You never mentioned the possibility that some of the 2% may have been people who decided to use the money to support them doing the unpaid “work” of childcare and homemaker that supports a paycheck worker.
Well, they did detailed surveys of what people did with their extra time after receiving the money. Time spent on childcare and housework didn't increase, but time spent on leisure did increase.
Maybe for people working and caring for kids/parents need a little more leisure?
What I know is that my mom, in the 50s and 60s, in addition to childcare and housework, played a lot of bridge and the economy survived. But it was much less generous.
Thanks for responding. I always wonder about the surveys. Who created them and how they posed the questions about time spent on childcare and what they considered “homemaking.”
Thinking myself about how much time I have spent getting those “three estimates” for home repairs, waiting around for the AC guy etc.
This comment and rebuttal is a good example of why this UBI study is so unusually good. When the usual dismal First World UBI study comes out, there's always a large pack of excuses to explain away why the results are so unimpressive (and get less impressive the more rigorous the study and more pre-registered), but this one was designed against those excuses and collected unusually detailed data: "they just didn't provide enough money for long enough" (this was actually a large long-term transfer designed to respond to that); "ah, but they made big investments in upgrading their careers and escaping 'the poverty trap', that's just Boot Theory, you know" (no, the researchers collected extensive data on that and the quality of jobs/education was about the same); "ah, but they invested in childcare and you can't put a number on that!" (maybe you can't, but said investment did not happen, so we don't need to); "ah, but [random metric pulled out of table because p ~ 0.05] showed it worked!" (but that was not pre-registered as an important metric and the magic p-value disappears after multiple correction for the post hoc selection that you just did right there); "ok, so they just did more leisure, but that's fine, that was the goal according to the experts and this is all as expected by the experts" (no, they surveyed experts before the results and the experts justified it on other grounds and expected bigger effects); and so on.
(Of course, there's only so much you can do for someone really determined to turn the sow's ear into a purse, as they can just decide to question the time-use surveys themselves now that they didn't turn out to support their claims.)
Yup. It grinds my gears that policy discussions like this start with the assumption that homemaking and child care are prisons and public funding of child care “frees” women. Freedom to work in a call center or at Walmart isn’t freedom.
That's what CTC is supposed to be. A tension is that people who don't like "welfare queens" don't want it paid per child, but of course you do need that.
Yes, absolutely. Or maybe that 2% will become self-employed. Most likely, they will simply look for another better job with a different employer. Noah just sort of assumes they’re done with productive activity forever but there seems to be very little support for that assumption.
2% stopped working over 3 years. Could this represent genuine people who became unemployed involuntarily and were unable to return to the workforce due to aging?
I see the paper talks about unemployment but I can't find a ready answer.
I would like to know more about the distinction between labor and consumption. If I hire a maid, I’m consuming services but she’s doing work. If I clean myself, I’m still consuming my time. Like, I could just let my place be messy and do something someone else would find productive. Or, I could clean my room and pay myself for doing it? But what would be the point of that. Seems like double counting.
People, especially women, like to say that unpaid childcare and homemaking is work. Understandably, they want more status or material benefits for things they are doing anyway. But if they were going to do these things anyway, that is, do them despite no pay, then they’re not work. Do women enjoy homemaking? Yes and no. They enjoy having a neat place.
I can make very real, top 5% income if I am willing to work 60 hours a week and respond to the office at the drop of a hat. But if I tried to take a hard line on only working 40 hours, I would not have access to those roles & that income. (BTW I think this relates to the "mommy penalty" we see in wage data.)
And if what I REALLY want is to work 30 hours a week - oh that's just not even an option. That's my secret dream, to work 6 hr days for half my current salary. Absolutely no one wants to offer me that. It's bummer! Working 8am-2pm and getting the afternoon for myself would be awesome.
This is something I've never understood about certain types of high-powered jobs, especially on Wall Street.
If a bond trader gets paid $500,000 per year to work 80-hour weeks, couldn't the firm hire two people at $250,000 each and have them both work 40-hour weeks? How could any employee prefer the first option, where you have so little free time that you need to substitute hookers and blow for a normal family life? And wouldn't the firm get better performance from people who aren't constantly exhausted (or high)?
Something non-neoclassical is going on here. Wealthy workers aren't being allowed to buy enough leisure to enjoy their salaries, and their employers are paying for labor that's less productive per hour than it could be.
I can pay one surrogate to $90k to have my baby in 9 months, why can't I pay 9 surrogates $10k to have my baby in 1 month? ;)
Jokes aside, I think there are a variety of factors that apply specifically to these types of jobs:
Coordination has a lot of costs (The Mythical Man Month being a famous software engineering book on this topic). So it might take 4 traders working 40 hours weeks to do the same amount as 1 trader doing 80h weeks because they need to spend so much time coordinating.
Culture: it's easier to maintain good culture in a smaller org, hiring is hard.
scaling: working more makes you more productive because you gain experience faster. After 1y of 80h weeks you have 2x the experience as someone who worked 40h weeks.
Focus: someone who spends all their time working has fewer distractions because they're not thinking about what they're gonna do after work.
You absolutely cannot do this in finance. This is not making widgets on an assembly line, or manning a fire station, or other things where you’re being paid for your training and your time. In high end professional services, you’re also being paid for the relationships and situational context that only YOU have. Ie also in in management consulting, corporate law, and similar services. You need the _same brain_ to be working with the clients in the day and responding to those client requests at night, weekends, holidays. You can’t hand off that kind of relationship and situational knowledge once a day or once a week.
It sucks because many people want exactly what you want: less pay for less hours but the same excitement and interest of the job. But the jobs inherently don’t work that way, unfortunately.
That may be true. But I'm skeptical, because the phenomenon seems to occur in other professions. Medical students work insane hours during their residencies, and I don't think anyone seriously disputes that patient care gets compromised as a result.
There may be a market distortion at work in that case (limits on the number of slots at medical schools, forcing hospitals to extract more hours per resident) but it also looks a lot like hazing/machismo. And I think the standard Wall Street workweek probably reflects some testosterone-related irrationality as well.
Just generally: if you waive the neoclassical assumption that the quantity of working hours is already welfare-optimized because market forces are always welfare-optimizing, you see a lot of evidence that people aren't being offered the option of less work for less money even when it's technically feasible. Some academic economist should look at this rigorously and figure out where a market failure might be located.
The worst time for hospital patients is shift change - medical errors are most common when someone is seeing a patient for the first time and the person from the previous shift has to explain to them what's going on. Longer hours = fewer shift changes = fewer handoffs = less opportunities for people to screw up.
Though this effect may not dominate when it comes to total medical errors per unit time. Indeed, it cannot dominate in general, because otherwise the error-minimizing shift length would be infinity (no shift changes)!
An I-banker or surgeon just isn't going to gain the same amount of experience working 40 hours a week for 4 years vs 80 hours a week for 4 years, and if you have 2 people work 40 hours a week for 4 years, you still won't end up with 1 person who had the experience of working 80 hours weeks for 4 years. And a lot of industries are winner-take-all; if 1 person who got 4 years of experience working 80 hours weeks for 4 years produces 10% more profit than 2 people who worked 40 hours weeks for 4 years, they'll want the person who has the experience of working 80 hours weeks for 4 years. Ultimately, it's because I-bankers and surgeons, like all people, can't share brains between 2 different humans.
I don't know, this strikes me more as an after-the-fact rationalization for why people are working 80 hours a week. I work in a highly technical field, where we are constantly hiring engineers to maintain and develop intricate processes on complex machines, and I've never heard anyone suggest "We'll just have the engineers work 80 hours a week for the first few years and then they'll be twice as experienced," even though these are 24/7 operations, so the work is there to do that. Pushing someone that hard is more likely to lead to catastrophic mistakes than increased profitability.
Yes, in some fields. But in winner-take-all fields, firms want extremely driven people for good reason. I mean, are there any high level football coaches who work 40 hours/week?
> Your skepticism doesn't make that fact less true.
So? I don't see that Jeff was disputing "that fact" ("2 different humans" can't "share brains").
Jeff's questioning whether 2 different humans actually need to share brains to get the job done. You actually bring up two points in response: that experience per person is less when labor's split across employees, and that winner-take-all industries disproportionately penalize firms that deprive themselves of an edge.
Both your points are true, but I find the second one a lot more compelling than the first; after all, TOTAL experience remains the same however one splits workload, so to first order, experience per person doesn't matter at the level of an entire firm unless returns to individual experience are superlinear.
The answer 'optimal hrs/wk' is probably somewhere between 40-80 hours and varies with type of work.
People in there 30-40's can be very productive without fatigue working 60+ hours/wk. Yes, 80 hours may produce some counterproductive hours as shown with the medical errors from long hour works demanded of doctors in training (residents). However, I am impressed with the creative power of concentrated work including maintaining train of thought, on productivity, whether in science, finance or even sales- basically any upper-level professional occupation. I doubt productivity on an assembly-line or for construction or landscape labor improves beyond 40 hours.
Even if it IS hazing, it's the process of how you get to those higher incomes - and therefore how you got to those higher incomes, and the expectations of all those other people with you at your firm.
And I assure you if the corporate/industry culture has everyone working like that, it does not tolerate ONE person trying to change that norm. You go along or you get drummed out.
Is this actually true? Big legal cases often have legal TEAMS on both sides; evidently law firms find a way to make teamwork work. As far as I know "corporate law" isn't an exception to this.
To be an individual contributor lawyer, sure. But the partners at the top who hold the entire strategy and the client relationship — you generally can’t split that across multiple people.
That I'm willing to believe, but those "partners at the top" are going to be a small and unrepresentative minority of the employees — the vast majority of lawyers don't make partner.
Yes, but law firms are also trying to determine who among the many young lawyers they have is partner-material. Most folks who work 40 hours/week don't have the drive to work 80 hours/week for years on end. The firms want to discern who can and will before promoting anyone to partner.
I agree with this. I spent 10 years in professional services (management consulting). When people say they’re working 80 hour weeks it’s usually closer to 60, and even that 60 often includes client dinners and other things that are as much fun as they are work. There’s a definite machismo about stated length of work week.
The work of Investment banking and legal drone is not particularly difficult to master- nearly everyone off the street (from uni, law schools) whom they hire can do it at a junior to intermediate level (at a senior level it is more about managing clients).
The hard part in splitting time and projects is continuity and trust- also these firms are limited by the very poor management skills of senior partners and MDs (who were not promoted for their process improvement skills).There is time lost in explaining what has been done and what to be done next. Tech will make that easier. What these firms are doing right now is not splitting a days work but offshoring aspects of the process (routine financial modeling to India, contract attorneys for doc reviews). Those outsourced people aren’t making great money (though some contract attorneys work 30 hours a week).
The shortest answer I can give without revealing too much is that I'm in tech, and I'm the one paid to have the entire vision of the system in my head. I can't just hand that off at every shift change. It's not just documentation either, because a lot of things are in flux and in development, and it's a giant subtle dependency map.
Sadly, the most efficient answer (in time-to-market and $) is to have me nearly always available and in contact with teams in multiple timezones.
Yikes! Now that is a job that begs for automation... You being a mortal human is definitely a liability and begs for an AI solution. Having you there is NOT the "most efficient answer" but it does give you a sense of worth and purpose. I guess the question is are you using the most efficient answer to finding self-worth for yourself?
System architecture is the part of tech that you can't automate and have it done well. AI can build routines, but ironically, it doesn't understand itself as a system. You need system architects for the vision and the big picture.
Blunt force iterative self-sharpening leads to the situation Google now faces - they let their search algorithm self-sharpen for so long that now NO HUMAN at Google understands how it works anymore. It's a black box, and the algorithm can't explain it, either.
It's reassuring if you're a systems architect - they're still going be very necessary for companies that need their tech to work. It's definitely not meant to reassure you about software development done without a good systems architect.
In addition to what others have said a lot of finance "work" is BSing on the phone with clients about the latest Jets football game, or better yet, having company paid dinner at Le Bernardin with your client and discussing their latest sailing adventure - or as Geoff mentions, building relationships. It's not like you can really have one person calling during the day and another taking the evening shift for dinner.
But doesn't that imply that being an investment banker is, to a substantial extent, what David Graeber called a "bullshit job"? The activities you mention don't sound as if they improve the allocation of capital.
If investment decisions in the global economy were clearly optimal or near-optimal in the aggregate, the astronomical earnings of investment bankers would be fully justified, because that's the outcome society is paying them to bring about. But it doesn't really look that way, does it?
Yes and no. Relationships matter irrespective of the industry. Sane humans tend to want to deal with people they get along with, right? You, the client, need the investment banker's backing to get deals done. That this produces optimal results is a matter of debate, yes, but one wonders where a better system has been devised that has generated better results over anything like the run the U.S. has had in the past century or so.
I don't think a better system has been devised, but the current system is obviously suboptimal.
Events like the mortgage-backed securities bubble are examples of highly-paid finance people not doing the thing they're paid to do, which is to allocate capital in a rational way. The protagonists of "The Big Short" got very rich because they were among a minority of finance professionals who understood what was happening, but if financial markets worked the way they're supposed to work the "people who understood what was happening" would have been in the majority and there would have been no bubble in the first place.
If it's clear that a better way of running the world is possible, but also clear that it hasn't been identified yet, that seems like a good reason to look for it.
People do seemingly irrational things for what turn out to be perfectly rational reasons. "Maybe this person won't pay off their mortgage, but we're going to sell it. And the government wants us to give these mortgages, so why not? Not going to be my problem."
