Post-Work

 Matt Yglesias had a piece on his Substack the other day about the "post-work future." He has spent his leisure time the last year reading 19th century novels, he tells us—and part of what he takes from these works is an example of how people who are "idle" by social design—the landed gentry of the age—can nonetheless make valuable and civilized use of their time. 

This is something we all may have to learn to do, Yglesias says, in a world where "work" assumes ever less prevalence and importance, due to changes in technology. 

The argument is a great deal like that of Keynes in his "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren." And when I first read that essay more than a decade ago, I was deeply skeptical. In particular, I found it hard to believe that, if only we no longer had to work, we would all spend our time writing symphonies or other civilized pursuits. 

This attitude on my part was shaped by my own experiences of leisure time in my early twenties—from which no symphonies had conspicuously emerged. 

There was that summer in div school, for instance, when I had taken an unpaid internship in Chicago that turned out to require almost none of my time. 

With my suddenly abundant leisure, I did not write a symphony. I read a few books, including ones of lasting impact and meaning to me (Lolly Willowes, for instance, and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep). But the lion's share of my time went into beating Super Mario 3D World on the Wii-U. 

Which was great fun, don't get me wrong. But not exactly a lasting contribution to humanity. 

So, I was a skeptic of the "abolish work" brigade for a while, and a partisan—after my fashion—of the "dignity of labor." My own experience, after all, was that I needed some externally-imposed structure in order to make meaningful and rewarding use of my time. Without orders from above, I tended to fritter away my life. 

By the time I reached my thirties, however—the situation was reversed. Now, I knew exactly how to make use of my free time. Any leisure I got went into reading books and writing blogs—which I considered my genuine metier in life. Work, then—which I still had to do five days a week—had become only a hindrance to what I really wanted to do. 

"Abolish work" suddenly started to sound more appealing. 

Add to this the fact that the partisans of the "dignity of work" didn't always make the most convincing arguments. 

One of them goes: We can't give people a universal basic income because studies show that this reduces their incentive to work. They then become trapped in demoralizing idleness, which they fritter away with drugs and criminality. 

Now, a moment's thought should reveal that universal cash benefits would not in fact lower the incentive to work. The incentive to secure an incremental increase in income, through extra work, should remain the same—assuming human wants to be more or less infinite, as economists do—even if people already have a subsistence income to meet their basic needs through another means. 

If there are certain jobs in the economy, then, that people refuse to take purely for the purpose of supplementing their income beyond subsistence level, and will only take so long as society ensures these jobs are their only alternative to starvation—then we should ask ourselves if those jobs are really so "dignified" as we have maintained. 

Then there's the fact that so many of the arguments for having other people work boil down to the fact that their labor appears necessary to promote the economic growth of industry and therefore to keep stock valuations aloft—thereby generating passive income for other people. 

It is at this point that the argument for the "dignity of work" begins to sound a great deal like what Bertrand Russell called it in his essay "In Praise of Idleness": namely, a gospel that the idle rich preach to the working poor in order to keep themselves in idleness (a gospel that those who preach are least likely, that is, to practice).

As Russell wrote of the landed gentry of his era—not so far removed from the Victorian gentlemen that Yglesias was talking about: "their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example."

Later on, he adds: "the necessity of keeping the poor contented [...] has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labour, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect." 

But suppose it really is true that the labor of some is necessary to secure the blessings of idleness to others—and therefore no symphonies will be written at all if we do not trap some part of the population in wage-slavery? 

We would perhaps—if we really knew that to be the situation—have to take a harder look at how highly we value the existence of symphonies. But fortunately, this is not even necessary. 

After all, this idea of necessary wage-slavery has become hard to sustain in an era when we are once again talking openly about mass layoffs and chronic unemployment from technological displacement due to AI automation. 

In a world where AI genuinely reduces the demand for human labor (which it may not—Russell in his essay discounts the idea of the infinitude of human wants, and thereby assumes there is an ultimate cap on the amount of production needed in society, which many economists would question him on)...

