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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. And employees keep tabs on each other: Who has been at their desk the longest? Who clocks the most hours? At the end of the
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Incorrect valuation by capitalism
“Since men will not be tired in their spare time,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1932, “they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid.”
The demise of "after work all I want to do is watch tv"
Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Victory of the unimaginative person
Bizarrely, it’s precisely the jobs that shift money around–creating next to nothing of tangible value–that net the best salaries.
Ironically, however, it has also created a system in which an increasing number of people can earn money without contributing anything of tangible value to society. Call it the paradox of progress: Here in the Land of Plenty, the richer and the smarter we get, the more expendable we become.
Bullshit jobs
In recent decades those clever minds have concocted all manner of complex financial products that don’t create wealth, but destroy it. These products are, essentially, like a tax on the rest of the population. Who do you think is paying for all those custom-tailored suits, sprawling mansions, and luxury yachts? If bankers aren’t generating the underlying value themselves, then it has to come from somewhere–or someone–else. The government isn’t the only one redistributing wealth. The financial sector does it, too, but without a democratic mandate. The bottom line is that wealth can be
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As long as we continue to be obsessed with work, work, and more work (even as useful activities are further automated or outsourced), the number of superfluous jobs will only continue to grow. Much like the number of managers in the developed world, which has grown over the last thirty years without making us a dime richer. On the contrary, studies show that countries with more managers are actually less productive and innovative.15 In a survey of 12,000 professionals by the Harvard Business Review, half said they felt their job had no “meaning and significance,” and an equal number were
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The modern marketplace is equally uninterested in usefulness, quality, and innovation. All that really matters is profit.
Again: valuation problem
Maybe this is also a clue as to why the innovations of the past thirty years–a time of spiraling inequality–haven’t quite lived up to our expectations. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” mocks Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s self-described resident intellectual.19 If the post-war era gave us fabulous inventions like the washing machine, the refrigerator, the space shuttle, and the pill, lately it’s been slightly improved iterations of the same phone we bought a couple years ago.
Progress without vision because of market-determined valuation of what defines "progress"
In fact, it has become increasingly profitable not to innovate. Imagine just how much progress we’ve missed out on because thousands of bright minds have frittered away their time dreaming up hyper complex financial products that are ultimately only destructive. Or spent the best years of their lives duplicating existing pharmaceuticals in a way that’s infinitesimally different enough to warrant a new patent application by a brainy lawyer so a brilliant PR department can launch a brand-new marketing campaign for the not-so-brand-new drug. Imagine that all this talent were to be invested not in
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Capital-based valuation has robbed the future
Maybe a fat billfold triggers a similar false consciousness: the conviction that you’re producing something of great value because you earn so much.
Market valuation flawed
Then the whiz kids who pack off to Wall Street could go back to becoming teachers, inventors, and engineers.
Since they're in it for the money, why should they care what they do? If we change the incentives, they will go teach.
A study conducted at Harvard found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country’s brightest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants.
Higher taxes for top earners would serve, in Harvard science-speak, “to reallocate talented individuals from professions that cause negative externalities to those that cause positive externalities.” In plain English: Higher taxes would get more people to do work that’s useful.
On “problem-solving ability,” but not which problems need solving. Invariably, it all revolves around the question: Which knowledge and skills do today’s students need to get hired in tomorrow’s job market–the market of 2030? Which is precisely the wrong question.
Instead of wondering what we need to do to make a living in this or that bullshit job, we could ponder how we want to make a living. This is a question no trend watcher can answer. How could they? They only follow the trends, they don’t make them.
Trend watchers as false visionairies
To answer this question, we’ll need to examine ourselves and our personal ideals. What do we want? More time for friends, for example, or family? For volunteer work? Art? Sports? Future education would have to prepare us not only for the job market but, more fundamentally, for life. Do we want to rein in the financial sector? Then maybe we should give budding economists some instruction in philosophy and morals. Do we want more solidarity across race, sex, and socioeconomic groups? Start in social studies class.
Problem: agreeing on those ideas. Easier for status quo people to pass the job onto "all-knowing market" as a ruse
In the end, it’s not the market or technology that decides what has real value, but society. If we want this century to be one in which all of us get richer, then we’ll need to free ourselves of the dogma that all work is meaningful. And, while we’re at it, let’s also get rid of the fallacy that a higher salary is automatically a reflection of societal value. Then we might realize that in terms of value creation, it just doesn’t pay to be a banker.
The smaller the world gets, the fewer the number of winners.
The reality is that it takes fewer and fewer people to create a successful business, meaning that when a business succeeds, fewer and fewer people benefit.
As long as machines can’t go to college, a degree offers higher returns than ever.
Just as we adapted to the First Machine Age through a revolution in education and welfare, so the Second Machine Age calls for drastic measures. Measures like a shorter workweek and universal basic income.
For us today, it is still difficult to imagine a future society in which paid labor is not the be-all and end-all of our existence. But the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change.
Victory of unimaginative man
Nevertheless, it is not technology itself that determines the course of history. In the end, it is we humans who decide how we want to shape our destiny.
We have agency, not just pendulum swinging
Redistribution of money (basic income), of time (a shorter working week), of taxation (on capital instead of labor), and, of course, of robots.
