> A job market is where you rent someone's life; then you command them. This seems like a one-sided and unproductively emotional framing. One could easily flip

> A job market is where you rent someone's life; then you command them. This seems like a one-sided and unproductively emotional framing. One could easily flip the emotional bias and say "A job market is where greedy people with skills stubbornly refuse to volunteer their help unless they get paid for it." In fact, I suspect that's exactly how some might characterize the "job market" for independent medical services where the employer is the patient. Here's my suggestion for a neutral take: a job market is a mechanism where people who are willing to take on responsibilities are paid money by people who would like to delegate responsibilities. The current dynamics of the academic job market (and many other markets for people with conventional liberal arts education) suggest that fewer people want to delegate those responsibilities, and more people are willing to take on those responsibilities. This is not a market-created problem, it is a social problem (i.e. we have somehow encouraged far too many people to invest in educations that don't line up with current and near-future demand for responsibility-delegation). As to your point about intrinsic antagonism: naturally, in any negotiation there is a zero-sum element on the margin, i.e. while we both benefit we can still argue over how the mutual gains are to be distributed. On the one hand, this is a valid point, and the asymmetry of leverage in this on-the-margin zero-sum negotiation between employers and employees is an excellent theoretical argument for labor regulations and labor unions. On the other hand, framing the labor negotiation as zero sum overall is, I believe, counter to even Marxist [0] analysis of labor relations. [0] My lay understanding of Marxist labor relation theory is that it argues capital obtains the lion's share of the mutual benefits (or "surplus value") arising from delegation, but it does not argue that the exchange is what we would nowadays call zero-sum on an overall basis.