> Sane humans tend to want to deal with people they get along with, right? You, the client, need the investment banker's backing to get deals done.
Sure, but recall that Jeff started out asking why firms couldn't just hire two full-timers instead of one double-timer, and your observation doesn't really answer that. Why not just hire two people who're easy to "get along with" rather than one?
Two friends that you spend half as much time with each is different from one friend you spend full time with. It’s not clear under which contexts you’d prefer the one over the other, but the mere fact that both people are “easy to get along with” doesn’t mean that they are interchangeable in your relationship with them.
It'a simply that the most difficult and expensive part of operating a "knowledge work firm" is coordination and context sharing between employees.
Paying 2 employees half as much to work 25hrs/week as 1 employee working 50hrs/week is a massive step down in productivity.
Combine that with intra-firm competition (i.e. "if I work a little harder than my coworkers I will be the on that is promoted.") and there you have it.
In some finance jobs, you work 80 hour weeks because you have to be "on call" to handle customer requests at weird times even though you're not always busy. In some others, you're working 80 hour weeks because the money to hire an assistant would literally come out of your own paycheck and if you didn't want to be working 80 hour weeks for high pay (and retire early) you wouldn't be working that job in the first place.
Every single person you hire is a potential leak of information and a potential future competitor. The fewer people you can get by without burnout decreasing production the better.
I told my long-time employer that I wanted to work 30-hour weeks and they said yes. (I got 75% of my former salary rather than half.) I had long ago become indispensable to the company. Of course this won't work for everyone but you might consider revealing your secret dream at some point -- just maybe it could happen.
During a career talk in law school I asked a firm partner this question, but also included the rates of substance abuse, mental health conditions, and failed marriages in the profession. After some hemming and hawing the basic answer was well the client wants to hear the advice of a particular lawyer. Now that I'm in house and 'the client', I can say we don't care who answers the phone as long as somebody picks up! If I have two options to call rather than one, I am happier!
A related phenomenon here is that workers in salaried jobs and those in jobs with billable hours targets have limited capacity to modulate their hours-worked output in the first place. Like, if you have to be in the office eight hours a day as a claims adjuster, and you're on salary, what does it even mean to work fewer hours?
There is no deep, intrinsic reason why salaried workers can't work fewer hours. Employers are just loath to alter contracts, and to write nonstandard contracts in the first place.
They might have contracts even if they're unwritten. The nub of a contract, legally & crudely speaking, is a capable person's acceptance of a non-illegal offer. Signing a piece of paper that says "CONTRACT" isn't actually necessary; oral agreements count.
At the same time, it's true a lot of salaried workers have a bit of wiggle room to trim working hours at the margin. But if they decide they've saved enough to half-retire, I suspect most can't unilaterally halve their 35 hours to 17.5 hours, whether they tell the boss or no.
Noah, I think you have missed the obvious mechanism by which UBI affects the labor market and wages by instead getting stuck on the idea of leisure. The whole reason that UBI is proposed by economists (Including Hayek's version) is to change the power dynamic between labor and employers. If we did not see a reduction in employment as a result, then we would be sure there is no change in that dynamic.
And while these small scale UBI RCTs obviously generate the labor reaction, they involve far too few people to generate the subsequent employer reaction at any detectable scale.
The employer reaction will be to bid up wages. This both draws some labor market dropouts back into the workforce and, as you pointed out in your roundup earlier this week, due to a now tighter labor market, may spur investment and thus productivity increases.
The more difficult political and psychological questions are (1) Can a UBI 'pay for itself' in some way? (2) How do you 'sell' this idea in the presence of creating some apparent freeloaders? I suppose you need to convince the workers that the freeloaders are helping to bid up the wages of the workers...
About the freeloaders, I'd wager their labor value is probably small or even negative...
Because since they are alright with a basic subsistence level life, it says a lot about their work ethic. Do we really want them as colleagues? Or are we better with them doing whatever they want for the meager price of basic subsistence level living?
In the end it may act as a self-selecting, revelation mechanism!
The most taboo subject is IQ and the economy. Half of the US population has an IQ under 100. In a high tech economy these people would just impede achieving business goals. Everyone shouldnt be working, to make like go up.
It is defined to be a bell curve, so mean is always supposed to be 100 and sigma is always 10. So the scores don't have to fall on a bell curve, but then the scores are normalized to a bell curve. And depending on what your reference class is, the mapping between the scores and the bell curve can be different, so people tend to reference the same tests that were normalized at one point in the past. If you do enough different tests with enough different distributions, the sum of those tests will tend to be a bell curve anyway.
My model for intelligence is that at the low end its about disability and deprivation, so large jumps in specific ability and corresponding IQ scores. Then in the middle it is about general cognitive abilities - focus, motivation, memory - where the IQ scores as general, innate, and continuous attribute makes the most sense for distinguishing the fortunes of healthy privileged people. But then on the high end intelligence is specialized - the world's best mathematican is different from the world's best jazz musician who is different from the world's best writer - and therefore the scores can be very volatile based on what you are trying to measure and how well it can be learned, and anyhow the best strategy for prospective genius is to prioritize being very good at one thing.
It's a bell curve the same way height or weight or most other outcomes are bell curves. There's a pile of overlapping factors and randomness means few people will be at one end or the other.
I'm imagining designing the a height-measurement or an SAT so that the scores are evenly distributed. You might succeed but every step of the way you'd be aware that you're measuring a real-world bell-curve and trying to design around it.
We have to be a little careful here (my statistics nerd is coming out).
It's not that everything in nature is a bell-curve exactly, it's that things that are composites scores tend to be a bell-curve. So that fact that it is not one test, but a composite of many fairly independent tests, is what means it falls under the bell curve by the Law of Large Numbers. But it doesn't actually indicate that there is a "real-world bell-curve" measuring a real-world construct called intelligence. It's more accurate to say we are defining a construct "IQ" which is the result of the test composites which fall on a bell-curve.
To make it a real-world construct, something that has predictive validity, you would want to show that half the test predicts the other half the test. And it does somewhat, but not 1-1 and not requiring each component to be its own bell-curve. In fact you need the statistical independence, the part not predicted, to guarantee the composite is a bell-curve! But this is still a mostly self-consistent way to proceed, deriving a construct from a real-world clustering phenomenon. Except the interesting thing is that if you include any test that is correlated with the rest of the composite, than you quickly get into a territory that undermines the original idea like "if IQ somewhat predicts height should that be part of the composite" or "if IQ somewhat predicts memorization of state capitals".
So an IQ test measures IQ, a Myers-Briggs test measures Myers-Briggs, a Big Five test measures Big Five etc. These aren't purely made up but they aren't purely inspired by "real world" constructs either. They are useful standard reference points for analysis.
Much like height, mean IQ values differ depending on where you are in the world. The mean in Japan is different than the mean in Poland or South Africa.
FWIW, I wasn't trying to use 'freeloaders' as some sort of punitive normative expression just as a word that readily captures those who accept the UBI and decide to remove themselves from the formal employment market.
I disagree that they likely have negative labor value. If that were true, they would not have been employed to begin with.
I did not interpret it that way. Sorry if it came out as if it was the case.
Still, I'm curious, you don't think some employees may be bad at what they do and cause many problems as colleagues as they don't really want to be there?
It may be anecdotal, but I sure had colleagues like this.. hehe!
For sure there are bad apples. But they are spread across the distribution of workers, jobs, wages and nothing suggests they would be the ones dropping out of the workforce in greater numbers due to UBI.
Who (in terms of class/group) do you think would drop out completely and not only reduce hours worked?
Personally, from the top of my head, I'd say some artists, "bad apples", parents, voluntary minimalists, maybe people with issues (psychological or physical)? Should we count students too? Interested in your perspective in the matter!
The problem with bad apples is that, as per the original maxim, they can rot the whole barrel. I was on a ward recently where one nurse with a serious personality disorder was clearly upsetting and distracting everyone she worked with, leading to serious mistakes being made by her colleagues. You could sense the fear in the place.
As someone who is borderline disabled thanks to a variety of psychological issues, I’ve resonated with your points. I actually just landed a job, but I’m only really capable of working under 20 hours a week. The rest of my time is spent going to a treatment program and dealing with various symptoms. I’m very worried about being a “bad” employee because of my condition, and wouldn’t be working if I could afford not to. I still think incentivizing work for people like me is a worthwhile goal, but I don’t believe the returns of doing so are as much as people think.
> About the freeloaders, I'd wager their labor value is probably small or even negative...
More generally, in economics changes tend to happen at the margin. So the people most likely to stop working given a UBI are liable to be the people for whom working was only JUST BARELY worth it before the UBI. Which is exactly where I'd want disemployment to happen, if it's gonna happen!
I think the wage effect is important here and would really like Noah to give his thoughts on it!
Also: Is 2% really that substantial? I mean, what says we don't "overproduce" goods that aren't that valuable right now, just because we have to work to subsist? How can we be sure that everything we produce passes the larger (physical, psychological, environmental, etc.) cost/benefit analysis? Maybe we could work 2% less, consume 2% less and be more efficient in our production trade-offs.
"Who knows? It's nebulose.", said one great office manager.
2% fewer workers doesn't necessarily 2% less production or 2% less consumption. Remember, Noah also endorsed the idea that higher wages drive productivity. Not only that, the wage effect will draw some of those 2% quitters back into the workforce. The overall effect could indeed be higher overall production and consumption.
I agree. But still, I think the question remains: would it really be a net negative if the production and consumption of some goods and services was reduced by some 2%?
How can we be sure we are not overproducing lesser value goods when forced to work to subsist in an economy of this here scale?
Haha. Ouch. I'm not a "degrowther". I tend to think that at the margin, not all production may pass the larger cost/benefit analysis. And that shaving some of it may not be a net negative.
As I said above, it's not about producing less and less for the sake of it or for any outside ideology... it's more about strking an efficient balance that may (or may not) be skewed towards overproducing.
I hope it does not sound anymore like "malthusian degrowth"...
You have your own idea of the 2% of stuff that is just wasted. I have my own idea. They might have substantial overlap, but our common 2% is going to be very different than most other's.
You're right! And that's why we can let the market sort it out for us.
Can the wages be at a level where people actually want to work producing this or that good? If so, do consumers value the good enough to pay its price? If any of these questions is answered by a "no", we may have a good which is "socially" deemed not valuable enough to be produced and thus is in the "2%".
I am starting from the premise that employers already have (and exert) some level of monopsony power over workers. This is well supported by the literature. Given this, laborforce dropouts shift this power dynamic toward workers and thus create wage gains. This is both an economically efficient and socially efficient outcome.
The productivity argument is one that Noah made earlier this week in his roundup newsletter where he cites Dueholm, Kalyani, and Ozkan's paper and is a (rightful IMHO) rejection of 'real business cycle theory' hypothesis on what drives productivity & wages.
Thank you so much for responding. I am really hoping to learn from the dialogue.
“…employers already have (and exert) some level of monopsony power over workers.”
The low skilled job market seems to be about the furthest thing imaginable from a monopsony in most parts of the US. Not just dozens, but in many cases hundreds of competing employers is common. In those places where there actually is a monopsony, I would suggest addressing the issue head on rather than via a UBI.
As for labor force dropouts, I can’t even begin to imagine how having fewer people doing productive work is going to increase prosperity. As an extreme example, if we have ten people building things and instead go to 8 people building things and 2 being handed a free check, then we are likely to have fewer things of value built. Since the 8 people building need to also fund the two doing nothing, I would be shocked if this situation led to the enrichment of the people still working. I would bet the math works out to fewer things built, higher wages for those still working (your point), a higher price for goods (inflation), and the huge tax drag of paying for the “freeloaders.” Honestly, I think some of the workers would get pissed and drop out too, to get a handout.
I see the logic in 'real business cycle theory' with higher wages increasing the shift toward automation to replace or supplement workers. I would agree this is a positive force in productivity to offset the UBI. Not sure of the magnitude, or if it is enough to offset the headwinds I would anticipate as above.
Let me know your thoughts, and anyone else is welcome to join in. Good discussion!
I'm not Josh, but I'd like to enter this discussion since I think these questions are really important!
If you think (as I do) that the fact that people are "forced" to work to subsist exerts a downward pressuse on wages, having a subsistence level allowance as an exit option should reestablish a certain balance between profits and wages. The trade between employer and employee becomes effectively voluntary and efficiency is increased. In itself, this increase in wages has many benefits that we could get into if you wish so.
As to increased productivity, I think it's common knowledge that happy employees are more productive. This could make a difference. But, the biggest productivity benefits could come from liberal labor market reforms, now feasible and (more) socially acceptable with the establishment of a subsistence level allowance. For instance, abolishing the minimum wage, unemployment insurance responsibilities and lowering layoff rules and regulations comes to mind but I'm sure further liberalization changes could be enacted.
Any serious/practical basic subsistence scheme should (must?) come from and with these corollary considerations!
Also, higher wages mean that firms have a stronger incentive to focus on and invest in increasing productivity, whether through automation, training, better management, or what have you.
“….having a subsistence level allowance as an exit option should reestablish a certain balance between profits and wages. “
This makes sense. But as per my comment to Josh, is the increase in wages due to shift in labor supply enough to offset the cost of funding people not to work, and the increase in cost of less overall production (same population with fewer productive workers)?
I see the point in your suggested liberal market reforms. Yes, those could be another source of productivity gains.
