Particularly: "But this negative definition, that laziness is “too much not working” makes no sense, as leisure already describes 100% of the time one spends not working (the concepts of leisure and laziness have often been related, confused, or even intertwined; otiosus means laziness in Latin, from otium, meaning leisure). In any case, people often accuse themselves and others of laziness even when they don’t seem to particularly enjoy the activities they engage in instead; it is hard to conceive of “procrastination” or “persistent self-recrimination” as colloquial “leisure.” "
Laziness is the lack of ability to exert oneself towards (difficult) meaningful pursuits.
Playing video games instead of working out is giving in to momentary pleasure instead of pursuing a meaningful and difficult end. The difference between laziness and industriousness is the difference between what you do in your life today, and what you would tell yourself to do if you wouldn't experience the next 24 hours but would 'do' whatever you laid yourself out on a to-do list.
“A person who says playing catch with your child is not lazy but playing catch with your friends or your dog is lazy, or that playing with a dog is not lazy but playing videogames is lazy, is simply making arbitrary judgments about which expenditures of time are most meritorious”
Deciding who is allowed to make these judgments is a tricky question. But to suggest that there is no judgment to be made at all, or that “any activity is fine” is absurd. How does society get better, correct our mistakes, improve how we tackle tough issues? I don’t think it’s by suggesting that all choices of how we spend our time are equal. Would you say that about elected officials? Medical providers? Public safety professionals?
I don’t understand the point of writing something like this.
I always thought of being lazy as one of my defining characteristics. It seems like many people work because they have a drive to be the best or something. I work in order to support my ability to loaf. I went to law school to forestall entering the workforce. I work as a lawyer because it is easier, and better able to sustain my loafing. I enjoy being a lawyer a lot of the time, but if I was independently wealthy, I would enjoy going to art museums instead.
As faithful followers of the natural law of least effort, we are all lazy. Laziness understood as "unwilling to work or use energy" is the engine of technological advancement and progress.
I have no moral problem with "laziness," and I'm looking forward to a post-scarcity future in which we can all be as lazy as we want.
That said, this point:
>>Blaming people who are looking for work for not finding it is like blaming someone who dies on the list of prospective kidney recipients for not living longer. Most people in labour markets are price-takers operating in limited information environments; to imagine otherwise is fantasy. People upset about matching problems in the labour market (and people are right to puzzle at the figures that U.S. presently has 10M job openings and 8.5M unemployed and actively looking for work!) have valid concerns, but should not look first to the laziness of their compatriots as an explanation.
...ignores the fact that there is a strong incentive for many people to *say* they are looking for work when they aren't really looking for work, because you can't qualify for unemployment insurance unless you appear to be looking for work. I don't know how many of those 8.5 million fall into this category, and the authors don't say.
A much better essay on the concept of laziness is Scott Alexander's "The Whole City is Center". It's in the form of a philosophical dialogue, and it's not nearly as smug and off-putting as this essay. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/the-whole-city-is-center/
Lazy? No. Just haven’t found work to do that they consider worth the effort. Will UBI be an incentive to find that sort of work? Maybe. Will their work benefit anyone else? Maybe. It will take many years to find out, by which time it will be impossible to drop the UBI, no matter how disastrous UBI may prove to be.
"Most often, when promising new or progressive ideas are presented in policy and economics, the retort is, “Aha! But then the lazy person might win!” Or “a person near to, or related to, or the same colour as, or in the same neighbourhood as a lazy person might win!” "
It's remarkable to me that a post titled "People Aren't Lazy!" utilizes such a lazy strawman.
The comparison of medieval patronage to UBI is also a bit bizarre. Patronage was given to individuals who had already demonstrated extreme talent and willingness to work. It was more akin to a scholarship program for gifted students, and nothing like a blanket UBI program.
The authors also fail to answer the question I always have about UBI, which is: When all those baristas who aren't passionate about coffee leave, who replaces them? What about far less desirable jobs, such as being a garbage collector?
