Distributing Dirt

 I only catch glimpses of it through the Substacks I follow, but much of the policy world has apparently been engaged in a cantankerous back-and-forth, over the past six months, about the benefits of cash aid. 

For years, pundits on both the left and the right had been drawn to universal basic income (UBI) as a potential solution to social inequity. Libertarian-leaning voices on the right applauded the idea, on the theory that it might be cheaper and easier to administer than the current bureaucratic welfare state. Meanwhile, leftists of the techno-utopian variety saw it as the only just way to share out the benefits of AI innovation and to compensate people for the inevitable job displacement that will occur from the coming wave of automation. 

Apparently, though, some new empirical research has cast doubt on the narrative of UBI as the ultimate social panacea. As Noah Smith summarizes the findings, in a recent post on his economics blog, the latest studies show disappointing results from direct cash transfers. While giving people money to prevent extremes of poverty and suffering may still be the right thing to do for its own sake—he concludes—it's not obvious that it has as many secondary positive benefits as people once hoped, in terms of increasing overall income or reducing crime. 

As Smith summarizes the results of these studies: "a bunch of new evidence has shown that the costs of cash giveaways are higher (in terms of incentivizing people to stop working), and the social benefits are much narrower, than boosters like myself had believed."

The reason why a guaranteed basic income might incentivize some people to stop working is pretty obvious: if you could pay your bills and take care of your kids without having to spend eight hours a day behind a counter or a desk—which of us wouldn't take that offer? Particularly if the cash benefits are cut off as soon as people have income from another source—such as a job—many people would prefer to take the cash and skip the toil (I know I would). 

This has prompted some social researchers to experiment with offering people a guaranteed amount regardless of whether they find work or income elsewhere; but here again—Smith summarizes—the results have been disappointing: "We’d hope that if we gave people money unconditionally instead of yanking it away the moment they got a job, it would incentivize them to go find work," he writes. "But in this experiment, people who no longer faced that benefit cutoff were no more likely to go make money in the market." 

As Alexis de Tocqueville writes in his first "Memoir on Pauperism" (1835), "there are two motives that compel [man] to work: the need to live and the desire to improve his living conditions. Experience has proved that most men can be sufficiently motivated to work by only the first of these motives, and that the second is powerful only among a small number." (Henderson trans.)

The recent empirical evidence on UBI seems to roughly bear out Tocqueville's observation. Essentially, what UBI does is to remove the first of Tocqueville's two motives: it ensures that people can survive without working. 

Meanwhile, it leaves the second motive untouched—particularly if it is bestowed unconditionally, in the way Smith describes—i.e., the benefits do not terminate as soon as someone finds income from an alternative source. Even in a world of universal cash benefits payments, in other words, people would still have an incentive to work in order to raise their standard of living. 

But the new empirical research appears to indicate that this "second motive" is just not a strong enough inducement to prompt many people to work. In the absence of the first motive—fear of starvation—a fair number of people will prefer to stay home. Maybe they prize the extra time to take care of their kids or tend to various chores around the house more than money. Maybe they have other pursuits that bring them joy and that they have not yet found a way to monetize. 

Regardless, there appears to be a large part of the public—as Tocqueville predicted—for whom the second motive is weaker than the first, and who therefore, (given the choice) will choose to accept a lower overall income for the sake of not having to "work" (as it is defined in labor market terms). 

We could draw a variety of conclusions from this. Some conservatives, of course, will say: aha! See? This is why we can't have any cash welfare programs. People are lazy. They have "a natural passion for idleness," as Tocqueville puts it. They need the fear of outright destitution in order to motivate them to work. Therefore, we should withdraw these cash payments in order to force them from their idleness. 

I draw a rather different lesson from these data, however. To me: the fact that so many people would voluntarily choose a lower income and a lower standard of living, just so they don't have to go into work every day—should tell us something what kind of "work" we are talking about here—about the kinds of jobs, that is to say, that are available to people at the bottom rungs of our society. 

