Yes, we still have to work

The automated luxury paradise is still just science fiction.

Art by Vera Bock

“I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work to do it!” — Slacker

In my roundup this week, I flagged some disappointing results for a basic income experiment. When people got $1000 a month, 2% of them stopped working. That’s a significant amount, considering that $1000 a month is not enough to really support anyone by itself. It suggests that a much larger UBI would cause a much larger percentage of people to stop working. That would increase the costs of the program, and probably doom it politically — the idea of having the government pay a large portion of the citizenry not to work is likely to be very unpopular.

When I posted the result on Twitter X, however, I got some interesting reactions. A number of people told me — often in angry, indignant terms — that paying people to take leisure is the whole point of basic income, and is a good and desirable thing. Here are just a few examples:

From an economic standpoint, this argument is unpersuasive. Yes, taking more leisure time is valuable — even if you drop out of the labor force entirely, you’re still presumably doing something you like with all those spare hours. But the benefit of that leisure has to be weighed against the cost of the lost production when the people stop working, plus the monetary cost of providing the UBI in the first place, and the deadweight loss of whatever taxes you had to use to transfer the money. A welfare program that causes a significant number of people to stop working entirely is unlikely to pass any reasonable cost-benefit analysis.

But what’s interesting here is the deep antipathy to the idea of work that seems to have taken root among some on the political left. Not everyone on the left, of course — back in the late 2010s there were fierce battles between supporters of UBI and supporters of a federal job guarantee. But I notice a bunch of leftist types these days basically saying that work — or at least, most work — is useless and pointless and should be abolished.

A prime example was the late David Graeber, whose 2018 book Bullshit Jobs was something of a sensation. Although Graeber doesn’t support his argument very well — his list of “bullshit” jobs includes such obviously useful things as pizza delivery, dog washing, and corporate law¹ — the notion that a large percentage of jobs could be eliminated without reducing real economic value appealed to a lot of people. For less erudite and scholarly examples of leftist types who decry the idea of work, check out r/antiwork.

I admit that I’m not a scholar of the history of leftist thought, but this feels like a vibe shift compared to the socialists of a century ago. Obviously socialists in the early 20th century wanted workers’ lives to be less back-breaking and toilsome, but “worker” was also an identity that socialists deeply valued and viewed as their core support group. The Labor Theory of Value held that things were only valuable to the degree that it took work to create them (that theory is wrong, but it demonstrates what 20th century socialists cared about). Lenin vilified the bourgeoisie as being “those who shirk their work”, and the Soviet constitution declared that “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”

For much of the 20th century, the great political struggle of the left was to reward workers more for their labor — to raise wages and benefits, to give workers more control over companies, and to raise the status and political power of workers as a group. The people who designed the American welfare state took great pains to avoid the right’s accusation that they were paying people not to work; as a result, U.S. government programs are full of work incentives.

What has changed? The standard answer to that question will be something along the lines of “kids these days are just lazy”, but that’s completely unsatisfying to me — even if it’s true, which I doubt, it doesn’t really answer the question. Laziness does not appear out of the void; there must be some cause.

In fact, the simplest answer is that nothing has really changed. The people who thump their copies of Bullshit Jobs and post on r/antiwork and troll anyone who questions UBI are probably a small minority of Americans (and many of them are not Americans at all). After all, the share of Americans who say they’re satisfied with their jobs has been rising pretty steadily since 2010:

Source: Conference Board

The argument that Americans are trapped in jobs they hate and from which they need to be liberated by basic income is looking weaker by the year.

As for the fraction of Americans who do think work is bullshit, it’s probably not too hard to come up with plausible explanations for them either. Working-class people are undoubtedly annoyed by low wages, despite the fact that real wages have been rising at the bottom of the distribution for a decade now. Working for $16 an hour is better than working for $12.50², but it’s still not amazing, and low-paid workers still tend to get treated poorly in many workplaces. I’m sure that fuels plenty of online complaints. Most of those workers would probably rather just get paid more and get treated better, but I’m some would accept a UBI-supported life of leisure as an alternative.

Among educated Americans, however, I suspect there’s another factor at work: elite overproduction. In the 1990s and 2000s, smart young Americans were told that a college education was the ticket to a career that wasn’t just high-paying, but also deep, fulfilling, and meaningful. And even if that was true for the median college graduate, there were plenty for whom things didn’t turn out that way. The college wage premium has shrunk over time. Many humanities and social science majors turned out to be less useful for employment after the busts in the law and journalism professions. And academia is basically full.

If you went into $30,000 of debt for a state university, and now you’re facing the prospect of living out your life as an insurance assessor or a human resources compliance officer, perhaps you think a shabby life of leisure — paid for by all your classmates who struck it rich — doesn’t sound too bad.

Social media might be bad for work ethic

But on top of all that, it’s also possible that Americans have gotten lazier — or in less condescending econ terminology, there may have been a shift in the preference for leisure.

One of the most interesting economic facts of the last few decades is that Americans have gotten steadily richer since the 1980s, but haven’t really reduced the amount they work since then:

Many people — including John Maynard Keynes — think that as people get richer, they should work less. But in fact, as real wages go up, the incentive to work more hours actually increases, because each additional hour of work lets you buy more stuff. So it’s not clear whether people should work less or work more as they get richer.

Until the 1980s, Americans chose to work less as they got richer. But since then, increased income has had basically no effect on how much Americans work. There are several possible reasons for this. One possibility is that work itself has become more meaningful, fulfilling, and fun. Another is that the invention of new stuff to consume — better TVs, cars, video games, vacations, elective health procedures, etc. — has kept people working hard in order to afford it all.