Until we have affordable automation for those jobs, it would spell disaster for businesses who depend on these employees, especially small businesses that run on a tight budget. I'm yet to see anyone spell out a comprehensive plan for how we could implement UBI without decimating small businesses and possibly the economy as a whole (if someone knows of any resource that comprehensively tackles this question, please share, because the idealist inside me loves the idea of UBI.)
"And yet, by and large, society deems toiling away at a job one hates to be more meritorious than patiently waiting for a job one likes, which is almost always a job in which one will be more productive and effective."
I hear this argument a lot: that people who are unhappy at their jobs are very inefficient and wasting resources, and society would actually be more prosperous if they weren't locked into those jobs. But again, I just don't see much data backing it. I read this entire article hoping the authors, being Econ PhDs, would present data to support this, and was very disappointed that their argument boiled down to, "Trust us, it's true!"
"To call someone else lazy requires less humility, less empathy, and less introspection than admitting one’s own anger and disdain at the prospect that someone else might be enjoying herself. In this sense, if “laziness” is wrong, the sin involved is not the sloth of the accused, but the envy of the accuser."
This is a bizarre statement, and one that completely fails to take into account the impact of laziness on families and communities. My cousin is lazy. All he does is play video games, smoke pot, hang out with friends who also don't work, and collect a disability check (he has a "back injury" that somehow prevents him from working, but not from dirtbiking and playing baseball.) He absolutely, completely neglects his children. It crushes them and has completely destroyed their self esteem. Luckily, his wife has divorced him and taken the children (he made no effort to get custody), but his kids now have to deal with the life-long trauma of having a dad who has made it very clear they're just not worth the effort.
And, no, he is not someone basking in happiness as he enjoys "leisure." He's an utterly miserable person, and I suspect the root of his laziness is untreated mental illness. In my experience, that is the root of most laziness: not an idealistic rejection of the capitalistic rat race, like these authors suggest, but a deep self-loathing fueled by a lack of community and purpose in life.
Can part of that be attributed to our capitalistic lifestyles? For a lot of people, sure. But that doesn't mean laziness "doesn't exist."
Anyway, I adore Noah's writing (even when I don't agree with him, he presents clearly thought out arguments and uses data to back them). But I'm honestly a bit baffled that he'd share an essay this low in quality.
Speaking of lazy...this piece is evidence of intellectual laziness (it certainly isn't economic science). The question that ought to be being asked about disincentives to productive behavior is how strong they are AT THE MARGIN. Which takes diligent research to answer, not self-congratulatory blog posts.
Funny how ordinary (non-academics) people recognize laziness as a reality, and are then looked down upon for their astuteness.
"Laziness" tells us which jobs or tasks are crap enough to automate.
Also, we generally don't call workaholics who won't pull their weight at home "lazy." I've definitely known docs who take call to get a reprieve from home responsibilities (I am most definitely not one of those). I think thoughts within their households differ on whether the extra income offsets the burdens.
I get the feeling I am reading an argument for UBI and transfers to the unemployed buried under a rhetorical argument against slandering people with the term "lazy".
I think the term lazy is a lot like, albeit the opposite of, "greedy". Both reflect the vice of taking a useful trait to a harmful extreme. A greedy person takes self interest to the point of self harm or antisocial harm of others. A lazy person takes leisure to the extreme of harming their long term interest, or harming the interests of others they might care for.
One obvious concern with transfers to those not employed is that it incentivizes not getting employed. And why should we care if they get employed? Because employment is a positive sum, win/win activity which produces value for consumers and workers. Both expect and usually gain benefit from the relationship. The consumer gets a fine cup of java in a relaxing environment out of the house. The barista gets $16 an hour and various other benefits. We accomplish more together in a complex network of market activity than we can on our own, and wages is the incentive for us to join the network in a productive way.
If the person instead opts to play video games then the consumer benefit is not created. Total utility is reduced.
I agree that UBI might be a better way of providing a safety net in a modern economy. I seriously doubt it, but like another commenter on this page, I think it would be a great long term experiment somewhere willing to court possible disaster. And by replace, I mean eliminating existing "welfare" programs and transfers, and replacing it with a widespread UBI.
