Labor Supply and the Attention Tax
kortina.nyc
kortina.nyc
America's puritan relationship with work, and it's toxic interaction with free-market economics has reached it's ultimate conclusion in an economics that calmly and rationally lays out an argument that the working class, who:
1) for perhaps the first time in history have their essential needs met without spending most of their lives at toil, and
2) who indeed are happier than similar cohorts have been in the past, should
3) have their leisure time taxed in order to encourage them to go back to work for capital earning wages they don't want, instead of spending their time as they please.
This article really lays bare the grim reality of our world order: the owners want us working, even if there's nothing for us to gain from it. Indeed, any potential surplus which might under a rational system result in leisure, will instead be sucked up by an owner-controlled state through confiscatory taxes which are designed solely to get us back into the mines lest we enjoy ourselves too much playing Overwatch, being with our families, or just generally not wasting our lives in low-paying retail and service jobs.
From everything I see, people over age 65 want to stay in the game. Many of them are surprisingly healthy, and with the general collapse of factory work, most of the available jobs tend to be physically manageable service-sector work that provides a lot of interesting social interaction and affirmation of personal worth. Plus extra spending cash!
The head clerk at my local hardware store is 82 years old and knows everything about hardware! He doesn't move much from the cash register, and much younger folks stock the shelves. But he's the go-to guy when it comes to advice about acrylic vs. latex paint, etc. He likes to teach and we're grateful for it.
Same story among school crossing guards, which is a prime part-time job for the over 65-set.
My uncle kept picking up consulting income way into his 70s. Same basic story. Non-U.S. healthcare systems can get his input via PDFs, emails and video conferencing. No need to leave his Arizona condo unless he wants to.
For older people in frail health with limited skills, these options aren't open. But the role of the voluntarily working elderly is an overlooked bright spot.
Work (in appropriate doses) brings a sense of usefulness for seniors that staring at the TV all day does not.
As automation progresses we are going to have a lot more people who don't want or need to work. This would be much further along if the economy of capital inequality wasn't so distorted.
Young men apparently don't have to work full time to survive, don't want to, and are free to do things they want. This is being painted as a bad thing either because they should be working because work > leisure or assuming that work is inaccessible rather than undesired (probably both, definitely not just one)
I, personally, would like to work a lot less. The reason I can't are two fold. 1) it's uncommon for employers to hire highly skilled workers in part time roles and 2) the cost of living ballooned up to eat any excess income by rent seekers.
>The chief aim of their constitution and government is that, whenever public needs permit, all citizens should be free, so far as possible, to withdraw their time and energy from the service of the body, and devote themselves to the freedom and culture of the mind. For that, they think, is the real happiness of life.
I don't agree that the authors call this a bad thing. They call it out as an interesting trend that is different than what we've seen before, and run through the thought experiment of what you could do about it _if_ you thought it was bad. From the article:
> You might argue this is a good thing. People actually prefer to spend their time consuming media over working, and we have achieved the luxury of enabling them to act on this preference.
> If you’re in the camp that thinks lower economic output is bad, the natural follow-up question is what kind of policy changes might counteract this phenomenon.
> While it is fun to explore alternative mechanisms for motivating the labor force if labor supply no longer responds to increases in wages, it is far more likely that lost worker productivity will be made up for with technology (eg, automation via robotics, software, artificial intelligence) that makes remaining workers more productive. While this would lead to a host of other problems (eg, inequality) and almost certainly lead to a welfare state, it is probably more straightforward to implement the necessary technological advances than the attention tax. Furthermore, a welfare state where most people could devote most of their time to the pursuit of leisure seems to be more consistent with preferences revealed by recent trends in labor participation and alternative uses of time.
This seemed like dealing with the effects rather than the causes of the problem. But if you include social media like Instagram in the tax, and not just Xbox FPSes, you could disincentivize the status broadcasting that, according to the authors, leads the men to say "f it" and stop working in the first place.
I think you would have to tax a lot more than is obvious to discourage use of digital media -- like at least $3 or $4 an hour. Taxing status signaling is harder; you'd probably have to factor in the number of followers. I would welcome the chance to read more books, but this thought experiment is never going to happen.
He then unsurprisingly posits that it would be pointless/a bad idea to raise wages coincidentally mirroring the opinion of just about every other member of the share owning 1%.
And even if there is, it seems a lot like a chicken and egg problem, would young people consume more media because they cannot find a (as you note, "stable") work or are they refusing work because they are too busy consuming media (or have become addicted to it)?
I ask this because it's not at all obvious to me why this would be the case.
In times past, most parents would have kicked them out of the house and told them to get a job. Now we regularly have parents that let their kids live at home, even when they have high paying jobs (which used to be frowned upon).
