Telling a Different Story of Work

Did you know that 50 years ago, during the Nixon administration, the U.S. almost passed a bill creating a universal basic income? Test cases and studies had been done, all evidence supported the idea as feasible and universally beneficial, and it had widespread public and political support. Experts at the time were also predicting vastly reduced workweeks as machines replaced the need for human labor, so it made sense to provide income since there wouldn't be enough work to go around. Then the narrative changed. As predicted, essential work has since become a smaller and smaller part of the economy, but instead of leisure and meaningful pursuits, we have replaced it with what Bregman calls "bullshit jobs." We're now working harder than ever even as inequality has grown drastically and the government safety net has been reduced.

That's the beginning of my review of Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World by Rutger Bregman. It continues:

In this book, Bregman tells this story and many others in the hopes of changing our controlling narratives about work and the role of government. He makes a convincing case that the world now has more aggregate wealth than ever before in history and living conditions are better than they have ever been, and provides plenty of evidence that if we simply found better ways to share--to redistribute--that wealth we would all be better off. As predicted, machines are gradually taking over most labor and most jobs aren't really needed except as ways to create unnecessary wealth.

Bregman advocates for three big ideas: universal basic income, a 15-hour workweek, and open borders. He argues that if we found a way to make these a reality, we would all--even the wealthy--have an improved standard of living. If only we can find a way to tell the story so these ideas seem natural and logical instead of radical, they might even be possible (his final chapter is titled, "How Ideas Change the World"). It's an intriguing, fascinating, and (for me, at least) inspiring argument, well-documented and supported with research.

Highly accessible and entertaining writing, in addition to offering interesting content.

I wrote it a couple of weeks ago, then captured all of the quotes that follow and made notes and a mental outline for a big post. But it's been two years of pandemic now, plus a major renovation in my building at work that has drastically reduced moments of joy in my professional life, and my morale is low and my apathy is high. I haven't managed to revisit it until now, and I've lost all my momentum. I think it will lack the passion I initially had, but I'm going to finish it off so I can at least share the book.

In my very first post about this pandemic, May You Live in Interesting Times, I included:

Aside from that, we've been . . . 

Asking ourselves, "Am I essential?"

And, "What do I do if I'm not?"

The need for quarantine and social isolation made us look at jobs and work in a new way. What work was truly essential and had to be done? What work could we get by without? Maybe not quite as much could be instantly stopped as predicted 50 years ago, but more than the majority.

Many have said when this is done we shouldn't try to return to "business as normal," that this pause gives us a chance to come back differently. This book gives us excellent guidance for how we might do so.

The same day I initially planned this post, my Facebook feed included a series of images--economic charts with the start of Reagan's presidency indicated, showing the strong correlation between his policies and the growth of inequality since.

1980. That's when the policies started changing. That's when the controlling narrative started changing. As predicted, the necessity of work became less and less essential, while at the same time the story about the importance of work grew. Jobs stopped, for the most part, being about survival needs; yet jobs became more necessary for creating the money needed to survive. Money. It has become a game of creating money for the sake of money. And, with it, a redistribution of wealth upward, increasing poverty.

And that's where I've lost the thread of my original thoughts. How to articulate those thoughts is escaping me now. So I'll let the book do the speaking.

Extended excerpts:

"Progress is the realisation of Utopias," Oscar Wilde wrote many years ago. A fifteen-hour workweek, universal basic income, and a world without borders . . . They're all crazy dreams - but for how much longer?

-----

[In 1969,] President Nixon  presented a bill providing for a modest basic income, calling it "the most significant piece of social legislation in our nation's history." . . . their generation would also, finally, eradicate poverty.

A White House poll found 90% of all newspapers enthusiastically receptive to the plan. . . . The National Council of Churches was in favor, and so were the labor unions and even the corporate sector. . . . 

It seemed that the time for a basic income had well and truly arrived. . . . 

With 243 votes for and 155 against, President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan (FAP) was approved by an overwhelming majority [of the House of Representatives in 1970]. Most pundits expected the plan to pass the Senate, too . . . [but it didn't.]

In the following year, Nixon presented a slightly tweaked proposal to Congress. Once again, the bill was accepted by the House, now as part of a larger package of reforms. This time, 288 voted in favor, 132 against. In his 1971 State of the Union address, Nixon considered his plan to "place a floor under the income of every family with children in America" the most important item of legislaton on his agenda.

