But,
wait, isn’t our present dilemma just a passing phase of the business
cycle? What about the job market of the future? Haven’t the doomsayers,
those damn Malthusians, always been proved wrong by rising productivity,
new fields of enterprise, new economic opportunities? Well, yeah –
until now, these times. The measurable trends of the past half-century,
and the plausible projections for the next half-century, are just too
empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum.
They look like the data on climate change – you can deny them if you
like, but you’ll sound like a moron when you do.
For example, the Oxford economists who study employment trends
tell us that almost half of existing jobs, including those involving ‘non-routine cognitive tasks’ – you know, like
thinking
– are at risk of death by computerisation within 20 years. They’re
elaborating on conclusions reached by two MIT economists in the
book Race Against the Machine (2011).
Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley types who give TED talks have started
speaking of ‘surplus humans’ as a result of the same process –
cybernated production.
Rise of the Robots, a new book that cites these very sources, is social science, not science fiction.
So
this Great Recession of ours – don’t kid yourself, it ain’t over – is a
moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. You might even say
it’s a spiritual impasse, because it makes us ask what social
scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character –
or whether character itself is something we must aspire to. But that is
why it’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a
world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our
incomes or dominates our daily lives.
What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?
In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work.
Certainly this crisis makes us ask: what comes
after work?
What would you do without your job as the external discipline that
organises your waking life – as the social imperative that gets you up
and on your way to the factory, the office, the store, the warehouse,
the restaurant, wherever you work and, no matter how much you hate it,
keeps you coming back? What would you do if you didn’t have to work to
receive an income?
And what would society and civilisation be like
if we didn’t have to ‘earn’ a living – if leisure was not our choice
but our lot? Would we hang out at the local Starbucks, laptops open? Or
volunteer to teach children in less-developed places, such as
Mississippi? Or smoke weed and watch reality TV all day?
I’m not proposing a fancy thought experiment here. By now these are
practical questions because there aren’t enough jobs. So it’s time we asked even more practical questions. How do you make a living
without a job
– can you receive income without working for it? Is it possible, to
begin with and then, the hard part, is it ethical? If you were raised to
believe that work is the index of your value to society – as most of us
were – would it feel like cheating to get something for nothing?
We already have some provisional
answers
because we’re all on the dole, more or less. The fastest growing
component of household income since 1959 has been ‘transfer payments’
from government. By the turn of the 21st century, 20 per cent of
all household
income came from this source – from what is otherwise known as welfare
or ‘entitlements’. Without this income supplement,
half of the adults with full-time jobs would live below the poverty line, and
most working Americans would be eligible for food stamps.
But
are these transfer payments and ‘entitlements’ affordable, in either
economic or moral terms? By continuing and enlarging them, do we
subsidise sloth, or do we enrich a debate on the rudiments of the good
life?
Transfer payments or ‘entitlements’, not to mention Wall
Street bonuses (talk about getting something for nothing) have taught us
how to detach the receipt of income from the production of goods, but
now, in plain view of the end of work, the lesson needs rethinking. No
matter how you calculate the federal budget, we can afford to be our
brother’s keeper. The real question is not whether but how we choose to
be.
I know what you’re thinking – we can’t afford this! But yeah,
we can, very easily. We raise the arbitrary lid on the Social Security
contribution, which now stands at
$127,200,
and we raise taxes on corporate income, reversing the Reagan
Revolution. These two steps solve a fake fiscal problem and create an
economic surplus where we now can measure a moral deficit.
Of
course, you will say – along with every economist from Dean Baker to
Greg Mankiw, Left to Right – that raising taxes on corporate income is a
disincentive to investment and thus job creation. Or that it will drive
corporations overseas, where taxes are lower.
But in fact raising taxes on corporate income
can’t have these effects.