Yes, we do currently still need to work (or at least a very substantial proportion of us do). And as the population ages, even if automation relieves us of some burden, an increasing proportion of retired people could even increase the necessity of working-age people actually working.
But work is still bad. If we can reduce the need for it, we should. "Creating jobs" is a bad thing to be doing, despite politicians' and businesspeople's rhetoric. Creating some useful product or service, which happens to demand some jobs, is a good thing. But creating jobs is in itself bad.
My kid feels immense accomplishment at being able to draw characters from My Little Pony, even though there is a 0% chance she will ever do it professionally and probably AI art will destroy the career prospects of most that do it today. You can "accomplish" things without them being economically viable.
Absolutely. I know artists who paint what they want but also paint things and take on projects they can sell, just so the pay the bills. It’s possible to enjoy creating while also working for subsistence. Even though they may not personally love some of the stuff they produce for sale, they get a sense of accomplishment because the buyer loves it.
If I had more leisure time I would spend some of it practicing piano and would doubtless feel some accomplishment from that. But the actual work I do right now is useful to others, not just myself. Art is great, but we are already over-saturated with it (before AI entered the scene), which is why it's difficult to make money at it unless you are extraordinarily talented. Delivering a pizza may not seem as glamorous as creating art, but when you are an overwhelmed parent trying to make it through the day, getting that pizza brought straight to your house is a service you are thankful for.
There's an interesting assumption baked in here that people would rather sit at home and be self-directed than be given a rewarded task that they have input into. I'm not sure that assumption's *true*.
"That they have input into" -- do you mean that they have influence over what they do and how they do it? I agree that that's a big psychological need for most people, but I find self-direction in short supply for most workers until you get to management/leadership levels. That's a big part of what I find unsatisfying at work.
Yes, but that need for influence can be quite mild, we're talking "exactly where you stack the dishes" levels of influence, not "can choose what projects to work on"
If it were, artists wouldn't be subject to depression. The point is that being paid or otherwise remunerated reliably is *part* of what is emotionally fulfilling about work, the regular reminder of acknowledged value.
I strongly agree and I really found this lens lacking in Noah's post. He mentioned Keynes without giving any of the flavor of what Keynes said about this. "The economic problem is not... the permanent problem of the human race... his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well."
It's a shame to focus instead on people who think other people are too dumb to work, or people who think too many jobs are bullshit jobs. There's a much more positive view on leisure available.
I would have preferred if Noah had made his points that work is, at present, still too necessary, and subsidizing non-work is, at present, still too much of a political lift, while also allowing hope for a future in which that is no longer true.
Perhaps I didn’t understand the methodology of the most recent study, but I have a similar issue with this research as with previous UBI studies. This is that if the participants know that this is a temporary boost to their income , then depending on their circumstances some will inevitably quit their jobs for a short time. It could be that they are burnt out and this is their chance to recover, or that they can finally take the trip they’ve been planning but couldn’t because their employer doesn’t allow that much time off.
It’s just incredibly hard to run an experiment like this, which is why people will say this isn’t science. I would like to see some data from actually implemented policies like child tax credits and unemployment benefits and how they impact the labour market and productivity in the long run. Those are essentially UBI with different criteria.
Indeed, the fact that they know it is temporary is a big confounding factor, which could bias results in either direction. But looking at the extant literature on the very few long-term or permanent examples out there of UBI-shaped programs and citizens' dividends (i.e. Alaska, various Indigenous tribes, GiveDirectly, etc.), we generally don't see any significant adverse effects on work.
> It’s just incredibly hard to run an experiment like this, which is why people will say this isn’t science. I would like to see some data from actually implemented policies like [...] in the long run.
You're calling for stalling. If it's "incredibly hard to run" the kind of experiment that's actually been done, then inferring the causal long-run effect of CTC and UI is IMPOSSIBLY hard, and people would DEFINITELY call your preferred type of study non-science. So it's not worth waiting on that kind of impossible study. Just implement the frickin' UBI!
I wasn’t calling for stalling, but neither am I convinced that UBI is the answer to all our issues. At the end of the day, what your taxes are spent on are mostly political vibes anyway, not data backed research. My comment was calling for more data on existing already implemented solutions to some of the problems that UBI could solve so that one could invest more in that space or tweak existing programmes.
There’s definitely a geographic difference of opinion I feel reading some comments. In the US, where quality of life depends more on the individual’s income then I understand why Americans would call for UBI. In Europe where I live, there’s less for the individual to pay for themselves, so I’d lean towards taking the money that would go into UBI and using it to hire more doctors, nurses, teachers, daycare staff etc instead.
Really interesting. One thing I wonder is if the rise of remote work will dampen this desire for a post-work world. If you were spending two hours of your day working and six hours arguing with strangers on the internet in your office, now that you can do it from the comfort of your own home, demanding fully automated luxury communism is almost superfluous. You now have fully automated luxury capitalism, so why bother?
This point also makes me wonder whether we’ve been underestimating productivity gains from technology since the dawn of the Information Age. I noticed myself, back in a previous life as a corporate wage-slave, that introducing new technologies would lead to huge time savings once you got your head around it. But most people would still say doing a particular task took the same amount of time, and then just bank the free time to check BBC Sport or something. Work is finite, but footie is infinite.
Talk and X posts are cheap. The only true slackers I know are the children of inherited wealth. Period. Now THERE’S a black hole of productivity in SO many ways.
Noah, this is silly and you are strawmanning. There are lunatic internet leftists saying to "abolish work", but there's also Bernie Sanders putting forward a bill for a 32-hour workweek. It has been almost a century since the 8-hours movement created the 40-hour workweek. Productivity has risen dramatically since then. The United States remains the only developed or OECD country whose labor law does not require that every full-time employee receive a minimum vacation/PTO package. Even in very liberal states we have only passed referenda mandating that *sick time* be available in the past decade. Even under Biden's NLRB, anyone making more than $50k/year can be required to work unlimited overtime for no additional pay and no comp time.
The traditional socialist program of the shorter-hours movement still makes sense today: increasing productivity can be partially consumed as leisure, mandating that compensation include time off discourages toxic work practices, and shortening the full-time workweek helps to redistribute both labor and free time in a more egalitarian way.
The 4/20 workweek is a meme, but it's a meme describing a dream likely achievable in this century: a 4-day workweek of 20 hours. Right now, a 32-hour workweek and an end to overtime exemption are sensible reforms in a world where some developed countries already have 35-hour workweeks to count an hour-long lunch as leisure everyday. Three day weekends for all, and forward until we can extend the weekend to four days, then five, and onward!
It has odd sops to conservatives. (The idea that the people wasting time on the internet are arguing about cultural appropriation as opposed to sharing memes about how Biden is taking blood from children, for example)
Second, the list of jobs like "janitors, food service workers, farmers, construction workers, checkout clerks, receptionists, security guards, cooks, warehouse workers, food delivery people" are not "middle class" jobs.
Third, you really neglected to add the international comparison.
Being a McDonald's worker in the Netherlands is not "well paid" but you get 4 weeks paid vacation, a higher minimum wage, and a bunch of other basic social protections that US people don't get. People know this. Being a janitor in Germany is better than being one in the US. Mandatory paid vacation is being paid not to work.
Finally, Office Space came out in 1999, before social media, has Peter giving this explanation about what he does.
"Bob Slydell:
You see, what we're trying to do is get a feeling for how people spend their time at work so if you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter Gibbons:
Yeah.
Bob Slydell:
Great.
Peter Gibbons:
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh - after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Bob Porter:
Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons:
Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."
I think this has always been the nature of office work, it's just the ubiquity of computers and automatic tracking has made it more visible.
Just for a bonus, here is George Costanza in 1995.
ELAINE: Yeah, what do you do all day?
GEORGE: Not that much.
ELAINE: Huh huh.
JERRY: I thought that new promotion was supposed to be more work?
GEORGE: When the season starts. Right now, I sit around pretending I’m busy.
JERRY: How do you pull that off?
GEORGE: I always look annoyed. Yeah. When you look annoyed all the time, people think that you’re busy. Think about it. [He pretends to be annoyed by something]
ELAINE: Yeah, you do!
JERRY: He looks busy!
ELAINE: He looks very busy.
GEORGE: I know what I’m doing. In fact, Mr. Wilhelm gave me one of those little stress dolls. [He stands up] All right. Back to work.
In the Netherlands, they have mandatory health insurance that covers them if they get sick and it covers mental health as well... And the four weeks paid vacation.
Yes, but they typically are less exposed to unaffordable housing, healthcare, and transportation costs. Once you factor those in, an American might have to earn 10-20k more for the equivalent situation.
PPP calculator's show 13.27 Euro is about 18.31 USD. There ought to be a PPP calculator between the US states (even between US cities) but I can't find it now.
Greaber didn't do a great job grounding his ideas in economic theory (he was just an anthropologist tbf) which makes him an easy target for actual economists. In the review I try build up the missing econ theory, and my conclusion is that bs jobs have grown to become a large fraction of the economy.
Ah I remember this, great article. I like that you didn’t just merely criticise the original book but also steel-manned the thesis into something stronger.
I remember this article and thought it was really interesting! Especially the bit about 'changers', though I would prefer to call them coordinators since most of them - even the lawyers - basically exist to coordinate market activity. The UK has a lot of them because it is an English-speaking, trade-intensive economy in close proximity to a major market, with links to others. It also has legacy institutions because of its previous role as a major, industrial power.
In other words, the UK is a coordination specialist. A lot of this is in service of coordinating activity in other markets, in a globalised world. London is, for instance, a major centre for corporate arbitration. You can, and often do, have, say Czech and Nigerian firms duking it out in the British legal system. It is also huge for accounting and related professional services, which are a big British export.
My question is whether this was not actually a better system than the Gosplan model. Contrary to the idea of the USSR as a planned economy, you could argue it wasn't actually planned enough. Economies are complex, and you need a lot of bureaucrats to manage them - whether they are employed by the state or companies. But states can struggle with hiring enough bureaucrats because citizens don't like them, and consider them a waste of their money. Businesses have no such hang-ups, and will either hire the right people or sub-contract the services if they're in a jam.
"Especially the bit about 'changers'" Yes! finally someone who likes the changers idea. It's what motivated me to write the whole piece.
"I would prefer to call them coordinators" Coordinators are what I'd consider the non-bs version of changers.
"a better system than the Gosplan model?" I'm agnostic on that question, but Britain used to have an economic model pre-1980 with a much smaller service sector that was mostly coordinators and not many changers, compared to today where it has a giant service sector mostly coordinating itself. I will say the pre-1980 model was definitely better.
"Contrary to the idea of the USSR as a planned economy, you could argue it wasn't actually planned enough." Strongly agree. Another thing that's not often mentioned about the USSR is that about half the economy was coordinated by a circulating money system, not directly planned, similar to capitalist economies. I wrote anther piece, kinda as a companion to the bs jobs one, about the central planning side of things that touched on that part of the USSR.
One heuristic I have for whether something is a BS job is whether, if you eliminated it, someone would immediately recreate it. In other words, is there demand for someone to do that job? If so, I don’t think it can be considered BS. Calling it BS basically just signals that you disapprove of it, not that it actually doesn’t create value. So maybe you don’t think a private chef, just to pick a random example out of your post, is creating value, but the economy does.
I'm not a fan, but I don't think they're BS. Calling them BS proves too much because then any convenience where you buy someone else's labor is BS, which doesn't make sense.
I was thinking more of situations where a very large amount of work is expended for a small amount of convenience. That situation fells different to normal convenience services to me.
You could make similar arguments for much of the economy. I wish we spent less money on soda (Coke is worth $289B), luxury goods, and sports, for example. But those sectors are not BS - other people do want to pay for them. IMO, BS means makework, not things that we personally don't find valuable.
Graeber was always great at coming up with interesting and thought-provoking new ideas that show that someone else’s story doesn’t have to be right. But he was always bad at recognizing that his own story doesn’t have to be right either, and got very thin-skinned about being called out in this way.
Nevertheless, it’s not just economists - sociologists that looked into his ideas found that he’s really just describing Marx’s “alienation” in different terms, and that it correlates oppositely with many of the phenomena that he suspected.
Graeber didn’t do surveys. Literally the only data he gathered is of the form “my Twitter friends told me…”
His theoretical side is more interesting, but he equivocates between “I’m just using self report of feeling worthless as a proxy for actually being worthless and it’s the actually worthless that matters” and “if a person self-reports their work being worthless then it’s probably worthless”.
When he talks about the zero sum jobs he’s on better theoretical ground - but he also explicitly denies that “mafia hit man” is a bullshit job in his sense.
In my experience, anyone who has worked a variety of jobs had no problem understanding the idea. It's only people who work in models of efficient economic allocation that have trouble with it.
The idea is an appealing one. But it relies too much on the worker’s own estimate of the value of their work. As Marx noted, it’s easy for blue collar workers to feel alienated and think they’re just doing useless bullshit when they’re repeatedly doing one motion on the factory floor and never see the finished product. Graeber doesn’t recognize that the phenomenon he’s describing is the same thing happening to white collar work, where the person in charge of compliance for the whatever committee never sees the finished product to understand why their apparent bullshit is actually valuable.
What tells me everything I need to know about that stupid book was not only that quote about how Apple was founded that was not only wrong but fractally wrong, but also that Graeber listed "actuary" as a bullshit job and had to walk it back after he admitted he didn't know what actuaries did.