If there are apparently plenty of jobs in this economy that are so degrading and awful that people will only do them if they are forced to do so under the threat of literal starvation—jobs that people will only perform if that "first motive" Tocqueville mentioned; the "need to live"; is directly called in—then we should perhaps ask ourselves whether those are the kinds of jobs that human beings ought to perform at all. 

Perhaps, if no person will perform a task unless their life literally depends on it, then that task is a kind of Egyptian slavery and no one should be made to do it in the first place. 

We hear a great deal—from Tocqueville among others—about the demoralization and degradation that result from a life of idleness among the poor (the idleness of the rich, who can live on their own incomes, has always drawn less scrutiny and alarm from policymakers; Tocqueville suggests this is because their idleness is "accompanied by inner contentment" and "moralized by the exercise of thought"). 

But what about the demoralization and degradation of being forced to do a task that no human being would do, unless it was their only alternative to death? Unless they were being forced to it by means of the whip, the knout, or the empty plate? 

I'm reminded of a passage from John Dos Passos's Three Soldiers, in which the protagonist, having been impressed into a convict labor gang as the penalty for attempted desertion from the army, is set to moving stones all day in the hot sun. "People have spent their lives... doing only this," he thinks to himself, over and over again—to remind himself that others have had it even worse. "People have spent their lives... doing only this." 

Dos Passos's point (he was still a radical at the time he wrote this novel) was surely: is this any way for a human being to live? Is this a life that anyone should be forced to endure in a purportedly modern civilization? Moving stones on one's back under the sun, like an Israelite slave building the pyramids? Is that a way any person would choose to live, unless under the most extreme forms of compulsion?

We have heard much—from both the right and the left—about the dignity of labor; the conviction that people will live more rewarding and meaningful lives if they work, regardless of what the job might be—and that therefore, they ought to be forced to participate in the labor market for their own good, whether they want to or not. 

But such lofty paeans to the virtue of toil crumble in the face of the actual kinds of jobs we're talking about—the breaking rocks in the hot sun kind of jobs—the ones that people will apparently not undertake, merely for the sake of supplementing their income, but only if policymakers deliberately ensure they are their only means to avoid outright starvation. 

Oscar Wilde, in a classic essay, once gave "sweep[ing] a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing" as an example of a job no one would do unless compelled by hunger. "To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible," he adds. "To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine."

Indeed. If people will only do certain jobs when the bread is literally plucked from their mouths—then those jobs can go hang. Human beings were meant for better things. 

If there are tasks of this sort that cannot yet be automated, and which still require human workers, then employers should have to compete with a higher salary and benefits than mere subsistence wages in order to attract people to those duties. The availability of the UBI check would just set a floor that employers would have to compete against and give low-wage workers a better bargaining position from the jump—it wouldn't prevent anyone from taking one of those jobs, if employers came up with a good enough offer to make it better than the alternatives. 

In other words, the goal of raising one's living standard—the "second motive" Tocqueville mentioned—would surely be enough on its own to motivate people to take these jobs—if the offer was actually high enough and if these jobs were worthy of a human being. 

If there really is so much "dignity" to be found in labor—if it is really so much more rewarding and less "demoralizing" and "degrading" to work in these jobs than to collect a check—then can't we trust people to decide on their own to take some of these jobs, in order to supplement their income, without having to resort to compulsion? If these jobs are so dignified, then let us pay wages for them that are adequate to tempt people away from the alternative of living on UBI, without fear of starvation being the only means of inducement. 

If people cannot be convinced to take one of these jobs unless their lives are literally threatened for refusing, then perhaps those jobs are not as "dignified" as we think. 

And so, as D.H. Lawrence once bid us, let us hear no more about the dignity of labor: "Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of," he wrote. 

Let's abolish labour, let's have done with labouring!

Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it's not labour.

Let's have it so! Let's make a revolution for fun!