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An introduction to and summary of Frithjof Bergmann's New Work, New Culture, read by Mark Linsenmayer. The full episode on this topic can be found here.
Read more about the topic at partiallyexaminedlife.com. A transcript is available on our Citizen site's Free Stuff page.
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Right away, I can say his analysis of the state of native people in Canada is ridiculously simplistic. I hope he doesn’t base his argument off of that example. First of all, it’s just wrong to say that the basic necessities are met, because many reserves don’t even have reliable running water infrastructure. The conditions on reserves can resemble those associated with the “Third World”. See for example: Attawapiskat housing crisis of 2011. Second of all, that analysis totally ignores cultural genocide and the legacy of residential schools. I could say more, but this should be enough to show how wrong his analysis of the state of native people in Canada is.
Hey Mark and Everyone,
This is Seth B. the economist from the previous Bergman post. Let me begin by saying that I got serious nerd-chills when I saw your thoughtful reply. Let me apologize in advance for my verboseness, but I want to be as clear as possible.
There seem to be 4 claims made between you and Bergman on the Job-System. These are:
1) The Job-System is failing the poorest
2) There is an imminent ‘jobs revolution’ which will change everything
3) Economics is not a science (this is from your previous post)
4) The Job-System is anti-eudemonian for prosperous communities
To save time, I will be mostly attacking the last point. I do this because I believe it to be the core of what makes you interested in Bergman’s work, and I think the first three are incorrect or misleading/incomplete for factual reasons that are less philosophically interesting.
So let me address (4); the claim that the Job-System is bad for true human welfare even in prosperous communities. Listening to this Precognition, I am able to identify six or so avenues by which the Job-System might be failing us:
1) People work too much and are generally stressed out – Keynes
2) Those whose work is demanded are forced to work long hours – Russel
3) The system does not reward the production of value, but rather the virtue of hard work. This is bad because it is a version of slave morality. –Russel
4) The Job-System is unsuited to human nature –Bergman/Mark
5) Jobs are not done well (e.g. Doctors are not able to form bonds with patients) –Bergman/Mark
6) Fiscal compensation reduces the meaning of a practice–Bergman/Mark
I will address these in turn, pointing out which I think are unfair criticisms, and which I think are problems but inessential to the Job-System (i.e. the system just needs to be tweaked).
(1) People work too much and are generally stressed out
-Let’s dig into what it means to be working ‘too much’. I think a reasonable definition is ‘A person is working too much if they would benefit (in terms of their true self interest let’s say) from working less.’ The difficulty is of course now in the term ‘true self interest’. Let us consider now two individuals. Let’s call them Emily (enlightened) and Ignor (ignorant). Emily has been able to successfully self-reflect, has exceptional wisdom or experience, and actually knows what her true self interest is. Ignor hasn’t and is a slave to his individual neuroses or whatever society tells him is normal.
Now it seems to me that an Emily will do great within the context of the Job-System. She truly knows what is best for her, and given this knowledge she is able to choose optimally between different job and compensation packages. Emily may for example face the options of being a corporate lawyer for 100K a year and 50 hours a week of work, a musician for 20K a year and 20 hours a week of work, and joining a Kibbutz for 5K a year plus room and board for a hazy amount of work. We may imagine an infinity of additional options. Being as wise as she is, Emily has no problem balancing the internal and external rewards of these various options and chooses the one that gives her the greatest expected level of Eudemonia.
Ignor on the other hand, faced with the same set of options, might unselfreflectively choose the corporate lawyer gig. He is thereby miserable for the rest of his life. However, the reason he is unhappy is not because of the Job-System. Rather, as Socrates would say, it is because of his ignorance. Even if the Job-System were abolished, the Ignors of the world would still make bad choices and be unhappy.
Finally it is unclear to me as a factual manner that people are working too much. Through technological research and the mechanisms of ‘learning-by-doing’ hard work today makes the future increasingly bright and hopeful. Keynes’ society of leisure might work out to be disturbingly stagnant.
(2) Those whose work is demanded are forced to work long hours
-This again misunderstands the Job-System. Those whose work is highly demanded are offered higher wages for a given level of work. With this higher wage per hour, an individual can choose to either work more or less. No one is forced to do anything.
As a factual aside, over the last 50 or so years US income has increased dramatically in real terms while hours worked per person have decreased (all graphs are from the St. Louis Fed).
http://imgur.com/a/E2rbu
As demand (wages) for jobs increased hours worked have not. So this statement is just factually untrue. (There is a small technical difficulty in the above charts as I am using total income rather than just labor income which would better fit my argument. However, labor’s share of total income has stayed relatively constant over this time period at about 2/3rds)
(3) The system does not reward the production of value, but rather the virtue of hard work. This is bad because it is a version of slave morality
-This one also seems wrong if not backward. In a mostly well-functioning capitalist area like the US, compensation is tied directly to value. The lazy but brilliant computer programmer gets much higher compensation than the diligent ditch digger. There are plenty of lazy but innately talented basketball players that could be so much more if they were to dedicate themselves, but even at their current level of sloth are valuable enough to their teams that they make millions.
