[dzunbsgu] Preventing going postal

You work long hours at a frustrating job, ultimately culminating with you "going postal" taking out your frustrations on society.

Your decision to work such a job has resulted in an externality: more than just you and your employer are affected.  It consequently behooves society to prevent, or be compensated for such behavior.  For every extremely public instance of going postal, there are probably countless instances of domestic violence and general assholery.  These are all externalities.

A possible first step is a tax on long working hours.  As part of the W-2, each employer reports wages and hours worked, and the total hours worked and total wages are used to select a tax bracket.  The tax rate is magically chosen to compensate society for the average "postal" behavior for a given number of hours.  Employers and employees might conspire to underreport working hours to be in a lower tax bracket.

Perhaps we need a measure of how "frustrating" a job is.  One way of measuring it might be to measure the turnover rate of the job.  Then, to compensate society for the externality, we impose a tax on jobs with high turnover rates.  One way to do it is a tax that goes down every year the employee remains employed with the employer.  The counter does not reset if the employee leaves and returns, allowing for seasonal jobs.  But I worry that the decreasing tax the longer you remain employeed will exacerbate the "locked-in" effect of a frustrating job.  I haven't said whether the employer or the employee pays the tax, though it ultimately might be the same.  Calculate minimum wage after taxes?

Despite all this talk of raising taxes, these can be implemented in a revenue neutral way: lower taxes on short hours or low turnover.

I'm less than convinced these are good ideas.  Before implementing any policy along these lines, we should check that there is (at least) correlation, and even show causality for going postal.  Going postal might have little to do with your job.

Inspired by, "4 day work week."  Take the time not working to be a better human being, because we need more of those.