Yeah, I crave more commentary from people who are in the thick of white collar bullshit bureaucracy or manual work tedium. We get it instead from writers, academics, and politicians whose jobs are probably abnormal on measures of: level of independence, control over how you spend your time, flexibility in working location/conditions, intrinsic enjoyment of the activity, and more, all things that make work feel satisfying and not bullshit.
I suppose its crazy to say this. I am a 73 year old retiree who has been out of the work force for a half dozen years. But work helps with people's self esteem. There is something about feeling that you can pay your way through the world and that you are adding value. In my own working life there were times when I believed that I was adding value and other times when I felt that I was marking time The latter drove me a little crazy. In my last job before I retired I probably should have been laid off. But my boss like me and I worked for a Japanese subsidiary which didnt believe in laying off employees. Each year I received a good raise and a good bonus. The company treated me fabulously. In the middle of the day I would take a bike and go out riding for around 3 hours. Everyone knew about this and the managers were mostly impressed that someone in their 60s could be so active. It sounds great but it drove me crazy and I retired once I reached full retirement age,
As someone who has seen his own father retire about a year ago - he just seems desperately bored to me. I keep trying to find him new hobbies, but nothing's really caught light yet. It's quite sad...
For me I became actively involved with a senior studies group and this combined with increased level of exercise has kept me quite busy. If I thought that I was adding value in my last job I would not have retired
In the case of my mother, who was wheelchair-bound in her last years of life and needed me and neighbors as caregivers, she continued to work until literally moments before she died.
She very much brought a Hungarian work drive (you live to work because you work to live) and scarcity mindset when she immigrated to the U.S. Even my grandmother was this way, though she had the disadvantage of not speaking English (it was my role as a child to translate for her) and not being able to find formal work. She was a domestic, and did receive government assistance, which she used to bake pastries to sell at her church, which she used for bus fare to buy groceries to bake more pastries. She was able to do this until a stroke left her bedridden, and her healthcare costs forced my mother to declare bankruptcy after she died.
I see a similar path for myself. I envision myself working until I am physically incapable and plan never to retire. Or, this being 2024 and all, I plan to work until my colleagues start telling me, "You know, you're doing a really good job and you don't have anything left to prove but we think you should consider stepping aside."
In regards to UBI, I really wouldn't put too much stock in this one study, as it is a bit of an outlier in terms of the apparent effect on work, other studies have disagreed with it, and in any case the effect size, at the margins, while larger than previous studies, is still fairly small for practical purposes. So a few marginally attached workers chose not to work as much as before, big deal. And as Robert Reich famously said, the economy exists to make our lives better, we don't exist to make the economy better.
To quote Buckminster Fuller, in 1970 mind you:
"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
”There’s just no sign of mass technological unemployment, either in the U.S. or anywhere else. ”
That’s because we keep inventing new bullshit jobs to replace the jobs (bullshit or otherwise) that have disappeared or been reduced because of technological advances and increased efficiency. Your view on this issue is myopic - we have become much richer, much more efficient so why not work less? Why keep adding ridiculous professions like yoga teacher for dogs? Yes people’s stated preference is for more consumption (people on the left have always been suspicious of this, which could depend on advertisement producing ”false consciousness) but what we now see is a shift in these preferences, which you decry. Watch as people will increasingly prioritize leisure and complain if you want - not everyone makes a living writing fun stuff on Substack.
I'm not sure of the case where someone spends 40 hours of labor to entertain 1 person for one-hour. Athletes and actors spend a lot of time preparing for a few hours entertainment but they're entertaining tens of thousands of people at once.
Even for the really rich. Like, I guess a really high-end escort? I guess? Is that what we're talking about?
Dog yoga doesn’t happen on its own. If it’s of value, then the people to whom it’s of value will want to find some way to express that value so that someone who can perform this valuable service will do it.
I don’t think many, if any, dog yoga instructors fit into Graeber’s bullshit category. They probably have great work conditions and can recognize the value of their work for their clients, because they share in the enjoyment it brings.
Graeber was talking about people doing email to set up meetings between the compliance team and the under-sub-secretary from HR or whatever, who can’t see any value in their work. But these people are likely just wrong about the lack of value of their work, just as the widget stamper is wrong when they think the widget is useless because they’ve never seen a finished one.
If self-reported job satisfaction has been rising steadily since 2010, could someone please tell me why everyone who comes to my coffee shop looks so haggard and unhappy? Or why most of them tell me, when I ask, that they do not like their jobs and would rather be doing something different? Or why so many of them dream of retiring and are working so hard to retire as early as possible?
I understand my anecdotal observations are not reliable indicators of social facts, but they certainly give me pause for doubt. In short, I’m skeptical that the self-reported surveys the data depends upon are getting at the truth.
Yeah, doesn't track for me either. Since before 2010 we've gotten cheaper consumer goods and MUCH more expensive health care, housing, child care, and education. Knowing how expensive it would be to insure myself if I lost my job makes me very conservative about leaving my job despite the fact that I find it boring, full of micromanagement, bureaucracy, poor quality output, and out-of-touch managers.
If job satisfaction is being measured with questions like "how likely are you to leave your job in the next year?" then maybe it's being inflated.
Part of the problem is social desirability bias. If other people are complaining, then it feels bad to say, “actually, I’m enjoying my job” - much easier to just go with the flow and say something complainy too. Especially if it’s morning and you haven’t had your coffee yet.
I mean, most people don't like or love their jobs. Regardless of your profession (assuming white-collar) or how much you love what you studied most of them are just about crunching numbers in excel, compiling code, writing reports, and sitting in on boring calls. I like my job, my coworkers, and clients, and generally think my work is interesting but if a genie appeared tonight and offered me $10 million in exchange for quitting I'd probably resign immediately and never look back. If said genie did the same but the condition was to quit speaking to my family and/or best friends I'd tell them to pound sand.
I genuinely think the culprit is just social media and the infinite level of fantasy and escape it provides. If you're unhappy with your present circumstances you can jump onto Youtube or Instagram and see people showing off their glamorous lives or jobs being done in wholly different circumstances than yours. The truth is that everyone is haggard and unhappy and lonely at times in their lives, and normally the only way out is through.
The other truth is that although I think we're in denial about it the past 10-12 years have been unprecedentedly world changing in ways that I think we're only now coming to terms with. This whole period saw the rise of smartphones/social media, then the new reckoning around racist police violence, then Trump, then Me Too, then the pandemic, then worldwide inflation, then the beginning of newly destabilizing wars...and that was all following the Great Recession. The sense of stability and security that a lot of now-adults grew up with collapsed and that's creating a lot of hurt and loss even among the well-off. At least that's my soapbox perspective.
That’s a very good summary of our collective experience over this past decade or two. The way you put it reminds me to have compassion for all of us. It’s easy to forget what we’ve been through.
It's clear that I'm one of the small minority of non-kooky people who think David Graeber had something important to say in "Bullshit Jobs". (Either that, or I'm one of the kooky people and don't realize it.)
I still think he's right on two fundamental points: real-world labor markets don't resemble the neoclassical model in which firms set wages and employment levels based on marginal productivity, and for that reason (among others) a lot of people in postindustrial economies have jobs that are useless or value-subtracting.
But none of that has much to do with Graeber's advocacy for UBI, which is the weakest point in the book. His own taxonomy distinguishes between "bullshit jobs" (useless, well-paid, middle-class) and "shit jobs" (necessary, badly-paid, working-class). But he never explains how you can set a UBI high enough to let alienated college graduates quit their pointless jobs, without causing society to collapse because the essential workers quit at a much lower threshold.
What I don't understand is why the recent experiment is being cited as proof that UBI "doesn't work".
Obviously you can't do what Graeber proposed, and pay such a generous UBI that nobody works unless they enjoy the job for its own sake. (We didn't need an experiment to figure that out!) But the non-utopian argument for UBI was always that it's Milton Friedman's negative income tax: the least inefficient way to redistribute income.
People who benefit from the redistribution will take some of the gains in higher consumption of goods and services, and some of the gains in leisure. Presumably that's why some beneficiaries stopped working even with a small UBI; they must have had family members or others who could support them, and they quit jobs that were only marginally worthwhile.
What about the category of shit jobs (i.e., difficult/potentially unpleasant) that pay well? My experience has been that we have a ton of reasonably well paid but unpleasant jobs in the current economy that are having a difficult time recruiting people to work in. I have not read the book but always wonder about that because so many well-paid, blue collar jobs are now short of people.
Because we had a couple cohorts who were raised to believe that a college degree was a must for success in life, and now we've got a shortage of skilled hands-on tradespeople. Think welders, plumbers, electricians, etc.
I think the trend is starting to show in more Gen Z going into the trades. But the fact is that these jobs still suffer from a higher degree of danger and injury that could put you out of your career relatively early. Desk jobs also have their negative effects on the human body, but you can drive a desk with more physical impairment than you can wire a house.
I appreciate this piece, as a humanities dean trying to make the case that what one studies (history, philosophy, creative writing) does not necessarily have to translate into what work the graduate will do, eventually. Elevator repair technicians are in great demand right now! That is good, honest work and why shouldn't those technicians be philosophy majors? Famous poets drove busses and worked in insurance. There needs to be a vibe shift indeed, among the elite but also the elite critics: you can have an elite education and do manual labor and that's totally okay.
The problem is the opportunity cost of being 4+ years behind your coworkers in the trades, who went straight to trade school instead of college. They're not paying back college loans, and they get 4+ more years of experience and earning in their prime physical years. Skilled trades still are hard on the body.
The ideal, it seems to me, would be to work in the trades until you can afford to retire, THEN go to college, if your goal is education in itself. But then you miss out on the lifelong benefits (which I believe in) that come from a college education. It's a tricky thing - perhaps if we could get college tuition costs under control, it would be a good start.
Ahead, behind -- having a philosophy or poetry education resists this way of thinking. Who cares if you're behind if you also have a few poems published or an essay or two for posterity? Or volunteer for your local historical society after hours? The point is fluidity between professions.
The point is that opportunity cost is a real thing, and that young work experience in your twenties really matters, especially when you're in something blue collar where you hope you're mostly behind a desk by age 50 when your back and knees are really getting to you.
I graduated with a history degree from a very elite liberal arts college and in the beginning my entire cohort were convinced they were the biggest nerds ever who were in love with the "life of the mind" and were going to go to school forever and get Ph.Ds and be like the professors we admired. It turns out that as you get older other things start to matter more to most people: getting established, making a good income, paying off debt, buying a house, having a nice vacation now and then. Hell, I remember an intensely depressing conversation with my thesis advisor (undergrad and grad from two Ivies) where he admitted that when he looked at his friends who went into law, medicine, finance, etc. and the opportunities they could give their kids that he couldn't he regretted going into academia.
Any trades(wo)man is really better off getting into poetry and essays on their own. A ton of great poets and essayists never set food on a college campus.
Yeah, had I known the career I’d end up in would end up not requiring any particular degree (just a BS or BA of some sort), I’d have loved to have majored in history. But I never had any illusions about my likelihood of being able to get tenure with a PhD. My brother-in-law is a STEM professor and he still didn’t get tenure until after he was 50.
Actually, in my haste to make a joke, I failed to notice that nothing I could say would be funnier than an academic dean dismissing the notions of “ahead,” and “behind.” Academia is all about getting ahead, because, frankly, how else will you make a living in academia?
What’s the cost of a four year humanities degree at your institution, and how much do you pay your adjunct professors?
Because you can’t do those physical jobs forever, and you can’t eat poems. I mean, I suppose you could, but you’d have to buy something edible to print them on first. Unless there really is a large poetry royalty market?
Probably economically the best course of action would be to get a solid business degree and then work in the trades until you can start your own business, but I don’t think that’s what you had in mind. This is a something of an economics blog, after all.
You never mentioned the possibility that some of the 2% may have been people who decided to use the money to support them doing the unpaid “work” of childcare and homemaker that supports a paycheck worker.
Well, they did detailed surveys of what people did with their extra time after receiving the money. Time spent on childcare and housework didn't increase, but time spent on leisure did increase.
So yeah, there is that...
I definitely should have mentioned that in the post, because unpaid work is very real work!
Interesting context. Where does the extra time end up going?
Maybe for people working and caring for kids/parents need a little more leisure?
What I know is that my mom, in the 50s and 60s, in addition to childcare and housework, played a lot of bridge and the economy survived. But it was much less generous.
Thanks for responding. I always wonder about the surveys. Who created them and how they posed the questions about time spent on childcare and what they considered “homemaking.”
Thinking myself about how much time I have spent getting those “three estimates” for home repairs, waiting around for the AC guy etc.
This comment and rebuttal is a good example of why this UBI study is so unusually good. When the usual dismal First World UBI study comes out, there's always a large pack of excuses to explain away why the results are so unimpressive (and get less impressive the more rigorous the study and more pre-registered), but this one was designed against those excuses and collected unusually detailed data: "they just didn't provide enough money for long enough" (this was actually a large long-term transfer designed to respond to that); "ah, but they made big investments in upgrading their careers and escaping 'the poverty trap', that's just Boot Theory, you know" (no, the researchers collected extensive data on that and the quality of jobs/education was about the same); "ah, but they invested in childcare and you can't put a number on that!" (maybe you can't, but said investment did not happen, so we don't need to); "ah, but [random metric pulled out of table because p ~ 0.05] showed it worked!" (but that was not pre-registered as an important metric and the magic p-value disappears after multiple correction for the post hoc selection that you just did right there); "ok, so they just did more leisure, but that's fine, that was the goal according to the experts and this is all as expected by the experts" (no, they surveyed experts before the results and the experts justified it on other grounds and expected bigger effects); and so on.