If a law of common progress fails to manifest itself of its own accord, there is nothing to stop us from enacting it ourselves. Indeed, the absence of such a law may well imperil the free market itself. “We have to save capitalism from the capitalists,” Piketty concludes.39
The OECD estimates that poor countries lose three times as much to tax evasion as they receive in foreign aid.16 Measures against tax havens, for example, could potentially do far more good than well-meaning aid programs ever could.
Why charity is wrong
our “everything except labor” brand of globalization.23 Billions of people are forced to sell their labor at a fraction of the price that they would get for it in the Land of Plenty, all because of borders. Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history.
In 2009, as the credit crunch was gathering momentum, the employee bonuses paid out by investment bank Goldman Sachs were equal to the combined earnings of the world’s 224 million poorest people.
he U.S. border effect on the wages of equal intrinsic productivity workers is greater than any form of wage discrimination (gender, race, or ethnicity) that has ever been measured,” observe three economists. It’s apartheid on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the real elite are those born not in the right family or the right class but in the right country.34 Yet this modern elite is scarcely aware of how lucky it is.
And those countries stole wealth
Most of us are even willing to accept advice on how to remove a grease stain or chop a cucumber. No, it’s when our political, ideological, or religious ideas are at stake that we get the most stubborn. We tend to dig in our heels when someone challenges our opinions about criminal punishment, premarital sex, or global warming. These are ideas to which people tend to get attached, and that makes it difficult to let them go.
Interrelation of objective issue and subjective thought process
The thing is, we know that ideas have changed over time. Yesterday’s avant-garde is today’s common sense.
History!!!!!
If it is true that ideas don’t change things gradually but in fits and starts–in shocks–then the basic premise of our democracy, our journalism, and our education is all wrong. It would mean, in essence, that the Enlightenment model of how people change their opinions–through information-gathering and reasoned deliberation–is really a buttress for the status quo. It would mean that those who swear by rationality, nuance, and compromise fail to grasp how ideas govern the world. A worldview is not a Lego set where a block is added here, removed there. It’s a fortress that is defended tooth and
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Fallacy of incremental progressivism
A single opposing voice can make all the difference. When just one other person in the group stuck to the truth, the test subjects were more likely to trust the evidence of their own senses. Let this be an encouragement to all those who feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness: Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come.
Greenspan’s faith in capitalism had taken a severe beating. “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”10 When a congressman asked him if he had been misled by his own ideas, Greenspan replied, “That’s precisely the reason I was shocked because I’d been going for 40 years or so with considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”
Capitalism manufactures its own evidence, it does not uncover it as science does.
Was the cognitive dissonance from 2008 even big enough? Or was it too big? Had we invested too much in our old convictions? Or were there simply no alternatives? This last possibility is the most worrying of all.
Victory of unimaginative man
A crisis, then, should be a moment of truth, the juncture at which a fundamental choice is made. But it almost seems that back in 2008 we were unable to make that choice. When we suddenly found ourselves facing the collapse of the entire banking sector, there were no real alternatives available; all we could do was keep plodding down the same path. Perhaps, then, crisis isn’t really the right word for our current condition. It’s more like we’re in a coma. That’s ancient Greek, too. It means “deep, dreamless sleep.”
In a coma of a life not worth living, without ideas
In an ironic twist of fate, the neoliberalist brainchild of two men who devoutly believed in the power of ideas has now put a lockdown on the development of new ones. It would seem that we have arrived at “the end of history,” with liberal democracy as the last stop and the “free consumer” as the terminus of our species.20
By the time Friedman was named president of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1970, most of its philosophers and historians had already decamped, the debates having become overly technical and economic.21 In hindsight, Friedman’s arrival marked the dawn of an era in which economists would become the leading thinkers of the Western world. We are still in that era today.22 We inhabit a world of managers and technocrats. “Let’s just concentrate on solving the problems,” they say. “Let’s just focus on making ends meet.” Political decisions are continually presented as a matter of exigency–as neutral and
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Naturally, we should still take pride in the liberty that generations before us fought for and won. But the question is, what is the value of free speech when we no longer have anything worthwhile to say? What’s the point of freedom of association when we no longer feel any sense of affiliation? What purpose does freedom of religion serve when we no longer believe in anything?
A life worth living beyond happiness as defined by economics
And yet, despite all this, a society can change completely in a few decades. The Overton window can shift. A classic strategy for achieving this is to proclaim ideas so shocking and subversive that anything less radical suddenly sounds sensible. In other words, to make the radical reasonable, you merely have to stretch the bounds of the radical.
Perceptions, values, the economic systems are all malleable
It’s an international phenomenon, observable across the globe among legions of left-wing thinkers and movements, from trade unions to political parties, from columnists to college professors. The worldview of the underdog socialist is that the neoliberals have mastered the game of reason, judgment, and statistics, leaving the left with emotion. Its heart is in the right place. Underdog socialists have a surfeit of compassion and find prevailing policies deeply unfair. Seeing the welfare state crumbling to dust, they rush in to salvage what they can. But when push comes to shove, the underdog
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The premise of the debate is set up in the economist's favor
“There’s a kind of activism,” Rebecca Solnit remarks in her book Hope in the Dark, “that’s more about bolstering identity than achieving results.”
True: I have given up on results. I stop at presenting the evidence, I don't seek to convince because I fear for holding these ideas too closely (aka quit my day job, involve myself in activism, etc.)
Ultimately, what the underdog socialist lacks is the most vital ingredient for political change: the conviction that there truly is a better way. That utopia really is within reach.
Exactly, but I want to believe so badly