But supposing that it does actually reduce the demand for human labor in aggregate, as many people seem to suppose it will—we could respond to this in what Russell describes as the usual way: namely, by laying off half the workers and forcing the other half to work the same long, miserable hours as before. 

Or, Russell suggests, we could keep the same number of people employed at the same wages, but reduce their hours by half. 

One way—the latter, seldom tried, way—he points out, would solve the problem by distributing happiness and leisure to everyone. The other way—the first, most common way—would approach it by distributing misery to everyone, through forcing them into either poverty or overwork. 

One is a win-win. The other lose-lose. Yet, Russell observes, we seem to keep picking the lose-lose. 

A world in which people worked only four hours a day might, Russell concedes, leave some people feeling bored and useless at first—since they've never had a chance before to develop active and productive ways to use their leisure time. 

Essentially what such a world would require, as Ezra Pound points out in his ABC of Economics, is that everyone would have to learn to live as the artists do. They will still "work"—but they will have to learn how to work for intrinsic reasons; how, that is, to separate work from money. Which artists (and bloggers) have obviously had to do for some time now. 

Such a future seems very obviously preferable to one in which AI merely condemns half of humanity to starvation and misery. 

The question, however, is how to ensure we get to the four-hour work day (which Ezra Klein and the other "abundance" enthusiasts have recently started talking about as well—not to be confused with the other Ezra mentioned above). 

To limit labor contracts to no more than four hours a day would—of course—require considerable state interference in the economy. 

So too, to redistribute the proceeds of AI automation equitably in the form of universal basic incomes would require a great deal of conscious redistribution of wealth and incomes. 

It's possible to do such things, of course. But this brings us to the question of the health of our democracy. 

The vision of the post-work future seems to have a political contradiction at its heart. On the one hand—it requires the further robust development of AI technology so that it can replace human workers. Such a process will inevitably concentrate more wealth in the hands of billionaires (soon to be trillionaires) who own tech companies. 

The vision then requires the democratic process to seize part of the incomes of these tech trillionaires and redistribute it in the form of cash benefits; while also interfering in their ability to ink exploitative labor contracts with the poor. 

But what hope do we have that the democratic process would prove this muscular and durable, in a world where all economic and social power had simultaneously been concentrated in the hands of tech oligarchs? 

If Tocqueville was right about anything, it was surely that a democracy, in order to function, needs a fairly broad distribution of economic and social power. If the underlying structures of society are not democratic, it appears unlikely that a merely political democracy will last for long. 

But perhaps those tech barons will decide to feed and clothe and house the rest of us, purely out of the goodness of their hearts? 

The careers of those tech barons in politics so far does not inspire confidence. 

Elon Musk's major policy innovation, during his time in the administration, was to eliminate food aid for starving children in Africa and throughout the developing world. 

Does anyone out there have a lot of confidence that he would willingly fork over a large percentage of his own personal income indefinitely for the sake of feeding the rest of us? 

This, to my mind, remains the biggest problem with the vision of the "post-work future." How do we obtain it without simultaneously losing the middle class society, and widespread distribution of economic power, that alone makes democracy possible—and which alone could effectively redistribute the gains of automation so as to remove the need to work for most people? 

This is a real objection to such visions, and I do not yet see a way around it. 

But I will say that my objection no longer rests, at this point, on any belief that work is necessary to human happiness and flourishing. Or rather—work may be so necessary—but the work that it best for us in this regard is often the work we choose for intrinsic reasons; work that has nothing to do with making money; "work," to Ezra Pound's point, as understood by the artist. 

This sort of work is good. But work that we would never choose for ourselves, unless it was the only way to avoid starvation, and that we conspicuously avoid as soon as we are given any alternative to meet our basic subsistence needs, is "emphatically not one of the ends of human life," as Russell puts it. 

So I'm now on D.H. Lawrence's team in this great debate: Let us hear no more of the "dignity of labor," he argued—for

Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.

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!