But if it’s the latter, then the invention of new free forms of consumption — Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and so on — could reduce the incentive to work. If the way I have fun is by buying a boat and sailing it up and down the coast while drinking Clase Azul and watching TV on a big screen, then sure, I might work 50-hour weeks in order to afford all that. But if the way I have fun is by going on X and arguing with Elon Musk, and watching TikToks of college kids complaining about cultural appropriation, then why am I busting my butt at work?

Of course, that’s theoretical. The cold, hard data says that Americans are working just as much as ever before…or does it?

Data on labor hours comes from two places: A) asking businesses how long their employees worked, and B) asking people how many hours they worked. But neither of those is likely to capture actual time-on-task very well. If people browse social media on their smartphone in their cubicle, that’s going to be counted as “work” in the government numbers, even though in reality that’s leisure.³ Before the internet, smartphones, and social media, goofing off at work was probably both more boring and harder to get away with; now, people bring their whole social lives to the office in their pockets.

All day long, whenever I check Twitter, there are a ton of people talking who list high-paying jobs in their bio. And yet there they are, gabbing away on the internet instead of doing those jobs!

If lots of people are taking stealth leisure via social media use during “work” hours, then this might be satisfying the increased demand for leisure time due to a shift in consumption preferences toward social media. This might increase job satisfaction — because work now involves a lot more goofing off — while also making many jobs feel like “bullshit”. Because if you’re actually getting paid to do a couple hours of work and six hours of arguing on the internet every day, why are you even clocking in to the office or logging onto the company Slack?

The robot fantasy

I did notice one other very common argument among the people who had no problem with UBI discouraging work. A whole bunch of people said that since jobs are going to be automated away anyway, people are going to have more leisure time whether they want it or not. And so, they argue, at least UBI will regular folks well-fed during their new leisurely obsolescence:

I can’t tell you with certainty that this won’t happen, but I can tell you with certainty that it hasn’t happened. Among those who are too young to retire and mostly too old to still be in school, the percentage of people with jobs is as high as it has ever been:

There’s just no sign of mass technological unemployment, either in the U.S. or anywhere else.

Now it could be that this is about to change. Sometimes the economy really does encounter a sudden break point where all the old certainties get tossed out and a new reality takes hold. The Industrial Revolution is a good example of this. Maybe the invention of Artificial General Intelligence is right around the corner, and will replace the bulk of the work that normal humans can possibly do, leaving a world in which only the most brilliant AI engineers, savviest and boldest entrepreneurs, and most well-heeled financiers can make a living.

I encounter a surprisingly large number of people in the San Francisco tech industry who believe that this is going to happen. They might be right — Daron Acemoglu agrees with them — but I suspect they’re overgeneralizing from their own experience. Everyone likes to marvel at how billion-dollar software companies have been created with just a handful of employees. If you see that kind of thing all day, you very well might start to think that labor is obsolete! But if you look at the overall economy, you’ll see that the fraction of output that gets paid to labor has fallen by only a couple of percentage points since the dawn of the information age:

(And part of this fall is just the increase in land rents from our national failure to build housing.)

Science fiction futures are fun to imagine, but as things stand right now, pretty much every American company still needs lots of labor from lots of human workers. If all the janitors, food service workers, farmers, construction workers, checkout clerks, receptionists, security guards, cooks, warehouse workers, food delivery people, and other working-class people in the economy vanished tomorrow, advanced technological society would simply collapse, and those software engineers and entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who didn’t starve to death would find themselves scratching out a meager living from unforgiving soil in short order. Economics bloggers would not be spared.⁴

A less colorful way of saying this is that labor and capital might have become a tiny bit more substitutable over the last few decades, but they’re still mostly complements.

Personally I like the idea of unconditional cash benefits. They have much to recommend them over other forms of welfare — they’re easy to administer, simple to navigate, relatively free of perverse incentives, and have the potential to be broadly popular. I supported the expanded Child Tax Credit, which is the closest thing we’ll get to a federal basic income in the near future.

But at the same time, I think the intellectual culture around UBI has become a bit weird and dysfunctional. It seems like a strange alliance between rich nerds who think that anyone with an IQ of less than 130 is either economically useless or soon will be, and downwardly-mobile overeducated elites who feel like normie middle-class jobs are beneath them.

Neither of those attitudes makes much sense to me; neither the dream of a world free of workers nor the dream of a world free of work is particularly useful right now. Human labor is still incredibly valuable, and figuring out how to make human workers more capable is still how most value is created. And for that reason, we should focus policy on rewarding human labor more, and be wary of economic philosophies that claim that most human beings would be better off as glorified pets.

Update: I should have mentioned this in the post, but unpaid work like child care and housework is no less valuable than the paid kind — and society seriously undervalues it. But in the recent big UBI experiment, detailed surveys of the cash recipients found that they didn’t spend more time on these unpaid tasks — or on things like community engagement, caring for others, or self-improvement — after getting UBI. I should have been more explicit about that!

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1. But what about “econ blogger”, you ask? Surely that is a bullshit, useless job? Ahh, but if not for us econ bloggers, someone somewhere might make actual policy based on something David Graeber wrote. And just think how much economic value that would destroy!

2. Assuming both numbers are adjusted for inflation, which in this case they are.

3. Note that this might help explain the productivity slowdown! If people today spend an hour more out of every workday goofing off on social media rather than doing work, compared to 2005, this increased “stealth leisure” could mask increasing productivity from new information technologies. So far I haven’t seen anyone investigate this possibility.

4. In fact, this is a joke from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.