your employer, no more, no less. On this theory, certain jobs—like busing tables in a fast-food restaurant or picking crops in a hot field—just don’t command wages high enough for most Americans to want to do them.

In truth, there’s no such thing as objectively higher- or lower-value jobs. Those determinations are set by market conditions, which are in turn shaped by public policy. There is, therefore, a circularity to the dynamic: Wages are influenced by judgments about what a given job should be worth and thus whether a purported shortage should be remedied by policy makers. Although it’s tempting to say that the market has decided that software development pays $61 an hour while picking lettuce pays $16, that observation falters on the fact that farm owners can’t actually find workers at that low wage. (If you offered computer programmers $16 an hour and made them work in the hot sun, you would have trouble finding enough of them too.) That’s why the federal government created an H-2A agricultural-guest-worker program that has swelled from fewer than 50,000 annual visas in 2005 to more than 250,000 in 2021.

No one thinks twice when professionals in office buildings see their wages rise, or when employers have to woo them with free meals and comfy chairs. Only when lower-wage workers see gains, even briefly, do we suddenly have an economic crisis on our hands.

[Annie Lowrey: Why everyone is so mad about the economy]

The sober economists have an explanation for this too: inflation. Sure, everyone wants to see low-wage workers do better, in the abstract. But if we start paying people too much, employers will have to raise prices to cover rising wages, and we’ll get inflation. In the argot of the Federal Reserve, wage growth must be kept “consistent” with its target 2 percent inflation rate.

The first problem with this reaction is that, as an empirical matter, tight labor markets are not necessarily associated with high inflation. In the late 1970s, as inflation was surging, the unemployment rate was high too: 5 to 6 percent. Throughout both the late 1990s and the late 2010s, an unemployment rate below 4 percent coincided with low inflation. Over the past year, as inflation fell from its high of 9 percent to less than 5 percent—much closer to the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent—the unemployment rate fell along with it.

One reason for the disconnect is that market forces create a constant incentive for employers to do more with less. Faced with pressure to raise wages, the rational response is to seek productivity increases wherever possible—or even, gasp, to accept lower profits for shareholders. A remarkable illustration comes from the 1960s, when the United States decided to end the Mexican bracero program that provided farms with half a million low-wage guest workers each year. The result was not the proverbial $50 pint of strawberries, but rapid mechanization. In other words, instead of relying on many poorly paid jobs filled by guest workers, the industry created new, better jobs Americans would do—in equipment development, production, and operation. The lesson: If employers know that they’ll always have to pursue profit with a constrained labor supply, they will invest and innovate in ways that benefit workers. Bringing manufacturing back to American shores, for example, would not mean replicating Asian sweatshops, but rather creating capital-intensive, high-productivity factories with good jobs here at home.

We also should scrutinize the term inflation, which doesn’t mean the same thing at all times to all people. For workers at the low end of the income scale, wage increases are desirable even if they do partly translate to higher prices, because those workers will see their earnings grow faster than the prices they pay for consumer goods. (This is because labor is only one of many factors that determine prices). Wage growth may fuel some inflation, but those receiving the raises see real net gains. Higher-income workers might lose out in this scenario, as they pay more for the same goods without getting a raise. After decades of widening inequality, market forces would finally work to the benefit of those who have been left behind.

And yet, the political and economic establishment sees this outcome as a cause for alarm, not excitement. Enthusiasm for “free markets” turns out to depend on which interests those markets are serving. As both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have recently reported, corporations seem to be taking advantage of the inflation story to raise prices beyond what their rising costs require. Yet conservative think tanks and op-ed columnists seem uninterested in calling on the government to tackle that issue. Equally damning for the left of center, meanwhile, is the embrace of immigration as a “solution” to inflation—which finally acknowledges the reality, long denied by liberals, that unskilled immigrants suppress the wages of low-wage workers already here. “When labor is in short supply relative to demand, employers offer higher wages,” explained the pro-immigration advocacy group FWD.us last month. “Immigration policy that responds quickly to market shifts can stabilize prices for consumers and offer relief to employers.”