Let’s
work backward. Corporations have been ‘multinational’ for quite some
time. In the 1970s and ’80s, before Ronald Reagan’s signature tax cuts
took effect, approximately 60 per cent of manufactured imported goods
were produced offshore, overseas,
by US companies. That percentage has risen since then, but not by much.
Chinese
workers aren’t the problem – the homeless, aimless idiocy of corporate
accounting is. That is why the Citizens United decision of 2010 applying
freedom of speech regulations to campaign spending is hilarious. Money
isn’t speech, any more than noise is. The Supreme Court has conjured a
living being, a new person, from the remains of the common law, creating
a real world more frightening than its cinematic equivalent: say,
Frankenstein,
Blade Runner or, more recently,
Transformers.
But the bottom line is this.
Most jobs aren’t created by private, corporate investment, so raising taxes on corporate income won’t affect employment.
You heard me right. Since the 1920s, economic growth has happened even
though net private investment has atrophied. What does that mean? It
means that profits are pointless except as a way of announcing to your
stockholders (and hostile takeover specialists) that your company is a
going concern, a thriving business. You don’t need profits to
‘reinvest’, to finance the expansion of your company’s workforce or
output, as the recent history of Apple and most other corporations has
amply demonstrated.
I know that building my character through work is stupid because crime pays. I might as well become a gangster
So
investment decisions by CEOs have only a marginal effect on employment.
Taxing the profits of corporations to finance a welfare state that
permits us to love our neighbours and to be our brothers’ keeper is not
an economic problem. It’s something else – it’s an intellectual issue, a
moral conundrum.
When we place our faith in hard work, we’re
wishing for the creation of character; but we’re also hoping, or
expecting, that the labour market will allocate
incomes fairly
and rationally. And there’s the rub, they do go together. Character can
be created on the job only when we can see that there’s an intelligible,
justifiable relation between past effort, learned skills and present
reward. When I see that your income is completely out of proportion to
your production of real value, of durable goods the rest of us can use
and appreciate (and by ‘durable’ I don’t mean just material things), I
begin to doubt that character is a consequence of hard work.
When I
see, for example, that you’re making millions by laundering drug-cartel
money (HSBC), or pushing bad paper on mutual fund managers (AIG, Bear
Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Citibank), or preying on low-income borrowers
(Bank of America), or buying votes in Congress (all of the above) – just
business as usual on Wall Street – while I’m barely making ends meet
from the earnings of my full-time job, I realise that my participation
in the labour market is irrational. I know that building my character
through work is stupid because crime pays. I might as well become a
gangster like you.
That’s why an economic crisis such as the Great
Recession is also a moral problem, a spiritual impasse – and an
intellectual opportunity. We’ve placed so many bets on the social,
cultural and ethical import of work that when the labour market fails,
as it so spectacularly has, we’re at a loss to explain what happened, or
to orient ourselves to a different set of meanings for work and for
markets.
And by ‘we’ I mean pretty much all of us, Left to Right,
because everybody wants to put Americans back to work, one way or
another – ‘full employment’ is the goal of Right-wing politicians no
less than Left-wing economists. The differences between them are over
means, not ends, and those ends include intangibles such as the
acquisition of character.
Which is to say that everybody has
doubled down on the benefits of work just as it reaches a vanishing
point. Securing ‘full employment’ has become a bipartisan goal at the
very moment it has become both impossible and unnecessary. Sort of like
securing slavery in the 1850s or segregation in the 1950s.
Why?
Because
work means everything to us inhabitants of modern market societies –
regardless of whether it still produces solid character and allocates
incomes rationally, and quite apart from the need to make a living. It’s
been the medium of most of our thinking about the good life since Plato
correlated craftsmanship and the possibility of ideas as such. It’s
been our way of defying death, by making and repairing the durable
things, the significant things we know will last beyond our allotted
time on earth because they teach us, as we make or
repair them, that the world beyond us – the world before and after us – has its own reality principles.