I say this as someone who chose to drop out of a career as a financial executive (I designed novel financial products). Eventually, I just decided with tax rates where they were that I would just retire early (in my forties) and spend time surfing and with my family. No regrets. I don’t really consider myself lazy (ok, I might be a bit lazy). I just chose the trade offs that best met my need. But who did lose out on my admittedly selfish choice were all the millions of consumers who could have benefitted from any creative products which I was capable of creating. Their loss, not mine. Some create coffees. Some new products. A UBI would just have encouraged me to opt out sooner, or to opt out with less personal saving.
This argument only really makes sense if we think that personal and social incentives toward hard work are aligned.
If we think about contexts where people aren't given individual rewards for work, laziness as a value judgment makes perfect sense. If you go on a long camping trip with your friends, and one of your friends never helps collect firewood/pack up the stuff/etc., calling them lazy and treating that as a value judgment is perfectly reasonable, and saying "they just have different preferences" is unreasonable. In that context, it's clear that work has to get done, that much of that work is unpleasant, and that a willingness to participate in that work is a moral quality that deserves praise.
The work that most of us do now is also important, and done for the good of society. The only reason to think of it as purely a matter of personal preference is if we think that the money we get from working harder is commensurate with the value we create by working. If this isn't true, then people who work hard are carrying people who don't, just as if we were on a camping trip.
The funny thing about this is that if you want more economic redistribution (as I do), you want a world where our personal rewards for working hard are smaller than the benefits to society. You want a world that looks more like the camping trip. And in order for that world to work, we need people to feel proud of hard work.
One possible retort to this is that people's natural preference for creating good stuff is strong enough that our society would produce what it needs without incentives to work hard (either monetary or moral/social). That might be true for creating art, writing novels, or even making google. I doubt that it's true for restocking shelves, data entry, and all of the many difficult, necessary, and unglamorous tasks that keep our society running.
Horrible post.
Particularly: "But this negative definition, that laziness is “too much not working” makes no sense, as leisure already describes 100% of the time one spends not working (the concepts of leisure and laziness have often been related, confused, or even intertwined; otiosus means laziness in Latin, from otium, meaning leisure). In any case, people often accuse themselves and others of laziness even when they don’t seem to particularly enjoy the activities they engage in instead; it is hard to conceive of “procrastination” or “persistent self-recrimination” as colloquial “leisure.” "
Laziness is the lack of ability to exert oneself towards (difficult) meaningful pursuits.
Playing video games instead of working out is giving in to momentary pleasure instead of pursuing a meaningful and difficult end. The difference between laziness and industriousness is the difference between what you do in your life today, and what you would tell yourself to do if you wouldn't experience the next 24 hours but would 'do' whatever you laid yourself out on a to-do list.
“A person who says playing catch with your child is not lazy but playing catch with your friends or your dog is lazy, or that playing with a dog is not lazy but playing videogames is lazy, is simply making arbitrary judgments about which expenditures of time are most meritorious”
Deciding who is allowed to make these judgments is a tricky question. But to suggest that there is no judgment to be made at all, or that “any activity is fine” is absurd. How does society get better, correct our mistakes, improve how we tackle tough issues? I don’t think it’s by suggesting that all choices of how we spend our time are equal. Would you say that about elected officials? Medical providers? Public safety professionals?
I don’t understand the point of writing something like this.
I always thought of being lazy as one of my defining characteristics. It seems like many people work because they have a drive to be the best or something. I work in order to support my ability to loaf. I went to law school to forestall entering the workforce. I work as a lawyer because it is easier, and better able to sustain my loafing. I enjoy being a lawyer a lot of the time, but if I was independently wealthy, I would enjoy going to art museums instead.
It really does take an academic to miss the obvious so effectively.
As faithful followers of the natural law of least effort, we are all lazy. Laziness understood as "unwilling to work or use energy" is the engine of technological advancement and progress.
I have no moral problem with "laziness," and I'm looking forward to a post-scarcity future in which we can all be as lazy as we want.