Low prices for consumers and relief for employers, but no mention of existing workers: a fine summary of America’s economic agenda for the past half-century. One hopes that the spectacle of our leaders scrambling to keep poor workers from getting ahead will finally expose its absurdity. Good jobs that allow workers to support their families and communities can’t be just a hoped-for by-product of a market economy; they must be its purpose. Gains in consumption and material living standards are good, but cheaper prices through lower wages is a losing proposition for working-class families and the nation as a whole.

The modern American economy has not failed with respect to the material standard of living. It has failed in the creation of insecure jobs that do not meet workers’ needs, a shift in the distribution of income that has left working families struggling, and a decay in social solidarity as the winners declare themselves the most valuable and the losers expendable. To reverse those trends, workers must have the power that comes from being needed.

Support for this article was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Most war correspondents don’t become household names, but as the Second World War raged, every American knew Ernie Pyle. His great subject was not the politics of the war, or its strategy, but rather the men who were fighting it. At the height of his column’s popularity, more than 400 daily newspapers and 300 weeklies syndicated Pyle’s dispatches from the front. His grinning face graced the cover of Time magazine. An early collection of his columns, Here Is Your War, became a best seller. It was followed by Brave Men, rereleased this week by Penguin Classics with an introduction by David Chrisinger, the author of the recent Pyle biography The Soldier’s Truth.

Pyle was one of many journalists who flocked to cover the Second World War. But he was not in search of scoops or special access to power brokers; in fact, he avoided the generals and admirals he called “the brass hats.” What Pyle looked for, and then conveyed, was a sense of what the war was really like. His columns connected those on the home front to the experiences of loved ones on the battlefield in Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. For readers in uniform, Pyle’s columns sanctified their daily sacrifices in the grinding, dirty, bloody business of war. Twelve million Americans would read about what it took for sailors to offload supplies under fire on a beachhead in Anzio, or how gunners could shoot enough artillery rounds to burn through a howitzer’s barrel. Pyle wrote about what he often referred to as “brave men.” And his idea of courage wasn’t a grand gesture but rather the accumulation of mundane, achievable, unglamorous tasks: digging a foxhole, sleeping in the mud, surviving on cold rations for weeks, piloting an aircraft through flak day after day after day.

We’ve become skeptical of heroic narratives. Critics who dismiss Pyle as a real-time hagiographer of the Greatest Generation miss the point. Pyle was a cartographer, meticulously mapping the character of the Americans who chose to fight. If a person’s character becomes their destiny, the destiny of the American war effort depended on the collective character of Americans in uniform. Pyle barely touched on tactics or battle plans in his columns, but he wrote word after word about the plight of the average frontline soldier because he understood that the war would be won, or lost, in their realm of steel, dirt, and blood.

In the following passage, Pyle describes a company of American infantrymen advancing into a French town against German resistance:

They seemed terribly pathetic to me. They weren’t warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands, sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain. They were afraid, but it was beyond their power to quit. They had no choice. They were good boys. I talked with them all afternoon as we sneaked slowly forward along the mysterious and rubbled street, and I know they were good boys. And even though they weren’t warriors born to the kill, they won their battles. That’s the point.

I imagine that when those words hit the U.S. in 1944, shortly after D-Day, readers found reassurance in the idea that those “good boys” had what it took to win the war, despite being afraid, and despite not really being warriors. However, today Pyle’s words hold a different meaning. They read more like a question, one now being asked about America’s character in an ever more dangerous world.

[Read: Notes from a cematary]

The past two years have delivered a dizzying array of national-security challenges, including the U.S.’s decision to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. A rising authoritarian axis threatens the West-led liberal world order birthed after the Second World War. Much like when Pyle wrote 80 years ago, the character of a society—whether it contains “brave men” and “good boys” willing to defend democratic values—will prove determinative to the outcomes of these challenges.