(Of course, there's only so much you can do for someone really determined to turn the sow's ear into a purse, as they can just decide to question the time-use surveys themselves now that they didn't turn out to support their claims.)
Yup. It grinds my gears that policy discussions like this start with the assumption that homemaking and child care are prisons and public funding of child care “frees” women. Freedom to work in a call center or at Walmart isn’t freedom.
BINGO. Unpaid work is still work, any way you look at it.
I would also like to understand what that 2% did with the money and time. I am not my W-2. I haven't earned one since 1993 but I have worked.
Let's have a child allowance that "pays" the parent for the child care or lets them pay others. A UBU is not well targeted for this.
That's what CTC is supposed to be. A tension is that people who don't like "welfare queens" don't want it paid per child, but of course you do need that.
Yes, absolutely. Or maybe that 2% will become self-employed. Most likely, they will simply look for another better job with a different employer. Noah just sort of assumes they’re done with productive activity forever but there seems to be very little support for that assumption.
2% stopped working over 3 years. Could this represent genuine people who became unemployed involuntarily and were unable to return to the workforce due to aging?
I see the paper talks about unemployment but I can't find a ready answer.
Yes, it could also be people of retirement age taking retirement instead of working into old age as many are forced to do. Surely a desirable outcome?
They published a qualitative section with a lot of individual interviews, so it should be in there.
I would like to know more about the distinction between labor and consumption. If I hire a maid, I’m consuming services but she’s doing work. If I clean myself, I’m still consuming my time. Like, I could just let my place be messy and do something someone else would find productive. Or, I could clean my room and pay myself for doing it? But what would be the point of that. Seems like double counting.
People, especially women, like to say that unpaid childcare and homemaking is work. Understandably, they want more status or material benefits for things they are doing anyway. But if they were going to do these things anyway, that is, do them despite no pay, then they’re not work. Do women enjoy homemaking? Yes and no. They enjoy having a neat place.
Also, my personal experience has been that the correlation between higher wages and higher working hours is the "greedy jobs" issue: https://hbr.org/2021/09/the-problem-with-greedy-work (or google the term).
I can make very real, top 5% income if I am willing to work 60 hours a week and respond to the office at the drop of a hat. But if I tried to take a hard line on only working 40 hours, I would not have access to those roles & that income. (BTW I think this relates to the "mommy penalty" we see in wage data.)
And if what I REALLY want is to work 30 hours a week - oh that's just not even an option. That's my secret dream, to work 6 hr days for half my current salary. Absolutely no one wants to offer me that. It's bummer! Working 8am-2pm and getting the afternoon for myself would be awesome.
This is something I've never understood about certain types of high-powered jobs, especially on Wall Street.
If a bond trader gets paid $500,000 per year to work 80-hour weeks, couldn't the firm hire two people at $250,000 each and have them both work 40-hour weeks? How could any employee prefer the first option, where you have so little free time that you need to substitute hookers and blow for a normal family life? And wouldn't the firm get better performance from people who aren't constantly exhausted (or high)?
Something non-neoclassical is going on here. Wealthy workers aren't being allowed to buy enough leisure to enjoy their salaries, and their employers are paying for labor that's less productive per hour than it could be.
Maybe an anthropologist could explain this?
I can pay one surrogate to $90k to have my baby in 9 months, why can't I pay 9 surrogates $10k to have my baby in 1 month? ;)
Jokes aside, I think there are a variety of factors that apply specifically to these types of jobs:
Coordination has a lot of costs (The Mythical Man Month being a famous software engineering book on this topic). So it might take 4 traders working 40 hours weeks to do the same amount as 1 trader doing 80h weeks because they need to spend so much time coordinating.
Culture: it's easier to maintain good culture in a smaller org, hiring is hard.
scaling: working more makes you more productive because you gain experience faster. After 1y of 80h weeks you have 2x the experience as someone who worked 40h weeks.
Focus: someone who spends all their time working has fewer distractions because they're not thinking about what they're gonna do after work.
You absolutely cannot do this in finance. This is not making widgets on an assembly line, or manning a fire station, or other things where you’re being paid for your training and your time. In high end professional services, you’re also being paid for the relationships and situational context that only YOU have. Ie also in in management consulting, corporate law, and similar services. You need the _same brain_ to be working with the clients in the day and responding to those client requests at night, weekends, holidays. You can’t hand off that kind of relationship and situational knowledge once a day or once a week.
It sucks because many people want exactly what you want: less pay for less hours but the same excitement and interest of the job. But the jobs inherently don’t work that way, unfortunately.
That may be true. But I'm skeptical, because the phenomenon seems to occur in other professions. Medical students work insane hours during their residencies, and I don't think anyone seriously disputes that patient care gets compromised as a result.
There may be a market distortion at work in that case (limits on the number of slots at medical schools, forcing hospitals to extract more hours per resident) but it also looks a lot like hazing/machismo. And I think the standard Wall Street workweek probably reflects some testosterone-related irrationality as well.
Just generally: if you waive the neoclassical assumption that the quantity of working hours is already welfare-optimized because market forces are always welfare-optimizing, you see a lot of evidence that people aren't being offered the option of less work for less money even when it's technically feasible. Some academic economist should look at this rigorously and figure out where a market failure might be located.
The worst time for hospital patients is shift change - medical errors are most common when someone is seeing a patient for the first time and the person from the previous shift has to explain to them what's going on. Longer hours = fewer shift changes = fewer handoffs = less opportunities for people to screw up.
Though this effect may not dominate when it comes to total medical errors per unit time. Indeed, it cannot dominate in general, because otherwise the error-minimizing shift length would be infinity (no shift changes)!
An I-banker or surgeon just isn't going to gain the same amount of experience working 40 hours a week for 4 years vs 80 hours a week for 4 years, and if you have 2 people work 40 hours a week for 4 years, you still won't end up with 1 person who had the experience of working 80 hours weeks for 4 years. And a lot of industries are winner-take-all; if 1 person who got 4 years of experience working 80 hours weeks for 4 years produces 10% more profit than 2 people who worked 40 hours weeks for 4 years, they'll want the person who has the experience of working 80 hours weeks for 4 years. Ultimately, it's because I-bankers and surgeons, like all people, can't share brains between 2 different humans.
Your skepticism doesn't make that fact less true.
I don't know, this strikes me more as an after-the-fact rationalization for why people are working 80 hours a week. I work in a highly technical field, where we are constantly hiring engineers to maintain and develop intricate processes on complex machines, and I've never heard anyone suggest "We'll just have the engineers work 80 hours a week for the first few years and then they'll be twice as experienced," even though these are 24/7 operations, so the work is there to do that. Pushing someone that hard is more likely to lead to catastrophic mistakes than increased profitability.
Yes, in some fields. But in winner-take-all fields, firms want extremely driven people for good reason. I mean, are there any high level football coaches who work 40 hours/week?
> Your skepticism doesn't make that fact less true.
So? I don't see that Jeff was disputing "that fact" ("2 different humans" can't "share brains").
Jeff's questioning whether 2 different humans actually need to share brains to get the job done. You actually bring up two points in response: that experience per person is less when labor's split across employees, and that winner-take-all industries disproportionately penalize firms that deprive themselves of an edge.
Both your points are true, but I find the second one a lot more compelling than the first; after all, TOTAL experience remains the same however one splits workload, so to first order, experience per person doesn't matter at the level of an entire firm unless returns to individual experience are superlinear.
In many fields, they are.
The answer 'optimal hrs/wk' is probably somewhere between 40-80 hours and varies with type of work.
People in there 30-40's can be very productive without fatigue working 60+ hours/wk. Yes, 80 hours may produce some counterproductive hours as shown with the medical errors from long hour works demanded of doctors in training (residents). However, I am impressed with the creative power of concentrated work including maintaining train of thought, on productivity, whether in science, finance or even sales- basically any upper-level professional occupation. I doubt productivity on an assembly-line or for construction or landscape labor improves beyond 40 hours.
Even if it IS hazing, it's the process of how you get to those higher incomes - and therefore how you got to those higher incomes, and the expectations of all those other people with you at your firm.
And I assure you if the corporate/industry culture has everyone working like that, it does not tolerate ONE person trying to change that norm. You go along or you get drummed out.
Is this actually true? Big legal cases often have legal TEAMS on both sides; evidently law firms find a way to make teamwork work. As far as I know "corporate law" isn't an exception to this.
To be an individual contributor lawyer, sure. But the partners at the top who hold the entire strategy and the client relationship — you generally can’t split that across multiple people.
That I'm willing to believe, but those "partners at the top" are going to be a small and unrepresentative minority of the employees — the vast majority of lawyers don't make partner.
Yes, but law firms are also trying to determine who among the many young lawyers they have is partner-material. Most folks who work 40 hours/week don't have the drive to work 80 hours/week for years on end. The firms want to discern who can and will before promoting anyone to partner.
Maintain relationships with high-powered decision-makers.
No one over 30 is working 80 hours a week. They may say they are but they aren’t.
I agree with this. I spent 10 years in professional services (management consulting). When people say they’re working 80 hour weeks it’s usually closer to 60, and even that 60 often includes client dinners and other things that are as much fun as they are work. There’s a definite machismo about stated length of work week.
Truth
The work of Investment banking and legal drone is not particularly difficult to master- nearly everyone off the street (from uni, law schools) whom they hire can do it at a junior to intermediate level (at a senior level it is more about managing clients).
The hard part in splitting time and projects is continuity and trust- also these firms are limited by the very poor management skills of senior partners and MDs (who were not promoted for their process improvement skills).There is time lost in explaining what has been done and what to be done next. Tech will make that easier. What these firms are doing right now is not splitting a days work but offshoring aspects of the process (routine financial modeling to India, contract attorneys for doc reviews). Those outsourced people aren’t making great money (though some contract attorneys work 30 hours a week).
The shortest answer I can give without revealing too much is that I'm in tech, and I'm the one paid to have the entire vision of the system in my head. I can't just hand that off at every shift change. It's not just documentation either, because a lot of things are in flux and in development, and it's a giant subtle dependency map.
Sadly, the most efficient answer (in time-to-market and $) is to have me nearly always available and in contact with teams in multiple timezones.
Yikes! Now that is a job that begs for automation... You being a mortal human is definitely a liability and begs for an AI solution. Having you there is NOT the "most efficient answer" but it does give you a sense of worth and purpose. I guess the question is are you using the most efficient answer to finding self-worth for yourself?
System architecture is the part of tech that you can't automate and have it done well. AI can build routines, but ironically, it doesn't understand itself as a system. You need system architects for the vision and the big picture.
Blunt force iterative self-sharpening leads to the situation Google now faces - they let their search algorithm self-sharpen for so long that now NO HUMAN at Google understands how it works anymore. It's a black box, and the algorithm can't explain it, either.
Pardon me if I don't find any of that reassuring...
It's reassuring if you're a systems architect - they're still going be very necessary for companies that need their tech to work. It's definitely not meant to reassure you about software development done without a good systems architect.
In addition to what others have said a lot of finance "work" is BSing on the phone with clients about the latest Jets football game, or better yet, having company paid dinner at Le Bernardin with your client and discussing their latest sailing adventure - or as Geoff mentions, building relationships. It's not like you can really have one person calling during the day and another taking the evening shift for dinner.
But doesn't that imply that being an investment banker is, to a substantial extent, what David Graeber called a "bullshit job"? The activities you mention don't sound as if they improve the allocation of capital.
If investment decisions in the global economy were clearly optimal or near-optimal in the aggregate, the astronomical earnings of investment bankers would be fully justified, because that's the outcome society is paying them to bring about. But it doesn't really look that way, does it?
Yes and no. Relationships matter irrespective of the industry. Sane humans tend to want to deal with people they get along with, right? You, the client, need the investment banker's backing to get deals done. That this produces optimal results is a matter of debate, yes, but one wonders where a better system has been devised that has generated better results over anything like the run the U.S. has had in the past century or so.
I don't think a better system has been devised, but the current system is obviously suboptimal.
Events like the mortgage-backed securities bubble are examples of highly-paid finance people not doing the thing they're paid to do, which is to allocate capital in a rational way. The protagonists of "The Big Short" got very rich because they were among a minority of finance professionals who understood what was happening, but if financial markets worked the way they're supposed to work the "people who understood what was happening" would have been in the majority and there would have been no bubble in the first place.
If it's clear that a better way of running the world is possible, but also clear that it hasn't been identified yet, that seems like a good reason to look for it.
People do seemingly irrational things for what turn out to be perfectly rational reasons. "Maybe this person won't pay off their mortgage, but we're going to sell it. And the government wants us to give these mortgages, so why not? Not going to be my problem."
> Sane humans tend to want to deal with people they get along with, right? You, the client, need the investment banker's backing to get deals done.
Sure, but recall that Jeff started out asking why firms couldn't just hire two full-timers instead of one double-timer, and your observation doesn't really answer that. Why not just hire two people who're easy to "get along with" rather than one?
Two friends that you spend half as much time with each is different from one friend you spend full time with. It’s not clear under which contexts you’d prefer the one over the other, but the mere fact that both people are “easy to get along with” doesn’t mean that they are interchangeable in your relationship with them.
It'a simply that the most difficult and expensive part of operating a "knowledge work firm" is coordination and context sharing between employees.
Paying 2 employees half as much to work 25hrs/week as 1 employee working 50hrs/week is a massive step down in productivity.
Combine that with intra-firm competition (i.e. "if I work a little harder than my coworkers I will be the on that is promoted.") and there you have it.