But once again, the bill foundered in the Senate.

Not until 1978 was the plan for a basic income shelved once and for all.

-----

In the mid-1960s, a Senate committee report projected that by 2000 the workweek would be down to just fourteen hours, with at least seven weeks off a year. The RAND Corporation, an influential think tank, foresaw a future in which just 2% of the population would be able to produce everything society needed. Working would soon be reserved for the elite.

In the summer of 1964, the New York Times asked the great science-fiction author Isaac Asimov to take a shot at forecasting the future. What would the world be like in fifty years? About some things, Asimov was cautious: The robots of 2014 would "neither be common nor very good." But in other respects, his expectations were high. Cars would be cruising through the air and entire cities would be built underwater.

There was just one thing, ultimately, that worried him: the spread of boredom. Mankind, he wrote, would become "largely a race of machine tenders," and there would be "serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences."

-----

Before the invention of the GDP, economists were rarely quoted by the press, but in the years after World War II they became a fixture in the papers. They had mastered a trick no one else could do: managing reality and predicting the future.

Emphasis mine. We have the policies we do because of the stories that frame our thinking. The political right has won the storytelling battle, starting with Reagan's election in 1980.

Economic growth can yield either more leisure or more consumption. From 1850 until 1980, we got both, but since then, it is mostly consumption that has increased. Even where real incomes have stayed the same and inequality has exploded, the consumption craze has continued, but on credit.

The economy we have designed demands unnecessary consumption or collapse.

Besides being blind to lots of good things, the GDP also benefits from all manner of human suffering. Gridlock, drug abuse, adultery? Goldmines for gas stations, rehab centers, and divorce attorneys. If you were the GDP, your ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who's going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and going berserk on Black Friday. Environmental pollution even does double duty: One company makes a mint by cutting corners while another is paid to clean up the mess. By contrast, a centuries-old tree doesn't count until you chop it down and sell it as lumber.

Mental illness, obesity, pollution, crime - in terms of the GDP, the more the better. That's also why the country with the planet's highest per capita GDP, the United States, also leads in social problems. "By the standard of the GDP," says the writer Jonathan Rowe, "the worst families in America are those that actually function as families that cook their own meals, take walks after dinner and talk together instead of just farming the kids out to the commercial culture."

The GDP is equally indifferent to inequality, which is on the rise in most developed countries, and to debts, which make living on credit a tempting option.

Emphasis mine.

It maybe hasn't happened quite as quickly as predicted 50 years ago--largely because we've managed to create new work based on consumption and not need--but more and more people are finding their labor replaced by machines.

According to [Oscar] Wilde, the ancient Greeks had known an uncomfortable truth: Slavery is a prerequisite for civilization. "On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."

However, there's something else that is equally vital to the future of our world, and that's a mechanism for redistribution. We have to devise a system to ensure that everybody benefits from this Second Machine Age, a system that compensates the losers as well as the winners. For 200 years that system was the labor market, which ceaselessly churned out new jobs and, in so doing, distributed the fruits of progress. But for how much longer? What if the Luddites' fears were premature, but ultimately prophetic? What if most of us are doomed, in the long run, to lose the race against the machine?

What can be done?

Indeed. Emphasis mine.

I want to include a long quote of an entire section, titled The Curse of Inequality. I'm including the whole thing because it can be a bit counterintuitive, the full nuance is needed, and it's so core to the issues:

But money was supposed to be the key to a happy and healthy life, wasn't it?

Yes. However, nationally speaking, only to a certain extent. Up to a per capita GDP of roughly $5,000 a year, life expectancy increases more or less automatically. But once there's enough food on the table, a roof that doesn't leak, and clean running water to drink, economic growth is no longer a guarantor of welfare. From that point on, equality is a much more accurate predictor.

Take the diagram below. The y-axis shows an index of social problems; on the x-axis are the countries’ per capita GDP. It turns out that there's no correlation whatsoever between these two variables. What's more, the world's richest superpower (the U.S.) rates alongside a country with less than half the per capita GDP (Portugal) for the highest incidence of social problems.

"Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries," concludes the British researcher Richard Wilkinson. "As you get more and more of anything, each addition ... contributes less and less to your well-being." However, the graph changes dramatically if we replace income on the x-axis with income inequality. Suddenly, the picture crystallizes, with the U.S. and Portugal close together in the top right-hand corner.