The collapse of Afghanistan’s military and government came as a surprise to many Americans. That result cannot be fully explained by lack of dollars, time, or resources expended. Only someone who understood the human side of war—as Pyle certainly did—could have predicted that collapse, when the majority of Afghan soldiers surrendered to the Taliban. Conversely, in Ukraine, where most experts predicted a speedy Russian victory, the Ukrainians overperformed, defying expectations. The character of the Ukrainian people, one which most didn’t fully recognize, has been the driving factor.

Pyle often wrote in anecdotes, but his writing’s impact was anything but anecdotal. His style of combat realism, which eschews the macro and strategic for the micro and human, can be seen in today’s combat reporting from Ukraine. A new documentary film, Slava Ukraini, made by one of France’s most famous public intellectuals, Bernard-Henri Lévy, takes a Pyle-esque approach to last fall’s Ukrainian counteroffensive against the Russians. The film focuses on everyday Ukrainians and the courage they display for the sake of their cause. “And I’m amazed,” Lévy says, walking through a trench in eastern Ukraine, “that while weapons were not always their craft, these men are transformed into the bravest soldiers.”

Ernie Pyle at the front in 1944.(Bettmann/CORBIS/Getty)

War correspondents such as Thomas Gibbons-Neff at The New York Times and James Marson at The Wall Street Journal take a similar approach, with reporting that’s grounded in those specifics, which must inform any real understanding of strategy. The result is a style that’s indebted to Pyle and his concern with the soldiers’ morale and commitment to the cause, and reveals more than any high-level analyses could.

Pyle wasn’t the first to search for strategic truths about war in the granular reality of individual experiences. Ernest Hemingway, who didn’t cover the First World War as a correspondent but later reflected on it as a novelist, wrote in A Farewell to Arms:

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of the places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Pyle took this advice to heart when introducing characters in his columns. He would not only tell you a bit about a soldier, their rank, their job, and what they looked like; he would also make sure to give the reader their home address. “Here are the names of just a few of my company mates in that little escapade that afternoon,” he writes, after describing heavy combat in France. “Sergeant Joseph Palajsa, of 187 I Street, Pittsburgh. Pfc. Arthur Greene, of 618 Oxford Street, Auburn Massachusetts …” He goes on to list more than a half dozen others. Pyle knew that “only the names of the places had dignity.” And sometimes those places were home.

As a combat reporter, Pyle surpassed all others working during the Second World War, outwriting his contemporaries, Hemingway included. This achievement was one of both style and commitment. Was there any reporter who saw more of the war than Pyle? He first shipped overseas in 1940, to cover the Battle of Britain. He returned to the war in 1942, to north Africa, and he went on to Italy, to France, and finally to the Pacific. On April 17, 1945, while on a patrol near Okinawa, a sniper shot Pyle in the head, killing him instantly. His subject, war, finally consumed him.

[Read: The two Stalingrads]

Reading the final chapters of Brave Men, it seems as though Pyle’s subject was consuming him even before he left for Okinawa. “For some of us the war has already gone on too long,” he writes. “Our feelings have been wrung and drained.” Brave Men ends shortly after the liberation of Paris. The invasion of western Europe—which we often forget was an enormous gamble—had paid off. Berlin stood within striking distance. The war in Europe would soon be over. Pyle, however, remains far from sanguine.

“We have won this war because our men are brave, and because of many other things.” He goes on to list the contribution of our allies, the roles played by luck, by geography, and even by the passage of time. He cautions against hubris in victory and warns about the challenges of homecoming for veterans. “And all of us together will have to learn how to reassemble our broken world into a pattern so firm and so fair that another great war cannot soon be possible … Submersion in war does not necessarily qualify a man to be the master of the peace. All we can do is fumble and try once more—try out of the memory of our anguish—and be as tolerant with each other as we can.”