In some finance jobs, you work 80 hour weeks because you have to be "on call" to handle customer requests at weird times even though you're not always busy. In some others, you're working 80 hour weeks because the money to hire an assistant would literally come out of your own paycheck and if you didn't want to be working 80 hour weeks for high pay (and retire early) you wouldn't be working that job in the first place.
Higher marginal tax rates would push in this direction.
Every single person you hire is a potential leak of information and a potential future competitor. The fewer people you can get by without burnout decreasing production the better.
I told my long-time employer that I wanted to work 30-hour weeks and they said yes. (I got 75% of my former salary rather than half.) I had long ago become indispensable to the company. Of course this won't work for everyone but you might consider revealing your secret dream at some point -- just maybe it could happen.
During a career talk in law school I asked a firm partner this question, but also included the rates of substance abuse, mental health conditions, and failed marriages in the profession. After some hemming and hawing the basic answer was well the client wants to hear the advice of a particular lawyer. Now that I'm in house and 'the client', I can say we don't care who answers the phone as long as somebody picks up! If I have two options to call rather than one, I am happier!
Even when I went into an office I only worked about 4 hours a day.
A related phenomenon here is that workers in salaried jobs and those in jobs with billable hours targets have limited capacity to modulate their hours-worked output in the first place. Like, if you have to be in the office eight hours a day as a claims adjuster, and you're on salary, what does it even mean to work fewer hours?
What it means is your contract needs rewriting.
There is no deep, intrinsic reason why salaried workers can't work fewer hours. Employers are just loath to alter contracts, and to write nonstandard contracts in the first place.
I've known a lot of salaried workers and most don't have contracts dictating their hours.
I'm not gonna tell my boss I'm gonna work a 35 hour week. I'm just gonna work a 35-hour week.
They might have contracts even if they're unwritten. The nub of a contract, legally & crudely speaking, is a capable person's acceptance of a non-illegal offer. Signing a piece of paper that says "CONTRACT" isn't actually necessary; oral agreements count.
At the same time, it's true a lot of salaried workers have a bit of wiggle room to trim working hours at the margin. But if they decide they've saved enough to half-retire, I suspect most can't unilaterally halve their 35 hours to 17.5 hours, whether they tell the boss or no.
"Saved enough to half-retire" is called "consulting"
Sometimes you can make more money doing it while working less.
Sometimes, but I expect it's a minority, and that most of that minority's no longer salaried.
Noah, I think you have missed the obvious mechanism by which UBI affects the labor market and wages by instead getting stuck on the idea of leisure. The whole reason that UBI is proposed by economists (Including Hayek's version) is to change the power dynamic between labor and employers. If we did not see a reduction in employment as a result, then we would be sure there is no change in that dynamic.
And while these small scale UBI RCTs obviously generate the labor reaction, they involve far too few people to generate the subsequent employer reaction at any detectable scale.
The employer reaction will be to bid up wages. This both draws some labor market dropouts back into the workforce and, as you pointed out in your roundup earlier this week, due to a now tighter labor market, may spur investment and thus productivity increases.
The more difficult political and psychological questions are (1) Can a UBI 'pay for itself' in some way? (2) How do you 'sell' this idea in the presence of creating some apparent freeloaders? I suppose you need to convince the workers that the freeloaders are helping to bid up the wages of the workers...
About the freeloaders, I'd wager their labor value is probably small or even negative...
Because since they are alright with a basic subsistence level life, it says a lot about their work ethic. Do we really want them as colleagues? Or are we better with them doing whatever they want for the meager price of basic subsistence level living?
In the end it may act as a self-selecting, revelation mechanism!
The most taboo subject is IQ and the economy. Half of the US population has an IQ under 100. In a high tech economy these people would just impede achieving business goals. Everyone shouldnt be working, to make like go up.
Sub-100 IQ people are capable of lots of things. Conscientiousness can go a long way.
I've had many above-100-IQ coworkers where I would have genuinely preferred literal r-slurs in their place.
Agree. As per Caddyshack, "the world needs ditchdiggers too!"
Plenty of work is not that mentally complicated but still needs to be done well.
Is IQ on a normal bell curve?
I realize that IQ tests are normalized to a score of 100. But is the distribution normal? Or is it skewed in one direction or another?
It is defined to be a bell curve, so mean is always supposed to be 100 and sigma is always 10. So the scores don't have to fall on a bell curve, but then the scores are normalized to a bell curve. And depending on what your reference class is, the mapping between the scores and the bell curve can be different, so people tend to reference the same tests that were normalized at one point in the past. If you do enough different tests with enough different distributions, the sum of those tests will tend to be a bell curve anyway.
My model for intelligence is that at the low end its about disability and deprivation, so large jumps in specific ability and corresponding IQ scores. Then in the middle it is about general cognitive abilities - focus, motivation, memory - where the IQ scores as general, innate, and continuous attribute makes the most sense for distinguishing the fortunes of healthy privileged people. But then on the high end intelligence is specialized - the world's best mathematican is different from the world's best jazz musician who is different from the world's best writer - and therefore the scores can be very volatile based on what you are trying to measure and how well it can be learned, and anyhow the best strategy for prospective genius is to prioritize being very good at one thing.
It's a bell curve the same way height or weight or most other outcomes are bell curves. There's a pile of overlapping factors and randomness means few people will be at one end or the other.
I'm imagining designing the a height-measurement or an SAT so that the scores are evenly distributed. You might succeed but every step of the way you'd be aware that you're measuring a real-world bell-curve and trying to design around it.
We have to be a little careful here (my statistics nerd is coming out).
It's not that everything in nature is a bell-curve exactly, it's that things that are composites scores tend to be a bell-curve. So that fact that it is not one test, but a composite of many fairly independent tests, is what means it falls under the bell curve by the Law of Large Numbers. But it doesn't actually indicate that there is a "real-world bell-curve" measuring a real-world construct called intelligence. It's more accurate to say we are defining a construct "IQ" which is the result of the test composites which fall on a bell-curve.
To make it a real-world construct, something that has predictive validity, you would want to show that half the test predicts the other half the test. And it does somewhat, but not 1-1 and not requiring each component to be its own bell-curve. In fact you need the statistical independence, the part not predicted, to guarantee the composite is a bell-curve! But this is still a mostly self-consistent way to proceed, deriving a construct from a real-world clustering phenomenon. Except the interesting thing is that if you include any test that is correlated with the rest of the composite, than you quickly get into a territory that undermines the original idea like "if IQ somewhat predicts height should that be part of the composite" or "if IQ somewhat predicts memorization of state capitals".
So an IQ test measures IQ, a Myers-Briggs test measures Myers-Briggs, a Big Five test measures Big Five etc. These aren't purely made up but they aren't purely inspired by "real world" constructs either. They are useful standard reference points for analysis.
Height is not a bell curve, because children exist. ;)
Much like height, mean IQ values differ depending on where you are in the world. The mean in Japan is different than the mean in Poland or South Africa.
FWIW, I wasn't trying to use 'freeloaders' as some sort of punitive normative expression just as a word that readily captures those who accept the UBI and decide to remove themselves from the formal employment market.
I disagree that they likely have negative labor value. If that were true, they would not have been employed to begin with.
I did not interpret it that way. Sorry if it came out as if it was the case.
Still, I'm curious, you don't think some employees may be bad at what they do and cause many problems as colleagues as they don't really want to be there?
It may be anecdotal, but I sure had colleagues like this.. hehe!
For sure there are bad apples. But they are spread across the distribution of workers, jobs, wages and nothing suggests they would be the ones dropping out of the workforce in greater numbers due to UBI.
Who (in terms of class/group) do you think would drop out completely and not only reduce hours worked?
Personally, from the top of my head, I'd say some artists, "bad apples", parents, voluntary minimalists, maybe people with issues (psychological or physical)? Should we count students too? Interested in your perspective in the matter!
The problem with bad apples is that, as per the original maxim, they can rot the whole barrel. I was on a ward recently where one nurse with a serious personality disorder was clearly upsetting and distracting everyone she worked with, leading to serious mistakes being made by her colleagues. You could sense the fear in the place.
As someone who is borderline disabled thanks to a variety of psychological issues, I’ve resonated with your points. I actually just landed a job, but I’m only really capable of working under 20 hours a week. The rest of my time is spent going to a treatment program and dealing with various symptoms. I’m very worried about being a “bad” employee because of my condition, and wouldn’t be working if I could afford not to. I still think incentivizing work for people like me is a worthwhile goal, but I don’t believe the returns of doing so are as much as people think.
> About the freeloaders, I'd wager their labor value is probably small or even negative...
More generally, in economics changes tend to happen at the margin. So the people most likely to stop working given a UBI are liable to be the people for whom working was only JUST BARELY worth it before the UBI. Which is exactly where I'd want disemployment to happen, if it's gonna happen!
I think the wage effect is important here and would really like Noah to give his thoughts on it!
Also: Is 2% really that substantial? I mean, what says we don't "overproduce" goods that aren't that valuable right now, just because we have to work to subsist? How can we be sure that everything we produce passes the larger (physical, psychological, environmental, etc.) cost/benefit analysis? Maybe we could work 2% less, consume 2% less and be more efficient in our production trade-offs.
"Who knows? It's nebulose.", said one great office manager.
2% fewer workers doesn't necessarily 2% less production or 2% less consumption. Remember, Noah also endorsed the idea that higher wages drive productivity. Not only that, the wage effect will draw some of those 2% quitters back into the workforce. The overall effect could indeed be higher overall production and consumption.
I agree. But still, I think the question remains: would it really be a net negative if the production and consumption of some goods and services was reduced by some 2%?
How can we be sure we are not overproducing lesser value goods when forced to work to subsist in an economy of this here scale?
I think your comment is toodling far to close to the edge of the modern Malthusian degrowth movement that I have zero respect for.
Haha. Ouch. I'm not a "degrowther". I tend to think that at the margin, not all production may pass the larger cost/benefit analysis. And that shaving some of it may not be a net negative.
As I said above, it's not about producing less and less for the sake of it or for any outside ideology... it's more about strking an efficient balance that may (or may not) be skewed towards overproducing.
I hope it does not sound anymore like "malthusian degrowth"...
You have your own idea of the 2% of stuff that is just wasted. I have my own idea. They might have substantial overlap, but our common 2% is going to be very different than most other's.
You're right! And that's why we can let the market sort it out for us.
Can the wages be at a level where people actually want to work producing this or that good? If so, do consumers value the good enough to pay its price? If any of these questions is answered by a "no", we may have a good which is "socially" deemed not valuable enough to be produced and thus is in the "2%".
Josh, may I ask why you want to bid up wages?
Are you assuming this change in “power dynamic” is good? Why?
Are you assuming this will lead to increased productivity, if so, how?
Hi Swami,
I am starting from the premise that employers already have (and exert) some level of monopsony power over workers. This is well supported by the literature. Given this, laborforce dropouts shift this power dynamic toward workers and thus create wage gains. This is both an economically efficient and socially efficient outcome.
The productivity argument is one that Noah made earlier this week in his roundup newsletter where he cites Dueholm, Kalyani, and Ozkan's paper and is a (rightful IMHO) rejection of 'real business cycle theory' hypothesis on what drives productivity & wages.
Thank you so much for responding. I am really hoping to learn from the dialogue.
“…employers already have (and exert) some level of monopsony power over workers.”
The low skilled job market seems to be about the furthest thing imaginable from a monopsony in most parts of the US. Not just dozens, but in many cases hundreds of competing employers is common. In those places where there actually is a monopsony, I would suggest addressing the issue head on rather than via a UBI.
As for labor force dropouts, I can’t even begin to imagine how having fewer people doing productive work is going to increase prosperity. As an extreme example, if we have ten people building things and instead go to 8 people building things and 2 being handed a free check, then we are likely to have fewer things of value built. Since the 8 people building need to also fund the two doing nothing, I would be shocked if this situation led to the enrichment of the people still working. I would bet the math works out to fewer things built, higher wages for those still working (your point), a higher price for goods (inflation), and the huge tax drag of paying for the “freeloaders.” Honestly, I think some of the workers would get pissed and drop out too, to get a handout.
I see the logic in 'real business cycle theory' with higher wages increasing the shift toward automation to replace or supplement workers. I would agree this is a positive force in productivity to offset the UBI. Not sure of the magnitude, or if it is enough to offset the headwinds I would anticipate as above.
Let me know your thoughts, and anyone else is welcome to join in. Good discussion!
I'm not Josh, but I'd like to enter this discussion since I think these questions are really important!
If you think (as I do) that the fact that people are "forced" to work to subsist exerts a downward pressuse on wages, having a subsistence level allowance as an exit option should reestablish a certain balance between profits and wages. The trade between employer and employee becomes effectively voluntary and efficiency is increased. In itself, this increase in wages has many benefits that we could get into if you wish so.
As to increased productivity, I think it's common knowledge that happy employees are more productive. This could make a difference. But, the biggest productivity benefits could come from liberal labor market reforms, now feasible and (more) socially acceptable with the establishment of a subsistence level allowance. For instance, abolishing the minimum wage, unemployment insurance responsibilities and lowering layoff rules and regulations comes to mind but I'm sure further liberalization changes could be enacted.
Any serious/practical basic subsistence scheme should (must?) come from and with these corollary considerations!
Also, higher wages mean that firms have a stronger incentive to focus on and invest in increasing productivity, whether through automation, training, better management, or what have you.
Thanks for joining in, Emma.