Whether you look at the incidence of depression, burnout, drug abuse, high dropout rates, obesity, unhappy childhoods, low election turnout, or social and political distrust, the evidence points to the same culprit every time: inequality.

But hold on. What should it matter if some people are filthy rich, when even those who are the hardest up today are better off than the kings of a few centuries ago?

A lot. Because it's all about relative poverty. However wealthy a country gets, inequality always rains on the parade. Being poor in a rich country is a whole different story to being poor a couple centuries ago, when almost everybody, everywhere was a pauper.

Take bullying. Countries with big disparities in wealth also have more bullying behavior, because there are bigger status differences. Or, in Wilkinson's terms, the "psychosocial consequences" are such that people living in unequal societies spend more time worrying about how others see them. This undercuts the quality of relationships (manifested in a distrust of strangers and status anxiety, for example). The resulting stress, in turn, is a major determinant of illness and chronic health problems.

Okay - but shouldn't we be more concerned with equal opportunities than with equal wealth?

The fact is they both matter, and these two forms of inequality are inextricable. Just look at the global rankings: When inequality goes up, social mobility goes down. Frankly, there's almost no country on Earth where the American Dream is less likely to come true than in the U.S. of A. Anybody eager to work their way up from rags to riches is better off trying their luck in Sweden, where people born into poverty can still hold out hope of a brighter future.

Don't get me wrong - inequality is not the only source of hardship. It's one structural factor that feeds into the evolution of lots of social problems and is intricately linked to a constellation of other factors. And, in point of fact, society can't function without some degree of inequality. There still need to be incentives to work, to endeavor, and to excel, and money is a very effective stimulus. Nobody would want to live in a society where cobblers earn as much as doctors. Or rather, nobody living in such a place would want to risk getting sick.

Nonetheless, in almost all developed countries today, inequality far exceeds what could reasonably be deemed desirable. Recently, the International Monetary Fund published a report which revealed that too much inequality even inhibits economic growth. Perhaps the most fascinating finding, however, is that even rich people suffer when inequality becomes too great. They, too, become more prone to depression, suspicion, and myriad other social difficulties.

"Income inequality," say two leading scientists who have studied twenty-four developed countries, "makes us all less happy with our lives, even if we're relatively well-off."

Emphasis mine.

The controlling narrative says giving people money makes them lazy. As I've shared before (too many times to link), all the evidence says otherwise.

Cash handouts may be the most extensively studied anti-poverty method around. RCTs across the globe have shown that over both the long and short term and on both a large and small scale, cash transfers are an extremely successful and efficient tool.

Giving people money helps them escape the scarcity mindset and other aspects of the poverty trap so that they can start making cumulative improvements.

The section on eliminating national boundaries presented ideas I haven't much considered before, and I'm afraid I didn't capture much of it to share. Just . . . 

Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history.

Bregman makes a convincing case it is so.

The point of the argument is not so that people can be lazy; it's about focusing only on what's necessary, making sure everyone is taken care of, and letting us spend the rest of our time on more meaningful pursuits.

The purpose of a shorter workweek is not so we can all sit around doing nothing, but so we can spend more time on the things that genuinely matter to us.

In the end, it's not the market or technology that decides what has real value, but society. If we want this century to be one in which all of us get richer, then we'll need to free ourselves of the dogma that all work is meaningful. And, while we're at it, let's also get rid of the fallacy that a higher salary is automatically a reflection of societal value.

I do want to make one relevant detour through previous posts. A thought from Devon Price:

People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder.
From my post No One Wants to Feel Incapable, Apathetic, or Ineffective, which featured an article by Price titled, "Laziness Does Not Exist." They turned it into a book of the same title, which I shared extensively in The Remedy Is Boundless Compassion. My short review
An insightful look at one of the deep-set cultural values of the American psyche, that of hyperproductivity. While moderate productivity is a beneficial goal, our society has warped it into something damaging by exaggerating it to extremes that create a dynamic of constant judgment that lacks all compassion. Price very approachably and conversationally delves into the historical development of our shared concept of laziness, how it manifests in a variety of realms, the harm it does, and ways we can shift our thinking to healthier, more understanding perspectives. This is a valuable book.

It pairs nicely with Bregman's book.

Not my photo or meme
Speaking of, a final thought from it. I said at the top our current situation exists because the story the political right tells about the economy and work has been the most convincing and compelling one, thus controlling our policies. There has been a failure from the left to counter it with effective storytelling of their own.