That said, this point:
>>Blaming people who are looking for work for not finding it is like blaming someone who dies on the list of prospective kidney recipients for not living longer. Most people in labour markets are price-takers operating in limited information environments; to imagine otherwise is fantasy. People upset about matching problems in the labour market (and people are right to puzzle at the figures that U.S. presently has 10M job openings and 8.5M unemployed and actively looking for work!) have valid concerns, but should not look first to the laziness of their compatriots as an explanation.
...ignores the fact that there is a strong incentive for many people to *say* they are looking for work when they aren't really looking for work, because you can't qualify for unemployment insurance unless you appear to be looking for work. I don't know how many of those 8.5 million fall into this category, and the authors don't say.
A much better essay on the concept of laziness is Scott Alexander's "The Whole City is Center". It's in the form of a philosophical dialogue, and it's not nearly as smug and off-putting as this essay. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/the-whole-city-is-center/
Lazy? No. Just haven’t found work to do that they consider worth the effort. Will UBI be an incentive to find that sort of work? Maybe. Will their work benefit anyone else? Maybe. It will take many years to find out, by which time it will be impossible to drop the UBI, no matter how disastrous UBI may prove to be.
"Most often, when promising new or progressive ideas are presented in policy and economics, the retort is, “Aha! But then the lazy person might win!” Or “a person near to, or related to, or the same colour as, or in the same neighbourhood as a lazy person might win!” "
It's remarkable to me that a post titled "People Aren't Lazy!" utilizes such a lazy strawman.
The comparison of medieval patronage to UBI is also a bit bizarre. Patronage was given to individuals who had already demonstrated extreme talent and willingness to work. It was more akin to a scholarship program for gifted students, and nothing like a blanket UBI program.
The authors also fail to answer the question I always have about UBI, which is: When all those baristas who aren't passionate about coffee leave, who replaces them? What about far less desirable jobs, such as being a garbage collector?
Until we have affordable automation for those jobs, it would spell disaster for businesses who depend on these employees, especially small businesses that run on a tight budget. I'm yet to see anyone spell out a comprehensive plan for how we could implement UBI without decimating small businesses and possibly the economy as a whole (if someone knows of any resource that comprehensively tackles this question, please share, because the idealist inside me loves the idea of UBI.)
"And yet, by and large, society deems toiling away at a job one hates to be more meritorious than patiently waiting for a job one likes, which is almost always a job in which one will be more productive and effective."
I hear this argument a lot: that people who are unhappy at their jobs are very inefficient and wasting resources, and society would actually be more prosperous if they weren't locked into those jobs. But again, I just don't see much data backing it. I read this entire article hoping the authors, being Econ PhDs, would present data to support this, and was very disappointed that their argument boiled down to, "Trust us, it's true!"
"To call someone else lazy requires less humility, less empathy, and less introspection than admitting one’s own anger and disdain at the prospect that someone else might be enjoying herself. In this sense, if “laziness” is wrong, the sin involved is not the sloth of the accused, but the envy of the accuser."
This is a bizarre statement, and one that completely fails to take into account the impact of laziness on families and communities. My cousin is lazy. All he does is play video games, smoke pot, hang out with friends who also don't work, and collect a disability check (he has a "back injury" that somehow prevents him from working, but not from dirtbiking and playing baseball.) He absolutely, completely neglects his children. It crushes them and has completely destroyed their self esteem. Luckily, his wife has divorced him and taken the children (he made no effort to get custody), but his kids now have to deal with the life-long trauma of having a dad who has made it very clear they're just not worth the effort.
And, no, he is not someone basking in happiness as he enjoys "leisure." He's an utterly miserable person, and I suspect the root of his laziness is untreated mental illness. In my experience, that is the root of most laziness: not an idealistic rejection of the capitalistic rat race, like these authors suggest, but a deep self-loathing fueled by a lack of community and purpose in life.
Can part of that be attributed to our capitalistic lifestyles? For a lot of people, sure. But that doesn't mean laziness "doesn't exist."
Anyway, I adore Noah's writing (even when I don't agree with him, he presents clearly thought out arguments and uses data to back them). But I'm honestly a bit baffled that he'd share an essay this low in quality.
