Workism Is Making Americans Miserable (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Workism Is Making Americans Miserable (2019)

theatlantic.com

It's maddening to think that we have the material possibility of the sort of work week predicted by Keynes, but we have instead collectively chosen to create a brutally competitive world where workers fight each other for the privilege of serving neo-feudal elites and where most labor is about skimming and redistributing the surplus rather than creating wealth.

It's insane to me to see people who are proud of working themselves to the bone in jobs where they aren't even accumulating their own capital but building that of a noble, and/or where the job has no definable societal utility.

You have some of the smartest people on Earth spending the entirety of their talent creating professional-grade skinner boxes or getting people to click on ads. The worst part is that it makes perfect sense from their individual perspective to accumulate as much as money as possible early on to escape this crab-bucket world.

We were so close to escaping the nightmare of toil and scarcity and becoming free and instead we have built another form of self-inflicted nightmare.

> Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot.

John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848

How, exactly, is wealth created? Is it not all just skimming from other places?

For the purpose of the discussion, we could define wealth as anything that can improve the material conditions (and by extension, social) of human beings. Of course, this opens the debate as to which material conditions are desirable, but I'd say the possibility of not needing to work yet having your basic needs met is the main lodestar, the one aspect that would fundamentally change the nature of human life.

In this case, it is clear that some human activity would cause a dramatic fall in our material conditions if not performed. Food and energy producers, raw material extractors and processors, doctors, waste disposers, builders, grocery store clerks and so on... Even if we take into account the wastefulness of our production, it is still the case that they would be sorely missed, and their sudden absence would bring about total collapse. We both consciously and unconsciously recognize this, as evidenced for instance by all the "essential worker" designations that have followed the pandemic in various nations.

Comparatively, if all ad-tech workers, corporate lawyers, high-frequency traders and other such professions disappeared tomorrow we would collectively be hard pressed to notice unless it were pointed out to us. The skimming aspect is much clearer and obvious in their case, even if it's still an inevitably fuzzy boundary that could be argued about indefinitely.

We could also make an argument referring to entropy and there being no free lunch but like solipsism it would be both technically true and useless at the same time.

So which raw materials are actually necessary for human life? What happens when one area runs out? What is the rate limit of extraction in any given area? Should we consider other life besides human to be necessary? What do they need?

I don't understand how doctors and farmers create wealth. A farmer is taking up a massive amount of land, that other species may need. A doctor helps people recover from illness and prevent illness, is it then just the extension of human life that we consider 'wealth'?

Farming is a pretty good example. Life isn't zero sum

Taking over massive amounts of land to plant a monoculture? You're skimming from nature itself. You prevent other species from thriving for your own gain.

No. Turning a beef-patty, a bun, and an onion into a hamburger creates a valuable good that wasn't there before. Throwing beef, a bun, and an onion into a pit doesn't. However, as an economy gets more and more abstract, it can become harder and harder to identify the value that a given job produces.

I think the elephant in the room is the two income families, especially those with kids. Everything revolves around work, including where to put the kids when no one is at home. It's all exhausting.

People talk about the end of work and automation, but in many circles "staying at home" is still considered distasteful or low class. We should change this attitude.

It’s really an unfortunate catch-22.

Women being barred from the workplace (by law or stigma) meant we lost half of society’s talent and those women who wanted to work couldn’t. Once the most eager to work start working, the other families see the incredible benefits of a two income household in a single income household world. It’s almost a no brainer to start working too, as you’re nearly doubling your family income.

Enough iterations of that, and now we live in a two income household world, where the “family expenses” of childcare, homes, college education, and so on are priced for two income homes, and everyone else (single people, the young, students), are stuck in unaffordability and also getting married at later ages.

Then, women didn’t have to work but couldn’t work anyways. Now, women work and couldn’t quit anyways.

I’m a man, I’d love to stay at home and work on projects while my wife works. That’s just not feasible in today’s world for most. Maybe it’s easier to say this as a man, but was the social change for a minority of women who wanted to work really worth the cost to society? I wonder how much would actually be different, and if the women advocating for a place in the workforce would reconsider if they saw our world today.

Obviously I don’t hold anything against women, these are bigger topics than that. The societal impact is real in either direction.

I’m actually pretty convinced that this isn’t something new. Consider all the people with surnames like “Smith,” “Potter,” “Farmer,” or their variants in other languages.

The old wisdom about people being like border collies who go crazy without a job got repeated until it was cliché for a reason. And sure, the article acknowledges that people need work to live balanced, happy lives. But I think it’s long gone further than that, and people have essentially always identified with their “useful function.”

I think in those olden times people more or less worked when they wanted--except for farmers--and also probably literally lived where they worked. So no commute, no scheduled workday. You likely didn't have a mortgage. So I'm not sure people had to plan for 30 years of debt and put in literal 12 hour days as potters, etc. all the time to prevent themselves from turning into crazy border collies.

Although basic life was a lot of work on top or it.

This is true.

Ill also add the this workism is usually subjected to knowledge work where its more mental than say farming which is mostly physical thus putting a hard limit on what you can on any given day.

Theres a cliche quote that goes highlights, at least comically, the sillyness of our lifestyles. "Work everyday for 8 hours to pay for a house you dont own and barely live in, to pay for a car you dont own for 2 hours in traffic everyday."

A recent series of posts on a historian's blog[1], stressed that subsistence farmers farmed as little as they could get away with (i.e. enough to feed the family), while the ruling class tried to get them to farm as much as possible (to increase the tax base).

1: https://acoup.blog/

"as little as they could get away with" is still a hell of a lot when you don't have a tractor.

Roughly a factor of 4 difference though[1]. The article states 5 acres was a typical farm size while an extended family unit with two adult males could farm 20 acres. A later article goes into the fact that tenant-farmers (a.k.a sharecroppers) would keep only 50% of what they farmed compared to 80-90% for non-tenant farmers.

1: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

Y'all need to read Marx.

"John Stuart Mill says in his Principles of Political Economy: ‘It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.’ That is, however, by no means the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism... The machine is a means for producing surplus-value."

"Hence that remarkable phenomenon in the history of modern industry, that machinery sweeps away every moral and natural restriction on the length of the working day. Hence too the economic paradox that the most powerful instrument for reducing labour-time suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital’s disposal for its own valorization."

Marx (1867), Capital Volume I, Chapter 15 ("Machinery and Large-Scale Industry")

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