Reining in and restraining the opposition, that's the sole remaining mission of the underdog socialist. Anti-privatization, anti-establishment, anti-austerity. Given everything that they're against, one is left to wonder, what are underdog socialists actually for?

Time and again, they side with society's unfortunates: poor people, dropouts, asylum seekers, the disabled, and the discriminated against. They decry Islamophobia, homophobia, and racism. They obsess over the proliferation of "rifts" dividing the world into blue-collar and white-collar, poverty and wealth, ordinary people and the one-percenters, and vainly seek to "reconnect" with a constituency that has long since packed its bags.

But the underdog socialists' biggest problem isn't that they're wrong. Their biggest problem is that they are dull. Dull as a doorknob. They've got no story to tell, nor even any language to convey it in. . . . 

Sadly, the underdog socialist has forgotten that the story of the left ought to be a narrative of hope and progress. By that I don't mean a narrative that only excites a few hipsters who get their kicks philosophizing about "post-capitalism" or "intersectionality" after reading some long-winded tome. The greatest sin of the academic left is that it has become fundamentally aristocratic, writing in bizarre jargon that makes simple matters dizzyingly complex. If you can't explain your ideal to a fairly intelligent twelve year-old, after all, it's probably your own fault. What we need is a narrative that speaks to millions of ordinary people.

It all starts with reclaiming the language of progress . . . 

Once again, emphasis mine.

We need to tell a different--a better--story about work and the economy.

I know I said above that was the final thought from Bregman's book, but I want to share one other thing outside the central argument. It's a very specific example that struck home with me, particularly for the sentence I emphasize.

Emancipation of women? Countries with short work weeks consistently top gender-equality rankings. The central issue is achieving a more equitable distribution of work. Not until men do their fair share of cooking, cleaning, and other domestic labor will women be free to fully participate in the broader economy. In other words, the emancipation of women is a men's issue. These changes, however, are not only dependent on the choices of individual men; legislation has an important role to play. Nowhere is the time gap between men and women smaller than in Sweden, a country with a truly decent system in place for childcare and paternity leave.

Just as racial injustice is a white issue. It is those with the power in any oppressive dynamic who need to make change.

I'll conclude with a couple of related things that have crossed my feed recently.

The Waste Age

Today, when the very weather is warped by the climate crisis, and plankton thousands of metres deep have intestinal tracts full of microplastics, the idea of a nature that is pristine or untouched is delusional. Nature and waste have fused at both planetary and microbiological scales. Similarly, waste is not merely a byproduct of culture: it *is* culture. We have produced a *culture of waste*. To focus our gaze on waste is not an act of morbid negativity; it is an act of cultural realism. If waste is the mesh that entangles nature and culture, it’s necessarily the defining material of our time. We live in the Waste Age. . . . 

The Steam Age launched a great explosion of material goods that has mushroomed exponentially ever since, while statistics about our current rates of waste numb the mind. . . . Such numbers present a seemingly precise quantification yet one that’s utterly ungraspable. The average person just translates them into ‘a shitload’. . . . 

The Anthropocene, or the age of human-driven planetary change, helps to evoke the new geological layer we are forming, a new planetary crust composed of our fossil-fuel residues, bottle tops and cigarette butts. . . . It is to acknowledge that growth is entirely dependent on the relentless and ruthlessly efficient generation of waste. . . . 

Only by recognising the scale of the crisis can we reorient society and the economy towards less polluting modes of producing, consuming and living. . . . If waste truly were to be a central issue – brought into the heart of every conversation about how things are extracted, designed and disposed of – it would transform society beyond recognition. To invoke the Waste Age is to usher in the hope of a cleaner future. . . . 

Contrary to what we might assume, wastefulness is not a natural human instinct – we had to be taught how to do it. Disposability was one of the great social innovations of post-war society in the United States. When the first disposable products became available in the 1950s, from TV-dinner meal trays to cocktail cups, consumers had to be persuaded that this magical new substance – plastic – was not too good to be thrown away. They had to be instructed in the advantages of the throwaway society. Corporations – in particular, the petrochemicals industry – spent many years and millions of dollars lobbying for the replacement of paper grocery bags with plastic ones. With the advent of supermarkets, and a help-yourself service culture, every product now had to be individually packaged to survive on the shelves. And with the full bloom of convenience culture and take-away everything, disposability reached its apogee. . . . 