(4) The Job-System is unsuited to human nature
-This version of the argument is too vague to address. My intuition however is (though I hate to say it and come off as a Randian) that the free exchange of goods and services in a free market is ennobling. Meanwhile a system designed to force meaning into my life whether I like it or not seems demeaning and totalitarian. Having a variety of thriving practices to choose from and thereby gain meaning – great! Having an inescapable state forcing ‘meaning’ on me? Bad. Maybe the state could have a role in fostering meaningful practices? Like by giving them tax breaks, or creating helpful forums? It would be a tricky balance – oh wait that’s what America is like right now.
(5) Jobs are not done well (e.g. Doctors are not able to form bonds with patients)
-This one also seems wrong for three subtle reasons. Firstly, I thought the argument was we wanted less work – wouldn’t less doctors exacerbate this problem? Second, in a well functioning market, people will be able to get what they pay for. In America now, you are totally welcome to have a private doctor at your beck and call-you just have to pay for it. Most Americans get harried doctors because that is the level of treatment they are willing to pay for. Third, of perhaps all markets in the US the health care industry is perhaps the one least like the well-functioning markets of most economic models. It is weird then to attack the Job-System from this angle.
(6) Fiscal compensation reduces the meaning of a practice
-This one I will actually concede as a real problem. Some preliminary behavioral economic evidence indicates to me that this might be right. Cleaning up the dishes for Mom after Thanksgiving dinner probably will always feel more meaningful than cleaning up at a restaurant for a salary. However, we are now in is-ought territory. It may very well feel (to some) like doing a job is demeaned by being paid for it, but is that a necessary emotion or a cultural artifact? I don’t think Emily would be upset if she went the Kibbutz route and her wage were suddenly dramatically increased. You can always give any demeaning wage away.
Let me end by pointing out some positive benefits of the Job-System versus the alternatives you seem to be positing. I will couch this in the guise of the ‘positive program’ you requested in your last post.
What do we want from a labor system? Essentially, we want people who are ‘fitted’ to their role in society. We might examine fittedness amongst a few dimensions. For example, how much does a person in a role contribute to society versus other roles he might have? In how limited supply are the virtues associated with this role? How much meaning does a person get from their role? How much do they enjoy their role? If the role is in limited supply, how much would others enjoy being in that role? Through the price mechanism, wages summarize these sorts of measures and tell an individual how much society values them in that role in the sense of what wage brings supply and demand for that role into rough equilibrium. The Job-System therefore lets individuals decide between what sort of balance of internal and external goods they would like to receive, with those individuals whose virtues are dearer choosing from a more attractive schedule of options. Hence the Job-System allows the Emilys of the world to be as fitted as possible, achieving both rewards for themselves while being properly incentivized to take on tasks that benefit others. Those with extraordinary virtues are extremely highly rewarded.
What is the role of the philosopher in my vision? Most importantly it is to educate the Ignors. If people do not know what is best for themselves, no economic system will be able to help them. They also have a role in getting rid of cultural norms that are barriers to individuals making the optimal choices for themselves. The 40 hour work week and the understanding of work as something inherently unpleasant are good candidates.
What is the role of the state in my vision? I may have come off as a free market radical but that is certainly not the case. The state definitely has a role in regulating the financial sector, preventing pollution, and perhaps in reducing inequality (although, to take a stance on inequality is to take a meta-ethical stance. As emphasized in ‘After Virtue’, utilitarian/Rawlsean, rights-based, and dessert-based approaches will give very different answers as to which types of inequality are bad). The state also has a role in fostering meaningful practices. The US government does that today by providing forums for public meetings and giving tax breaks to religious and charitable institutions. If the government feels excellence in certain practices is under rewarded, it may intervene directly (such as through the public endowment for the arts). Finally, the Government has a role too at creating more Emilys and less Ignors. Free public education, and generous subsidies for higher education are in part designed to create a more enlightened public.
To conclude, I am slightly worried that at the end of the day the disagreement may be a semantic one. I think that the Job-System is good because it allows people to make the decision that is optimal for themselves given the needs of everyone else. Meanwhile, Bergman might say that the Job-System is bad because people tend to choose incorrectly, are bad at self-reflection, and face some headwinds in making idiosyncratic choices because of social norms. These two views are mostly compatible. I simply think that the price system, actively overseen by the government, is the best way for allowing enlightened individuals to find their role. Nietzsche would certainly not approve of limiting the opportunities of the enlightened in order to make a misguided attempt at helping the ignorant.