“….having a subsistence level allowance as an exit option should reestablish a certain balance between profits and wages. “
This makes sense. But as per my comment to Josh, is the increase in wages due to shift in labor supply enough to offset the cost of funding people not to work, and the increase in cost of less overall production (same population with fewer productive workers)?
I see the point in your suggested liberal market reforms. Yes, those could be another source of productivity gains.
Yes, we do currently still need to work (or at least a very substantial proportion of us do). And as the population ages, even if automation relieves us of some burden, an increasing proportion of retired people could even increase the necessity of working-age people actually working.
But work is still bad. If we can reduce the need for it, we should. "Creating jobs" is a bad thing to be doing, despite politicians' and businesspeople's rhetoric. Creating some useful product or service, which happens to demand some jobs, is a good thing. But creating jobs is in itself bad.
Accomplishment is integral to human nature. It need not be work-based, though it turns out most humans do better with structure and incentives.
My kid feels immense accomplishment at being able to draw characters from My Little Pony, even though there is a 0% chance she will ever do it professionally and probably AI art will destroy the career prospects of most that do it today. You can "accomplish" things without them being economically viable.
Absolutely. I know artists who paint what they want but also paint things and take on projects they can sell, just so the pay the bills. It’s possible to enjoy creating while also working for subsistence. Even though they may not personally love some of the stuff they produce for sale, they get a sense of accomplishment because the buyer loves it.
If I had more leisure time I would spend some of it practicing piano and would doubtless feel some accomplishment from that. But the actual work I do right now is useful to others, not just myself. Art is great, but we are already over-saturated with it (before AI entered the scene), which is why it's difficult to make money at it unless you are extraordinarily talented. Delivering a pizza may not seem as glamorous as creating art, but when you are an overwhelmed parent trying to make it through the day, getting that pizza brought straight to your house is a service you are thankful for.
There's an interesting assumption baked in here that people would rather sit at home and be self-directed than be given a rewarded task that they have input into. I'm not sure that assumption's *true*.
"That they have input into" -- do you mean that they have influence over what they do and how they do it? I agree that that's a big psychological need for most people, but I find self-direction in short supply for most workers until you get to management/leadership levels. That's a big part of what I find unsatisfying at work.
Yes, but that need for influence can be quite mild, we're talking "exactly where you stack the dishes" levels of influence, not "can choose what projects to work on"
If it weren't true, you wouldn't need to pay people to work.
If it were, artists wouldn't be subject to depression. The point is that being paid or otherwise remunerated reliably is *part* of what is emotionally fulfilling about work, the regular reminder of acknowledged value.
Indeed. Work need not be bad per se, but "work for the sake of work" sure is.
I strongly agree and I really found this lens lacking in Noah's post. He mentioned Keynes without giving any of the flavor of what Keynes said about this. "The economic problem is not... the permanent problem of the human race... his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well."
It's a shame to focus instead on people who think other people are too dumb to work, or people who think too many jobs are bullshit jobs. There's a much more positive view on leisure available.
I would have preferred if Noah had made his points that work is, at present, still too necessary, and subsidizing non-work is, at present, still too much of a political lift, while also allowing hope for a future in which that is no longer true.
Perhaps I didn’t understand the methodology of the most recent study, but I have a similar issue with this research as with previous UBI studies. This is that if the participants know that this is a temporary boost to their income , then depending on their circumstances some will inevitably quit their jobs for a short time. It could be that they are burnt out and this is their chance to recover, or that they can finally take the trip they’ve been planning but couldn’t because their employer doesn’t allow that much time off.
It’s just incredibly hard to run an experiment like this, which is why people will say this isn’t science. I would like to see some data from actually implemented policies like child tax credits and unemployment benefits and how they impact the labour market and productivity in the long run. Those are essentially UBI with different criteria.
Indeed, the fact that they know it is temporary is a big confounding factor, which could bias results in either direction. But looking at the extant literature on the very few long-term or permanent examples out there of UBI-shaped programs and citizens' dividends (i.e. Alaska, various Indigenous tribes, GiveDirectly, etc.), we generally don't see any significant adverse effects on work.
> It’s just incredibly hard to run an experiment like this, which is why people will say this isn’t science. I would like to see some data from actually implemented policies like [...] in the long run.
You're calling for stalling. If it's "incredibly hard to run" the kind of experiment that's actually been done, then inferring the causal long-run effect of CTC and UI is IMPOSSIBLY hard, and people would DEFINITELY call your preferred type of study non-science. So it's not worth waiting on that kind of impossible study. Just implement the frickin' UBI!
I wasn’t calling for stalling, but neither am I convinced that UBI is the answer to all our issues. At the end of the day, what your taxes are spent on are mostly political vibes anyway, not data backed research. My comment was calling for more data on existing already implemented solutions to some of the problems that UBI could solve so that one could invest more in that space or tweak existing programmes.
There’s definitely a geographic difference of opinion I feel reading some comments. In the US, where quality of life depends more on the individual’s income then I understand why Americans would call for UBI. In Europe where I live, there’s less for the individual to pay for themselves, so I’d lean towards taking the money that would go into UBI and using it to hire more doctors, nurses, teachers, daycare staff etc instead.
Really interesting. One thing I wonder is if the rise of remote work will dampen this desire for a post-work world. If you were spending two hours of your day working and six hours arguing with strangers on the internet in your office, now that you can do it from the comfort of your own home, demanding fully automated luxury communism is almost superfluous. You now have fully automated luxury capitalism, so why bother?
This point also makes me wonder whether we’ve been underestimating productivity gains from technology since the dawn of the Information Age. I noticed myself, back in a previous life as a corporate wage-slave, that introducing new technologies would lead to huge time savings once you got your head around it. But most people would still say doing a particular task took the same amount of time, and then just bank the free time to check BBC Sport or something. Work is finite, but footie is infinite.
It’s not fully automated if you still have to do *some* work from home.
How did you escape wage slavedom, share your ways.
I became a contractor, so now I guess I’m a wage-indentured servant
Talk and X posts are cheap. The only true slackers I know are the children of inherited wealth. Period. Now THERE’S a black hole of productivity in SO many ways.
Noah, this is silly and you are strawmanning. There are lunatic internet leftists saying to "abolish work", but there's also Bernie Sanders putting forward a bill for a 32-hour workweek. It has been almost a century since the 8-hours movement created the 40-hour workweek. Productivity has risen dramatically since then. The United States remains the only developed or OECD country whose labor law does not require that every full-time employee receive a minimum vacation/PTO package. Even in very liberal states we have only passed referenda mandating that *sick time* be available in the past decade. Even under Biden's NLRB, anyone making more than $50k/year can be required to work unlimited overtime for no additional pay and no comp time.
The traditional socialist program of the shorter-hours movement still makes sense today: increasing productivity can be partially consumed as leisure, mandating that compensation include time off discourages toxic work practices, and shortening the full-time workweek helps to redistribute both labor and free time in a more egalitarian way.
The 4/20 workweek is a meme, but it's a meme describing a dream likely achievable in this century: a 4-day workweek of 20 hours. Right now, a 32-hour workweek and an end to overtime exemption are sensible reforms in a world where some developed countries already have 35-hour workweeks to count an hour-long lunch as leisure everyday. Three day weekends for all, and forward until we can extend the weekend to four days, then five, and onward!
This is an odd post.
It has odd sops to conservatives. (The idea that the people wasting time on the internet are arguing about cultural appropriation as opposed to sharing memes about how Biden is taking blood from children, for example)
Second, the list of jobs like "janitors, food service workers, farmers, construction workers, checkout clerks, receptionists, security guards, cooks, warehouse workers, food delivery people" are not "middle class" jobs.
Third, you really neglected to add the international comparison.
Being a McDonald's worker in the Netherlands is not "well paid" but you get 4 weeks paid vacation, a higher minimum wage, and a bunch of other basic social protections that US people don't get. People know this. Being a janitor in Germany is better than being one in the US. Mandatory paid vacation is being paid not to work.
Finally, Office Space came out in 1999, before social media, has Peter giving this explanation about what he does.
"Bob Slydell:
You see, what we're trying to do is get a feeling for how people spend their time at work so if you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter Gibbons:
Yeah.
Bob Slydell:
Great.
Peter Gibbons:
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh - after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Bob Porter:
Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons:
Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."
I think this has always been the nature of office work, it's just the ubiquity of computers and automatic tracking has made it more visible.
Just for a bonus, here is George Costanza in 1995.
ELAINE: Yeah, what do you do all day?
GEORGE: Not that much.
ELAINE: Huh huh.
JERRY: I thought that new promotion was supposed to be more work?
GEORGE: When the season starts. Right now, I sit around pretending I’m busy.
JERRY: How do you pull that off?
GEORGE: I always look annoyed. Yeah. When you look annoyed all the time, people think that you’re busy. Think about it. [He pretends to be annoyed by something]
ELAINE: Yeah, you do!
JERRY: He looks busy!
ELAINE: He looks very busy.
GEORGE: I know what I’m doing. In fact, Mr. Wilhelm gave me one of those little stress dolls. [He stands up] All right. Back to work.
The minimum wage in Netherlands is 13.27 Euro which is less than Arizona at $14, let alone California where it is $20 for fast food workers.
In the Netherlands, they have mandatory health insurance that covers them if they get sick and it covers mental health as well... And the four weeks paid vacation.
Well worth the 63 cents.
Yes, but they typically are less exposed to unaffordable housing, healthcare, and transportation costs. Once you factor those in, an American might have to earn 10-20k more for the equivalent situation.
PPP calculator's show 13.27 Euro is about 18.31 USD. There ought to be a PPP calculator between the US states (even between US cities) but I can't find it now.
If anyone has the intuition that bullshit jobs are a real phenomena, I reviewed the book here:
https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/bullshit-jobs-review
Greaber didn't do a great job grounding his ideas in economic theory (he was just an anthropologist tbf) which makes him an easy target for actual economists. In the review I try build up the missing econ theory, and my conclusion is that bs jobs have grown to become a large fraction of the economy.
Ah I remember this, great article. I like that you didn’t just merely criticise the original book but also steel-manned the thesis into something stronger.
Glad to hear it, I wasn't sure how receptive Noah's readers would be to the ideas.
I remember this article and thought it was really interesting! Especially the bit about 'changers', though I would prefer to call them coordinators since most of them - even the lawyers - basically exist to coordinate market activity. The UK has a lot of them because it is an English-speaking, trade-intensive economy in close proximity to a major market, with links to others. It also has legacy institutions because of its previous role as a major, industrial power.
In other words, the UK is a coordination specialist. A lot of this is in service of coordinating activity in other markets, in a globalised world. London is, for instance, a major centre for corporate arbitration. You can, and often do, have, say Czech and Nigerian firms duking it out in the British legal system. It is also huge for accounting and related professional services, which are a big British export.
My question is whether this was not actually a better system than the Gosplan model. Contrary to the idea of the USSR as a planned economy, you could argue it wasn't actually planned enough. Economies are complex, and you need a lot of bureaucrats to manage them - whether they are employed by the state or companies. But states can struggle with hiring enough bureaucrats because citizens don't like them, and consider them a waste of their money. Businesses have no such hang-ups, and will either hire the right people or sub-contract the services if they're in a jam.
"Especially the bit about 'changers'" Yes! finally someone who likes the changers idea. It's what motivated me to write the whole piece.
"I would prefer to call them coordinators" Coordinators are what I'd consider the non-bs version of changers.
"a better system than the Gosplan model?" I'm agnostic on that question, but Britain used to have an economic model pre-1980 with a much smaller service sector that was mostly coordinators and not many changers, compared to today where it has a giant service sector mostly coordinating itself. I will say the pre-1980 model was definitely better.
"Contrary to the idea of the USSR as a planned economy, you could argue it wasn't actually planned enough." Strongly agree. Another thing that's not often mentioned about the USSR is that about half the economy was coordinated by a circulating money system, not directly planned, similar to capitalist economies. I wrote anther piece, kinda as a companion to the bs jobs one, about the central planning side of things that touched on that part of the USSR.
One heuristic I have for whether something is a BS job is whether, if you eliminated it, someone would immediately recreate it. In other words, is there demand for someone to do that job? If so, I don’t think it can be considered BS. Calling it BS basically just signals that you disapprove of it, not that it actually doesn’t create value. So maybe you don’t think a private chef, just to pick a random example out of your post, is creating value, but the economy does.
Do rickshaws not seem at least partly bs to you then?
I'm not a fan, but I don't think they're BS. Calling them BS proves too much because then any convenience where you buy someone else's labor is BS, which doesn't make sense.
I was thinking more of situations where a very large amount of work is expended for a small amount of convenience. That situation fells different to normal convenience services to me.
You could make similar arguments for much of the economy. I wish we spent less money on soda (Coke is worth $289B), luxury goods, and sports, for example. But those sectors are not BS - other people do want to pay for them. IMO, BS means makework, not things that we personally don't find valuable.
Graeber was always great at coming up with interesting and thought-provoking new ideas that show that someone else’s story doesn’t have to be right. But he was always bad at recognizing that his own story doesn’t have to be right either, and got very thin-skinned about being called out in this way.
Nevertheless, it’s not just economists - sociologists that looked into his ideas found that he’s really just describing Marx’s “alienation” in different terms, and that it correlates oppositely with many of the phenomena that he suspected.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067#tab-contributors
I have to hard disagree that bs is just alienation. What Graeber measured in his surveys might have been though.