Think
about the scope of this idea. Work has been a way of demonstrating
differences between males and females, for example by merging the
meanings of fatherhood and ‘breadwinner’, and then, more recently,
prying them apart. Since the 17th century, masculinity and femininity
have been defined – not necessarily achieved – by their places in a
moral economy, as working men who got paid wages for their production of
value on the job, or as working women who got paid nothing for their
production and maintenance of families. Of course, these definitions are
now changing, as the meaning of ‘family’ changes, along with profound
and parallel changes in the labour market – the entry of women is just
one of those – and in attitudes toward sexuality.
When work
disappears, the genders produced by the labour market are blurred. When
socially necessary labour declines, what we once called
women’s work
– education, healthcare, service – becomes our basic industry, not a
‘tertiary’ dimension of the measurable economy. The labour of love,
caring for one another and learning how to be our brother’s keeper –
socially beneficial labour – becomes not merely possible but eminently
necessary, and not just within families, where affection is routinely
available. No, I mean out there, in the wide, wide world.
Work has also been the American way of producing ‘racial capitalism’, as the historians now call it, by means of
slave labour,
convict labour, sharecropping, then segregated labour markets – in
other words, a ‘free enterprise system’ built on the ruins of black
bodies, an economic edifice animated, saturated and determined by
racism.
There never was a free market in labour in these united states.
Like every other market, it was always hedged by lawful, systematic
discrimination against black folk. You might even say that this hedged
market
produced the still-deployed stereotypes of
African-American laziness, by excluding black workers from remunerative
employment, confining them to the ghettos of the eight-hour day.
And
yet, and yet. Though work has often entailed subjugation, obedience and
hierarchy (see above), it’s also where many of us, probably most of us,
have consistently expressed our deepest human desire, to be free of
externally imposed authority or obligation, to be self-sufficient. We
have defined ourselves for centuries by what we do, by what we
produce.
But
by now we must know that this definition of ourselves entails the
principle of productivity – from each according to his abilities, to
each according to his creation of real value through work – and commits
us to the inane idea that we’re worth only as much as the labour market
can register, as a price. By now we must also know that this principle
plots a certain course to endless growth and its faithful attendant,
environmental degradation.
How would human nature change as the aristocratic privilege of leisure becomes the birthright of all?
Until
now, the principle of productivity has functioned as the reality
principle that made the American Dream seem plausible. ‘Work hard, play
by the rules, get ahead’, or, ‘You get what you pay for, you make your
own way, you rightly receive what you’ve honestly earned’ – such
homilies and exhortations used to make sense of the world. At any rate
they didn’t sound delusional. By now they do.
Adherence to the
principle of productivity therefore threatens public health as well as
the planet (actually, these are the same thing). By committing us to
what is impossible, it makes for madness. The Nobel Prize-winning
economist Angus Deaton
said
something like this when he explained anomalous mortality rates among
white people in the Bible Belt by claiming that they’ve ‘lost the
narrative of their lives’ – by suggesting that they’ve lost faith in the
American Dream. For them, the work ethic is a death sentence because
they can’t live by it.
So the impending end of work raises the
most fundamental questions about what it means to be human. To begin
with, what purposes could we choose if the job – economic necessity –
didn’t consume most of our waking hours and creative energies? What
evident yet unknown possibilities would then appear? How would human
nature itself change as the ancient, aristocratic privilege of leisure
becomes the birthright of human beings as such?
Sigmund Freud
insisted that love and work were the essential ingredients of healthy
human being. Of course he was right. But can love survive the end of
work as the willing partner of the good life? Can we let people get
something for nothing and still treat them as our brothers and sisters –
as members of a beloved community? Can you imagine the moment when
you’ve just met an attractive stranger at a party, or you’re online
looking for someone, anyone, but you don’t ask: ‘So, what do you do?’
We won’t have any answers until we acknowledge that work now means everything to us – and that hereafter it can’t.
Some times you need to do the things you don’t want to do, to succeed in this life. 
