Lazy, deceitful and freeloading. These words have been used to describe unemployed people in my economics class.

Last semester, when I enrolled in my first economics course, I anticipated boredom, but I promised myself that I would enter the class with an open mind. After all, as a first-year student in the School of Foreign Service, I had three semesters of economics coursework ahead of me. Economics is not particularly inspiring to me, but I see it as essential in my understanding of the world and how it functions. 

What I have come to feel concerned about regarding Georgetown University’s economics curriculum, however, is the elegant way in which normative values such as the understanding of jobless people as being unrighteous in nature, a gross misrepresentation, are disguised as economic truths for students to accept. 

And nobody seems to question this at all.

I urge Georgetown students to think critically about their required curriculum. Separating what is factual from what is normative is a crucial step in formulating personal values. I hope that my classmates are mindful of their consumption of curricula — a process that requires them to critically examine not only what they learn but also how it either fits with or contradicts their preexisting beliefs and values.

I have tried to understand how anyone could come to generalize unemployed people as lazy and deceitful. Unemployment benefits from the government can give people a cushion and make their job search less urgent, but I have a hard time believing that this makes them lazy. 

It is possible, in some cases, that people who are not actually looking for a job might tell the government that they are for the sake of receiving unemployment benefits. But I don’t believe that this is true for the majority of people receiving unemployment benefits — and, either way, this does not render all people without jobs deceitful.

People who take neoclassical approaches to economics, focusing strictly on how supply and demand impact markets, including the labor market, may have the right to be skeptical about government benefits and how they encourage or discourage productivity. 

But as students, we have a similar right to come to our own conclusions about the rightness or wrongness of social programs like unemployment benefits. There is no inherent truth to this question, nor is there an excuse for passing generalized value judgements on unemployed people.

Unemployment benefits are good. These benefits help people survive rough patches — and survive is a generous word.

In Washington, D.C., people can receive a maximum of $444 per week for up to 26 weeks if they file an unemployment claim, or approximately $1,776 per month. And the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the District is $2,326. For those who live paycheck to paycheck, unemployment benefits offer less than they need to survive. 

Perhaps for those who have generational wealth or a lot of savings, government unemployment benefits decrease the urgency of their job search. But for most people, these checks from the government might be just enough to keep them from losing their homes. 

Studies by the Tobin Center for Economic Policy at Yale University, the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago and the congressional Joint Economic Committee have proven over and over again that government benefits, like unemployment insurance or pandemic-era stimulus checks, do not disincentivize the job search. 

It is one thing if someone is presented with this data and still chooses to believe that unemployment insurance encourages laziness. But it is another thing to use the word laziness in the context of joblessness and government safety nets to hundreds of undergraduate students without presenting them with the facts and allowing them to decide what they think from there. 

Georgetown students are intellectually curious young people who are more than capable of coming to their own conclusions about what is right and wrong, and who is lazy and who is not. 

This example exemplifies a larger message about how we approach our education at Georgetown. I ask my classmates, not just in economics but in all disciplines, to think deeply about what we are presented with in class. I ask them to consider if they believe it simply because it is what is taught — or if they believe it because they have taken the time to consider what is objectively true in order to, from there, form their own normative beliefs. 

It can be easy for normative values to masquerade as positive facts. When we are learning at a prestigious institution via a curriculum developed by departments with authority, it can be difficult to recognize the difference between the two — but I see it as my duty as an active learner to begin carefully separating what is factual from what is normative.

I urge students to be persistent in their pursuit of an education that arms them with knowledge and empowers them to develop values of their own.

Lindsay Eiseman is a first-year student in the School of Foreign Service.