There are two issues here:
First supply and demand in the economy. Many jobs that young men used to do have either been exported to other countries or are being done by cheap undocumented labor.
Second, parents that have enabled this behavior. As much as it isn't pleasant, the fear of not having a roof over your head, or being able to eat is a powerful motivator for people to get off the game console and to find a job, even if it is cleaning toilets with a toothbrush. But when you have parents you can coast and play video games, while living relatively stress free life.
The problem is that a leisure economy is not sustainable long term. If the current generation has less wealth, they won't have the luxury of letting their kids stay at home to play video games. As much as technology will eliminate some jobs, it creates others, and the issue is not really a lowered demand for labor. It's that people looking for a larger profit are trying juice the labor markets in the US by increasing the supply of labor to lower the price by exporting production to places with cheaper labor and bringing in more labor competition......and we are seeing the effects of it.
Explanations like this article are akin to being on a ship with a large hole in the front. It is causing it to lean forward but instead of fixing the hole they are re-arranging the furniture on the deck to try to fix the tilt.
Lower male participation in the workforce is a separate though 60+ year trend and has a wide range of causes. More education, more stay at home dads, automation, etc. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001
Suburbanization and the increased availability of housing helped change that. But I'd guess the biggest contributor would have been the increasing age at first marriage. Living with your parents until marriage is one thing if you're married by 21, and quite another if you're single at 30 and can afford to move out - which was increasingly the case in the second half of the 20th century.
Of course, now fewer and fewer can afford to move out, even if they're 30+ and unmarried.
I indiscriminately downvote all comments that make such a statement, and I'm pretty sure others here do the same. It does make me wonder why though. Is it insecurity? Some kind of martyrdom-insurance if people do downvote you? Your comment seems perfectly okay as it is, if not for that.
Interesting idea. I've never thought of attention in this manner before.
I am not unique and advertisers have a really hard time getting any of my attention. I have ad blockers installed, I don't have an antenna for broadcast television or a cable subscription, I watch television through netflix or purchased seasons/episodes/movies either digital or physical, I play video games, and I buy books at bookstores or on an ereader. The most advertisement I experience is for more media on the same medium. Astroturfing reddit and email are the closest I get to consuming ads.
This isn't unique or special and it's certainly growing. I find being forced to watch advertisements intolerable having been away from it for so long and it's easy to keep away.
I had a similar thought listening to the radio yesterday: there are some lyrics and themes on public airwaves (like lauding adultery, cooking crack cocaine, etc.) that would have at least generated a little outrage even 15 years ago. But my guess is that many of the people who normally would have gotten on Parents Television Council and written angry letters to the FTC have now just stopped consuming mainstream media broadcasting altogether.
Anything with a non-transparent recommender system (including most digital stores) is still vulnerable to tracking, attention harvesting and paid placements, even if you aren't seeing straight up soap ads. For example, how do you know that the TV producer isn't paying Vudu or whoever to put shows on your front page because you watched show X?
When I say "what is happening" I am referring to the status quo stated here.
The view stated is that media companies are "buying" human attention with cheap entertainment and selling it to advertisers (the portion not taken up by the content).
The contradiction I am putting forward is that the people seemingly most susceptible to withdrawing some of their time from the workforce to pursue leisure and media are also consuming far fewer advertisement-hours in an absolute sense and as a proportion of time of multimedia consumed.
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As for the lack of outrage, that's a cultural shift not a media access shift (primarily at least). It's true that 15 years ago people were generally consuming a much more homogeneous set of media, but the driving factor of outrage is every age group was born 15 years later. Things aren't so shocking when you grew up with them. Fifteen years ago it was also a lot more outrageous to be gay; the extremely diminished outrage reaction to that isn't just because people are consuming different media.
http://blog.press.princeton.edu/2017/06/09/elizabeth-currid-...
Largely, young men need less money even for their basic everyday consumption (and so they have more time to spend on leisure). This is to a lesser extent true of young women (which are not discussed in the article even though their participation is also lowered -- are they playing video games too? Maybe those mobile games? Are there Facebook games still today?).
Interesting idea, but who would pay a 12% tax for writing a blog post, or leaving a review. I think it would pass the costs onto the consumers, raising the barrier of entry to information liquidity.
Until they "solve" this then taxing leisure -- which is actually a good, economically speaking -- will merely cause people to spend their leisure time on some other untaxed activity instead of video games/netflix.
Or tax the 78% of women to make the 20th percentile males less desirable on the Tinder so those other slackers will get out and work harder...don't actually know how Tinder works so just spitballing here.