Marginal Types

 Noah Smith had a column the other day in which he argued that most Universal Basic Income (UBI) advocates are wrong on the facts. First of all, he observed, it's not obvious that most Americans actually want to be relieved of their duties in the work force. Many people report a surprisingly high degree of job satisfaction. Their work is a source of meaning and social value in their lives, and they are not looking to escape it. 

But, the UBI advocates often retort: whether they want to continue working or not—they will very soon have no choice in the matter. AI and other forms of automation are coming for our jobs. And so, we will all have to get used to living off of UBI checks or starve. (One thing I've never understood about this hypothesis: what guarantees that our tech overlords will continue sending those checks indefinitely? No matter—Smith was making a different point.)

Smith responds to this second argument—the one from necessity—by pointing out that it is at most a science fiction scenario at this point. It's conceivable it might happen someday. But so far, there is no evidence in the statistics that large-scale displacement of jobs by automation is actually occurring. To the contrary, productivity has slowed over the last several decades. And unemployment across sectors is still hovering at relative lows—despite the government's efforts to increase it to tame inflation. 

Smith therefore suggested that what is really happening here is that UBI advocates tend to come from a handful of social groups that have a distorted view of the overall economy. Either they are tech workers who have drunk the ideological Kool-Aid about the supposed transformative effects that their new products are about to have on society. Or, they are humanities majors who have fallen victim to the problem of "elite oversupply." 

The "elite oversupply" theory holds that our universities are still churning out too many humanities majors who have been taught to expect a middle class living from doing work that aligns with their training. Over the same time period, however, jobs in journalism—which used to absorb many of these people who dream of making a living by their pen—have been drying up. This field really has been undergoing technological displacement, then—unlike so many others. 

And so, because journalists and humanities majors have been disproportionately negatively affected by the information revolution—they tend to exaggerate its impact. They say: "ChatGPT is coming for your jobs!" because ChatGPT really is coming for their jobs. But the rest of society, meanwhile, can shrug and continue on its merry way, content with its historically low levels of unemployment. In short, they can say: "That sounds like a you problem, not a me problem." 

I think Smith is probably right on the facts here—I've even argued as much myself in the past. But, seeing as I am one of those humanities majors who tries to make a living from his pen, I'm not sure if all of this is supposed to make me feel better or worse. "Your apocalypse really is occurring," the argument seems to run; "But it's a private one. No one else has this problem. Just you." Well, gee, thanks a lot, Noah Smith! Glad I'm uniquely cursed by fate. 

The only thing I can find solace in is the fact that this is not, after all, a new problem. "Elite oversupply" has actually been the lot of scholars for as long as there have been universities. It was only during the unique and historically unrepeatable moment of the American midcentury when "humanities professor" was a realistic middle-class career. Throughout the rest of time, people trying to write for a living have been a pariah caste—barely scraping by on the margins of some metropolis. 

The Canadian communications theorist, Harold Innis, is his deeply strange book The Bias of Communications (which actually reads less like a textbook in media theory than a modernist novel, moving disjointedly from one thought to another as it ranges from the history of Egyptian dynasties to eighteenth century Grub Street) cites a lament from the sixteenth century "Parnassus Plays" that could have been written today: 

Let scholars be as thriftie as they may

They will be poor ere their last dying daye;

Learning and povertie will ever kisse.  

Such is the eternal lot, then, of the writer and intellectual. They are always in chronic oversupply. They are offering merchandise the world does not want to buy. Indeed, this is practically baked into the definition. As Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann note, in their sociological classic The Social Construction of Reality, the intellectual may be defined "as an expert whose expertise is not wanted by society at large." She or he "is thus, by definition, a marginal type."

The poet Basil Bunting reached the same conclusion; and indeed, averred that it is right it should be so. "The scholar ought to be [...] an Ishmael," he wrote—"scanted and feared." A "marginal type," in other words. As soon as they become otherwise, they will run out of things to say. And so, there is an air of acquiescence in Bunting, even when he protests against the poet's lot of chronic poverty. "Well sung singer," he imagines Apollo telling him. "But in this trade, we pay no wages."

And so—to the humanities majors who went climbing the mountain of Parnassus expecting to find shelter and ease on top—we can perhaps retort: "you ought to have known what you were letting yourself in for when you started." Anyone who pursued the life of letters and expected it to be anything other than a slow, painful martyrdom was surely kidding themselves. If they weren't ready to be a "marginal type," they ought to have pursued a different line of work. 

But at least, even if we say this, we shouldn't ask the writers to also be happy about this fact. Surely, that is expecting too much. Perhaps, we can say: you should have known going in. Perhaps we can say that UBI is a pipe dream that wouldn't work in practice for a number of reasons. Perhaps we can say that: you should have expected all along you would have to work at some boring "normie middle class job," as Smith puts it, in order to pay the bills. 

But, do we not only need to accept this fate—but also do cartwheels about it? Shoulder our burden we must—accept we will that we are to be "scanted and feared" at the margins of society—but must we be deprived as well of the privilege even of complaining about it? I've quoted D.H. Lawrence to death on this point before, in his poem "Wages"; but it is worth emphasizing again that the poem does not suggest there is an obvious way to escape the drudgery of work—it merely registers a protest against it. 

And so, let us at least make our protest. Let us cry out against the drudgery; even if we acknowledge—as Lawrence does—that there is no obvious way out of it, "since the work-prison covers/ almost every scrap of the living earth," as he puts it. Let us at least have the consolation of complaining about this fact. In short, my reply to Smith is to quote another D.H. Lawrence poem: don't speak to us of the dignity of work; for it "is the one thing a man has had too much of."