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May 19, 2018 - July 28, 2019
The GDP also does a poor job of calculating advances in knowledge. Our computers, cameras, and phones are all smarter, speedier, and snazzier than ever, but also cheaper, and therefore they scarcely figure.
If you were the GDP, your ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who’s going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and going berserk on Black Friday.
Mental illness, obesity, pollution, crime – in terms of the GDP, the more the better.
We live in a world where the going rule seems to be that the more vital your occupation (cleaning, nursing, teaching), the lower you rate in the GDP.
“We are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity.”
If we want a higher quality of life, we will have to take the first step in search of other means, and alternative metrics.
Every era needs its own figures. In the eighteenth century, they concerned the size of the harvest. In the nineteenth century, the radius of the rail network, the number of factories, and the volume of coal mining. And in the twentieth, industrial mass production within the boundaries of the nation-state. But today it’s no longer possible to express our prosperity in simple dollars, pounds, or euros. From healthcare to education, from journalism to finance, we’re all still fixated on “efficiency” and “gains,” as though society were nothing but one big production line. But it’s precisely in a
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“gross national happiness,”
If we prefer to salve our grievances with a fixation on gross national happiness, that would spell the end of progress. “Discontent,” said Oscar Wilde, “is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.”27
Two candidates are the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) and the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), which also incorporate pollution, crime, inequality, and volunteer work in their equations.
Some things in life, like music, resist all attempts at greater efficiency.
It’s no accident that countries that score high on well-being, like Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, have a large public sector. Their governments subsidize the domains where productivity can’t be leveraged.
Unlike the manufacture of a fridge or a car, history lessons and doctor’s checkups can’t simply be made “more efficient.”
a British think tank estimated that for every pound earned by advertising executives, they destroy an equivalent of £7 in the form of stress, overconsumption, pollution, and debt; conversely, each pound paid to a trash collector creates an equivalent of £12 in terms of health and sustainability.30
“Value” and “productivity” cannot be expressed in objective figures, even if we pretend the opposite: “We have a high graduation rate, therefore we offer a good education” – “Our doctors are focused and efficient, therefore we provide good care” – “We have a high publication rate, therefore we are an excellent university” – “We have a high audience share, therefore we are producing good television” – “The economy is growing, therefore our country is doing fine…”
“Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.”31 Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.
The GDP was contrived in a period of deep crisis and provided an answer to the great challenges of the 1930s. As we face our own crises of unemployment, depression, and climate change, we, too, will have to search for a new figure. What we need is a “dashboard” complete with an array of indicators to track the things that make life worthwhile – money and growth, obviously, but also community service, jobs, knowledge, social cohesion.
And, of course, the scarcest good of all: time.
“Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth,” he wrote in 1962, “between costs and returns, and between the short and long run. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”34
Had you asked the greatest economist of the twentieth century what the biggest challenge of the twenty-first would be, he wouldn’t have had to think twice. Leisure.
At around the same time, the father of classical liberalism, British philosopher John Stuart Mill, was arguing that the best use of more wealth was more leisure. Mill opposed the “gospel of work” proclaimed by his great adversary Thomas Carlyle (a great proponent of slavery, too, as it happens), juxtaposing it with his own “gospel of leisure.”
Yet it was none other than Henry Ford – titan of industry, founder of Ford Motor Company, and creator of the Model-T – who, in that same year, became the first to implement a five-day workweek. People called him crazy. Then they followed in his footsteps.
A dyed-in-the-wool capitalist and the mastermind behind the production line, Henry Ford had discovered that a shorter workweek actually increased productivity among his employees.
“It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege.”6
But the most disappointing fail? The rise of leisure.
We Have Been Working Progressively Less (up to 1980)
Asimov may have been right that by 2014 “work” would be the most glorified word in our vocabulary, but for a completely different reason. We aren’t bored to death; we’re working ourselves to death. The army of psychologists and psychiatrists are fighting not the advance of ennui, but an epidemic of stress.
“Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.”29
Time is money. Economic growth can yield either more leisure or more consumption.
What Ford, Kellogg, and Heath had all discovered is that productivity and long work hours do not go hand in hand.
There are strong indications that in a modern knowledge economy, even forty hours a week is too much. Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.
Is there anything that working less does not solve?
Stress?
Climate change?
Accidents?
Unemployment?
Emancipation of women?
Paternity leave is a Trojan horse with the potential to truly turn the tide in the struggle for gender equality.46
Aging population?
Inequality?
Nowadays, excessive work and pressure are status symbols. Moaning about too much work is often just a veiled attempt to come across as important and interesting. Time to oneself is sooner equated with unemployment and laziness, certainly in countries where the wealth gap has widened.
And when British researchers asked employees if they would rather win the lottery or work less, again, twice as many choose the latter.53
It all starts with reversing incentives. Currently, it’s cheaper for employers to have one person work overtime than to hire two part-time.54 That’s because many labor costs, such as healthcare benefits, are paid per employee instead of per hour.55 And that’s also why we as individuals can’t just unilaterally decide to start working less. By doing so we would risk losing status, missing out on career opportunities, and, ultimately, maybe losing our jobs altogether.
There’s not a person on earth who on their deathbed thinks, “Had I only put in a few more hours at the office or sat in front of the tube some more.”
Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Imagine, for instance, that all of Washington’s 100,000 lobbyists were to go on strike tomorrow.3 Or that every tax accountant in Manhattan decided to stay home. It seems unlikely the mayor would announce a state of emergency. In fact, it’s unlikely that either of these scenarios would do much damage. A strike by, say, social media consultants, telemarketers, or high-frequency traders might never even make the news at all.
When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without. Were they to suddenly stop working the world wouldn’t get any poorer, uglier, or in any way worse. Take the slick Wall Street traders who line their pockets at the expense of another retirement fund. Take the shrewd lawyers who can draw a corporate lawsuit out until the end of days. Or take the brilliant ad writer who pens the slogan of the year and puts the competition right
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The better agriculture has become, the less we’re willing to pay for it. These days, the food on our plates has become dirt cheap.
This is what economic progress is all about. As our farms and factories grew more efficient, they accounted for a shrinking share of our economy. And the more productive agriculture and manufacturing became, the fewer people they employed. At the same time, this shift generated more work in the service sector. Yet before we could get ourselves a job in this new world of consultants, accountants, programmers, advisors, brokers, and lawyers, we first had to earn the proper credentials. This development has generated immense wealth. Ironically, however, it has also created a system in which an
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“The genius of the great speculative investors is to see what others do not, or to see it earlier,” explains the economist Roger Bootle. “This is a skill. But so is the ability to stand on tiptoe, balancing on one leg, while holding a pot of tea above your head, without spillage.”12
