Robert F. Kennedy, seeking his party’s nomination for president in 1968, understood this. The pain of unemployment was not simply that the jobless lacked an income but that they were deprived of the opportunity to contribute to the common good. “Unemployment means having nothing to do—which means having nothing to do with the rest of us,” he explained. “To be without work, to be without use to one’s fellow citizens, is to be in truth the Invisible Man of whom Ralph Ellison wrote.”