Speaking of lazy...this piece is evidence of intellectual laziness (it certainly isn't economic science). The question that ought to be being asked about disincentives to productive behavior is how strong they are AT THE MARGIN. Which takes diligent research to answer, not self-congratulatory blog posts.
Funny how ordinary (non-academics) people recognize laziness as a reality, and are then looked down upon for their astuteness.
Well that was one the craziest things Ive read in a long time.
Really enjoyed reading this. Gives a whole new perspectiove to the way we/I characterize people, and even myself. Good choice of guests.
"Laziness" tells us which jobs or tasks are crap enough to automate.
Also, we generally don't call workaholics who won't pull their weight at home "lazy." I've definitely known docs who take call to get a reprieve from home responsibilities (I am most definitely not one of those). I think thoughts within their households differ on whether the extra income offsets the burdens.
I get the feeling I am reading an argument for UBI and transfers to the unemployed buried under a rhetorical argument against slandering people with the term "lazy".
I think the term lazy is a lot like, albeit the opposite of, "greedy". Both reflect the vice of taking a useful trait to a harmful extreme. A greedy person takes self interest to the point of self harm or antisocial harm of others. A lazy person takes leisure to the extreme of harming their long term interest, or harming the interests of others they might care for.
One obvious concern with transfers to those not employed is that it incentivizes not getting employed. And why should we care if they get employed? Because employment is a positive sum, win/win activity which produces value for consumers and workers. Both expect and usually gain benefit from the relationship. The consumer gets a fine cup of java in a relaxing environment out of the house. The barista gets $16 an hour and various other benefits. We accomplish more together in a complex network of market activity than we can on our own, and wages is the incentive for us to join the network in a productive way.
If the person instead opts to play video games then the consumer benefit is not created. Total utility is reduced.
I agree that UBI might be a better way of providing a safety net in a modern economy. I seriously doubt it, but like another commenter on this page, I think it would be a great long term experiment somewhere willing to court possible disaster. And by replace, I mean eliminating existing "welfare" programs and transfers, and replacing it with a widespread UBI.
I say this as someone who chose to drop out of a career as a financial executive (I designed novel financial products). Eventually, I just decided with tax rates where they were that I would just retire early (in my forties) and spend time surfing and with my family. No regrets. I don’t really consider myself lazy (ok, I might be a bit lazy). I just chose the trade offs that best met my need. But who did lose out on my admittedly selfish choice were all the millions of consumers who could have benefitted from any creative products which I was capable of creating. Their loss, not mine. Some create coffees. Some new products. A UBI would just have encouraged me to opt out sooner, or to opt out with less personal saving.
I guess they have never had to rely on people doing work for them, ever.
The difference between a lazy person and a decent person doing the same job is astounding.
This argument only really makes sense if we think that personal and social incentives toward hard work are aligned.
If we think about contexts where people aren't given individual rewards for work, laziness as a value judgment makes perfect sense. If you go on a long camping trip with your friends, and one of your friends never helps collect firewood/pack up the stuff/etc., calling them lazy and treating that as a value judgment is perfectly reasonable, and saying "they just have different preferences" is unreasonable. In that context, it's clear that work has to get done, that much of that work is unpleasant, and that a willingness to participate in that work is a moral quality that deserves praise.
The work that most of us do now is also important, and done for the good of society. The only reason to think of it as purely a matter of personal preference is if we think that the money we get from working harder is commensurate with the value we create by working. If this isn't true, then people who work hard are carrying people who don't, just as if we were on a camping trip.
The funny thing about this is that if you want more economic redistribution (as I do), you want a world where our personal rewards for working hard are smaller than the benefits to society. You want a world that looks more like the camping trip. And in order for that world to work, we need people to feel proud of hard work.
One possible retort to this is that people's natural preference for creating good stuff is strong enough that our society would produce what it needs without incentives to work hard (either monetary or moral/social). That might be true for creating art, writing novels, or even making google. I doubt that it's true for restocking shelves, data entry, and all of the many difficult, necessary, and unglamorous tasks that keep our society running.