To say that we live in the Waste Age is not to focus attention on an unpleasant but marginal problem; it’s to say that the production of waste is central to our way of life. Waste is deliberately generated as the very metabolism behind economic growth.

But to invoke the Waste Age is also to claim that waste is one of the great material resources of our time. It acknowledges the tremendous untapped value in what we throw away. . . . 

What does a society look like in which fridges last 50 years, not five? Where individual ownership of goods is replaced by communal sharing? Where distributed manufacturing is the norm, such that distant factories and global supply chains give way to more local, bioregional and artisanal production, close to the point of purchase? What are the implications of a world in which some products last forever and others, made of organic materials, decompose in days?

Our aesthetic sensibilities might have to adapt. After nearly a century of appreciating the hard-smooth-shiny perfection of plastics, we might need to embrace irregularity, imperfection, decay and decomposition. . . . 

Emphasis mine.

A Twitter thread from Stephen Diehl

Let's discuss the environmental cost of bitcoin. Because despite all the push for sustainable and green investment in the tech sector, there's a giant smoldering Chernobyl sitting at the heart of Silicon Valley which a lot of investors would prefer you remain quiet about. 🧵 (1/)

TLDR on bitcoin economics: It's a pyramid-shaped investment scheme backed by the collective delusion that value can created out of nothing by convincing greater fools to buy it after you do. (2/)

That alone is sufficiently awful on its own merits, but on top of this the environmental damages of bitcoin are enough to make even Greta Thunberg weep at the pointless waste of it all. (3/)

The underlying technology of bitcoin is based on the notion of "mining", a technical term for a process that keeps the network running and processing transactions. (4/)

I won't cover the details of the algorithm, suffice it to say the premise of bitcoin mining is to prove how much power you can waste, and the more power you can waste, the more tokens you can probabilistically secure in exchange for your energy waste. (5/)

And so people have set up entire warehouses of computer hardware dedicated to run 24/7 consuming power and performing the trial computations required by the protocol. Globally this consumes *nation state* levels of energy to keep it all running. (6/)

Bitcoin mining is essentially a fucked up version of Candy Crush where you solve puzzles for coins, except the coins go to buy darknet fentanyl, launder money for warlords and provide gambling for hedge fund managers. (7/)

And the scale of this waste has some scary numbers attached to it. A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh, or half a million times more energy consumption than a credit card payment. (8/)

The bitcoin network annually wastes 78 TWh (terrawatt hours) annually or the energy consumption of several *million* US households. 

WolframAlpha gives some scary comparisons to help you relate to how much energy this is (think nuclear weapons). (9/)

Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste. It is a pure speculative activity of people gambling on the random movements of prices and the only output is simply shuffling numbers around in a computer at insane cost. (10/)

In addition to the energy waste and CO2 emitted, the mining process itself requires constant replacement of hardware and produces a steady stream of waste from broken and exhausted computer parts. All of which are full of toxins and rare earth metals. (11/)

The network produces 11.27 kilotons of waste annually or 96 grams of electronic waste per transaction. This is the equivalent annual e-waste as several small countries and equivalent to the waste of 482,456 people living at the German standard. (12/)

Try to imagine a future where paying for your morning coffee involved smashing an iPhone and burning enough fossil fuels to run your entire household for 60 days. That's the environmental cost of the "revolutionary" technology behind #Bitcoin  in a nutshell. (13/)

Climate scientists have estimated that #Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C. And this is just one of *hundreds* of other cryptocurrency networks that run on this apocalyptically wasteful set of ideas. (14/)

Climate change is not some abstract threat happening elsewhere, it is very real, and is happening everywhere we chose to invest in unsustainable and wasteful technology.

The absurd waste of bitcoin is a simultaneously both an environmental and a moral disaster. (15/)

Stephen, this is really bad, how can I help change this?

* Don't buy bitcoins.
* Tell friends not to buy bitcoins.
* Consider ethics of holding dirty companies ($MSTR, $SI, $SQ, $PYPL, Coinbase) in your portfolio.
* ... and products (funds, ETFs, etc) with crypto exposure.

/fin

As a final aside, this is very politically solvable. In the next administration Biden could stop the Bitcoin Waste Problem with the stroke of a pen. 

Banning US persons from trading these digital investment contracts is well within the powers of executive branch.

/done

Emphasis mine.