Graeber didn’t do surveys. Literally the only data he gathered is of the form “my Twitter friends told me…”
His theoretical side is more interesting, but he equivocates between “I’m just using self report of feeling worthless as a proxy for actually being worthless and it’s the actually worthless that matters” and “if a person self-reports their work being worthless then it’s probably worthless”.
When he talks about the zero sum jobs he’s on better theoretical ground - but he also explicitly denies that “mafia hit man” is a bullshit job in his sense.
In my experience, anyone who has worked a variety of jobs had no problem understanding the idea. It's only people who work in models of efficient economic allocation that have trouble with it.
The idea is an appealing one. But it relies too much on the worker’s own estimate of the value of their work. As Marx noted, it’s easy for blue collar workers to feel alienated and think they’re just doing useless bullshit when they’re repeatedly doing one motion on the factory floor and never see the finished product. Graeber doesn’t recognize that the phenomenon he’s describing is the same thing happening to white collar work, where the person in charge of compliance for the whatever committee never sees the finished product to understand why their apparent bullshit is actually valuable.
What tells me everything I need to know about that stupid book was not only that quote about how Apple was founded that was not only wrong but fractally wrong, but also that Graeber listed "actuary" as a bullshit job and had to walk it back after he admitted he didn't know what actuaries did.
Yeah, I crave more commentary from people who are in the thick of white collar bullshit bureaucracy or manual work tedium. We get it instead from writers, academics, and politicians whose jobs are probably abnormal on measures of: level of independence, control over how you spend your time, flexibility in working location/conditions, intrinsic enjoyment of the activity, and more, all things that make work feel satisfying and not bullshit.
I suppose its crazy to say this. I am a 73 year old retiree who has been out of the work force for a half dozen years. But work helps with people's self esteem. There is something about feeling that you can pay your way through the world and that you are adding value. In my own working life there were times when I believed that I was adding value and other times when I felt that I was marking time The latter drove me a little crazy. In my last job before I retired I probably should have been laid off. But my boss like me and I worked for a Japanese subsidiary which didnt believe in laying off employees. Each year I received a good raise and a good bonus. The company treated me fabulously. In the middle of the day I would take a bike and go out riding for around 3 hours. Everyone knew about this and the managers were mostly impressed that someone in their 60s could be so active. It sounds great but it drove me crazy and I retired once I reached full retirement age,
As someone who has seen his own father retire about a year ago - he just seems desperately bored to me. I keep trying to find him new hobbies, but nothing's really caught light yet. It's quite sad...
For me I became actively involved with a senior studies group and this combined with increased level of exercise has kept me quite busy. If I thought that I was adding value in my last job I would not have retired
In the case of my mother, who was wheelchair-bound in her last years of life and needed me and neighbors as caregivers, she continued to work until literally moments before she died.
She very much brought a Hungarian work drive (you live to work because you work to live) and scarcity mindset when she immigrated to the U.S. Even my grandmother was this way, though she had the disadvantage of not speaking English (it was my role as a child to translate for her) and not being able to find formal work. She was a domestic, and did receive government assistance, which she used to bake pastries to sell at her church, which she used for bus fare to buy groceries to bake more pastries. She was able to do this until a stroke left her bedridden, and her healthcare costs forced my mother to declare bankruptcy after she died.
I see a similar path for myself. I envision myself working until I am physically incapable and plan never to retire. Or, this being 2024 and all, I plan to work until my colleagues start telling me, "You know, you're doing a really good job and you don't have anything left to prove but we think you should consider stepping aside."
In regards to UBI, I really wouldn't put too much stock in this one study, as it is a bit of an outlier in terms of the apparent effect on work, other studies have disagreed with it, and in any case the effect size, at the margins, while larger than previous studies, is still fairly small for practical purposes. So a few marginally attached workers chose not to work as much as before, big deal. And as Robert Reich famously said, the economy exists to make our lives better, we don't exist to make the economy better.
To quote Buckminster Fuller, in 1970 mind you:
"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
(Mic drop)
”There’s just no sign of mass technological unemployment, either in the U.S. or anywhere else. ”
That’s because we keep inventing new bullshit jobs to replace the jobs (bullshit or otherwise) that have disappeared or been reduced because of technological advances and increased efficiency. Your view on this issue is myopic - we have become much richer, much more efficient so why not work less? Why keep adding ridiculous professions like yoga teacher for dogs? Yes people’s stated preference is for more consumption (people on the left have always been suspicious of this, which could depend on advertisement producing ”false consciousness) but what we now see is a shift in these preferences, which you decry. Watch as people will increasingly prioritize leisure and complain if you want - not everyone makes a living writing fun stuff on Substack.
No one forces you to get a yoga teacher for your dog.
As people spend more resources on leisure, they're going to want things to do with their leisure time. Like dogs and yoga.
I adressed this exact point in my post.
Sure, but why should there be a specific person who spends a full-time workweek on your leisure hour?
I'm not sure of the case where someone spends 40 hours of labor to entertain 1 person for one-hour. Athletes and actors spend a lot of time preparing for a few hours entertainment but they're entertaining tens of thousands of people at once.
Even for the really rich. Like, I guess a really high-end escort? I guess? Is that what we're talking about?
Dog yoga doesn’t happen on its own. If it’s of value, then the people to whom it’s of value will want to find some way to express that value so that someone who can perform this valuable service will do it.
I don’t think many, if any, dog yoga instructors fit into Graeber’s bullshit category. They probably have great work conditions and can recognize the value of their work for their clients, because they share in the enjoyment it brings.
Graeber was talking about people doing email to set up meetings between the compliance team and the under-sub-secretary from HR or whatever, who can’t see any value in their work. But these people are likely just wrong about the lack of value of their work, just as the widget stamper is wrong when they think the widget is useless because they’ve never seen a finished one.
I don't think it's wrong for dog-yoga teachers to be a thing. I think dog-yoga teachers deserve their own leisure time too.
I also think bro might have made that specific job up.
If self-reported job satisfaction has been rising steadily since 2010, could someone please tell me why everyone who comes to my coffee shop looks so haggard and unhappy? Or why most of them tell me, when I ask, that they do not like their jobs and would rather be doing something different? Or why so many of them dream of retiring and are working so hard to retire as early as possible?
I understand my anecdotal observations are not reliable indicators of social facts, but they certainly give me pause for doubt. In short, I’m skeptical that the self-reported surveys the data depends upon are getting at the truth.
Yeah, doesn't track for me either. Since before 2010 we've gotten cheaper consumer goods and MUCH more expensive health care, housing, child care, and education. Knowing how expensive it would be to insure myself if I lost my job makes me very conservative about leaving my job despite the fact that I find it boring, full of micromanagement, bureaucracy, poor quality output, and out-of-touch managers.
If job satisfaction is being measured with questions like "how likely are you to leave your job in the next year?" then maybe it's being inflated.
Part of the problem is social desirability bias. If other people are complaining, then it feels bad to say, “actually, I’m enjoying my job” - much easier to just go with the flow and say something complainy too. Especially if it’s morning and you haven’t had your coffee yet.
Maybe, Kenny. Good point though.
I mean, most people don't like or love their jobs. Regardless of your profession (assuming white-collar) or how much you love what you studied most of them are just about crunching numbers in excel, compiling code, writing reports, and sitting in on boring calls. I like my job, my coworkers, and clients, and generally think my work is interesting but if a genie appeared tonight and offered me $10 million in exchange for quitting I'd probably resign immediately and never look back. If said genie did the same but the condition was to quit speaking to my family and/or best friends I'd tell them to pound sand.
I genuinely think the culprit is just social media and the infinite level of fantasy and escape it provides. If you're unhappy with your present circumstances you can jump onto Youtube or Instagram and see people showing off their glamorous lives or jobs being done in wholly different circumstances than yours. The truth is that everyone is haggard and unhappy and lonely at times in their lives, and normally the only way out is through.
The other truth is that although I think we're in denial about it the past 10-12 years have been unprecedentedly world changing in ways that I think we're only now coming to terms with. This whole period saw the rise of smartphones/social media, then the new reckoning around racist police violence, then Trump, then Me Too, then the pandemic, then worldwide inflation, then the beginning of newly destabilizing wars...and that was all following the Great Recession. The sense of stability and security that a lot of now-adults grew up with collapsed and that's creating a lot of hurt and loss even among the well-off. At least that's my soapbox perspective.
That’s a very good summary of our collective experience over this past decade or two. The way you put it reminds me to have compassion for all of us. It’s easy to forget what we’ve been through.
It's clear that I'm one of the small minority of non-kooky people who think David Graeber had something important to say in "Bullshit Jobs". (Either that, or I'm one of the kooky people and don't realize it.)
I still think he's right on two fundamental points: real-world labor markets don't resemble the neoclassical model in which firms set wages and employment levels based on marginal productivity, and for that reason (among others) a lot of people in postindustrial economies have jobs that are useless or value-subtracting.
But none of that has much to do with Graeber's advocacy for UBI, which is the weakest point in the book. His own taxonomy distinguishes between "bullshit jobs" (useless, well-paid, middle-class) and "shit jobs" (necessary, badly-paid, working-class). But he never explains how you can set a UBI high enough to let alienated college graduates quit their pointless jobs, without causing society to collapse because the essential workers quit at a much lower threshold.
What I don't understand is why the recent experiment is being cited as proof that UBI "doesn't work".
Obviously you can't do what Graeber proposed, and pay such a generous UBI that nobody works unless they enjoy the job for its own sake. (We didn't need an experiment to figure that out!) But the non-utopian argument for UBI was always that it's Milton Friedman's negative income tax: the least inefficient way to redistribute income.
People who benefit from the redistribution will take some of the gains in higher consumption of goods and services, and some of the gains in leisure. Presumably that's why some beneficiaries stopped working even with a small UBI; they must have had family members or others who could support them, and they quit jobs that were only marginally worthwhile.
How is that not a successful outcome?
What about the category of shit jobs (i.e., difficult/potentially unpleasant) that pay well? My experience has been that we have a ton of reasonably well paid but unpleasant jobs in the current economy that are having a difficult time recruiting people to work in. I have not read the book but always wonder about that because so many well-paid, blue collar jobs are now short of people.
Because we had a couple cohorts who were raised to believe that a college degree was a must for success in life, and now we've got a shortage of skilled hands-on tradespeople. Think welders, plumbers, electricians, etc.
I think the trend is starting to show in more Gen Z going into the trades. But the fact is that these jobs still suffer from a higher degree of danger and injury that could put you out of your career relatively early. Desk jobs also have their negative effects on the human body, but you can drive a desk with more physical impairment than you can wire a house.
I appreciate this piece, as a humanities dean trying to make the case that what one studies (history, philosophy, creative writing) does not necessarily have to translate into what work the graduate will do, eventually. Elevator repair technicians are in great demand right now! That is good, honest work and why shouldn't those technicians be philosophy majors? Famous poets drove busses and worked in insurance. There needs to be a vibe shift indeed, among the elite but also the elite critics: you can have an elite education and do manual labor and that's totally okay.
The problem is the opportunity cost of being 4+ years behind your coworkers in the trades, who went straight to trade school instead of college. They're not paying back college loans, and they get 4+ more years of experience and earning in their prime physical years. Skilled trades still are hard on the body.
The ideal, it seems to me, would be to work in the trades until you can afford to retire, THEN go to college, if your goal is education in itself. But then you miss out on the lifelong benefits (which I believe in) that come from a college education. It's a tricky thing - perhaps if we could get college tuition costs under control, it would be a good start.
Ahead, behind -- having a philosophy or poetry education resists this way of thinking. Who cares if you're behind if you also have a few poems published or an essay or two for posterity? Or volunteer for your local historical society after hours? The point is fluidity between professions.
The point is that opportunity cost is a real thing, and that young work experience in your twenties really matters, especially when you're in something blue collar where you hope you're mostly behind a desk by age 50 when your back and knees are really getting to you.
I graduated with a history degree from a very elite liberal arts college and in the beginning my entire cohort were convinced they were the biggest nerds ever who were in love with the "life of the mind" and were going to go to school forever and get Ph.Ds and be like the professors we admired. It turns out that as you get older other things start to matter more to most people: getting established, making a good income, paying off debt, buying a house, having a nice vacation now and then. Hell, I remember an intensely depressing conversation with my thesis advisor (undergrad and grad from two Ivies) where he admitted that when he looked at his friends who went into law, medicine, finance, etc. and the opportunities they could give their kids that he couldn't he regretted going into academia.
Any trades(wo)man is really better off getting into poetry and essays on their own. A ton of great poets and essayists never set food on a college campus.
Yeah, had I known the career I’d end up in would end up not requiring any particular degree (just a BS or BA of some sort), I’d have loved to have majored in history. But I never had any illusions about my likelihood of being able to get tenure with a PhD. My brother-in-law is a STEM professor and he still didn’t get tenure until after he was 50.
Actually, in my haste to make a joke, I failed to notice that nothing I could say would be funnier than an academic dean dismissing the notions of “ahead,” and “behind.” Academia is all about getting ahead, because, frankly, how else will you make a living in academia?
What’s the cost of a four year humanities degree at your institution, and how much do you pay your adjunct professors?
Because you can’t do those physical jobs forever, and you can’t eat poems. I mean, I suppose you could, but you’d have to buy something edible to print them on first. Unless there really is a large poetry royalty market?
Probably economically the best course of action would be to get a solid business degree and then work in the trades until you can start your own business, but I don’t think that’s what you had in mind. This is a something of an economics blog, after all.