Looking forward to your discussion,
Seth B.
Hi, Seth, thanks for the great reply! I don’t think the debate is merely semantic, but I also think that you’re imposing some of the characterization of liberals as “imposing” and “equalizing” in a way that, well, I think even most liberals would object to but which certainly doesn’t apply to New Work; I’ve tried to clear this up in part with the post I just put up on the Native Canadians.
I also think, overall, that you’ve got a very rosy view of what constitutes people’s realistic choices and of what it’s actually like to work day after day in most jobs (my own experience is somewhat limited, but substantial: I did several years in a couple of fairly enlightened office environments doing work that was bad for me, but all through school during summers I’d do temp jobs, and so got to experience a lot of office environments and even did a couple of summers in a factory). This is a common left/right kind of divide: I think the meritocracy is largely a myth, that it works more on paper than in real life, and that the promulgation of that myth highly distorts our political landscape (see the “What’s the Matter with Kansas” deal). However, this is all fairly humdrum difference in political opinion, already given too much ink elsewhere. I’ll try to respond more specifically.
I know lots of very smart people who nonetheless can’t make it work financially or politically to work fewer hours. The best among the “enlightened” companies/office environments I referred to above was very smart about giving people ownership of tasks and providing good benefits and a great campus environment in which to work, but the CEO fundamentally can’t understand why everyone else isn’t as energized by working for the company as she is and so doesn’t want to work 60-80 hours a week. As a result, most folks I know who work or have worked for them bitch constantly about it but are in no political position to do anything about it. These are among the smartest people in Madison, and this is one of the best and biggest places to work. So what are their choices? Work somewhere less enlightened? Quit and start something on their own? (See my comment in the other post about entrepreneurship.)
I realize this sounds like traditional liberal whining: it’s just “a fact” that these are the choices on offer, and as you say, one could quit (hey, I did) and join a commune or something, so it sounds petulant to complain that we can’t “have it all,” i.e. good and meaningful work (which this company provides) but in sane, smaller doses. And gee, what’s the alternative? Have the GOVERNMENT come and tell all the companies that they CAN’T have people work so many hours, and so cause the company to be less successful and hire fewer people?
But there are cultural and systemic reasons why those are the only choices on offer, and why it takes a visionary CEO to have a company even as enlightened as the one I cited (I think based on my temping experience that more companies are like the one depicted in “Office Space,” filled with more overtly meaningless bullshit, but it’s not like I’ve done a study on that). Culturally, there’s still a widespread prejudice against part-timers and tele-commuters as not being as dedicated, and companies have a lot of the downsides of dictatorships, in that policies are ultimately at the whims of the single boss (not that an organization instead obsessed with procedures and rules and bureaucracy is better, of course, but those aren’t the only options). Politically, we have issues health care insurance that make create disincentives for employers to allow (and pay accordingly) folks to work 30 hours instead of 45-50.
Bergmann’s solution is essentially a market one: facilitate more opportunities for people to have real choices. Employers can be dickish about work hours because there are in most cases many more than enough employees who will take their shitty deal, but if more people felt they had real choices, then the balance of power would shift. The task of creating real alternatives is Herculean, but luckily, we are already moving according to some economists (I have in mind Jeremy Rifkin’s “The Third Industrial Revolution” in particular) to a business model where smallness and speed will overcome economies of scale, meaning more businesses = more employment choices. I work for a small consulting company that does hourly work, and so I really do have the choice on a week-to-week basis that you cite of spending more time making money vs. more time doing things like PEL or my music. Rifkin (and Bergmann) see this as the future of manufacturing, to the extent where (for Bergmann at least) we can start to fulfill more of our needs through this high-tech self-providing, which I hope you’ll admit is a f’ing cool idea. I think that’s the real innovation in Bergmann’s proposal: that we could actually get enough out of that so that the cost of living would go down substantially, which would provide more real choice and shift the balance of power to citizens (not “consumers”) from corporations.
Right now, I think the economic reality is that you (excepting a lucky few living off of inheritance or whatnot) generally either have to get a full time job, or make extreme sacrifices (no college for the kids, no health insurance, etc.). I say “generally” because, of course, as you say, some people can develop skills that are in such high demand that they then have more power in choosing what clients to take, how many hours to put in, and can still make a decent wage with part-time work.
So that’s the second part of my critique of your response: the meritocracy! Yes, of course having a meritocracy is better than the government or our social class assigning us positions, but the idea of “the clever who can work the system deserve the best and tough shit for everyone else” is again, antithetical to human nature, I think. It says that our eudaimonia is to be the most effective givers of value to others, and not to exert/create our true selves.
One might argue that well, we’re in a position of scarcity, where man’s purpose is to use his labor to generate his sustenance (yes, this is Ayn Rand), and so of course you should be rewarded only insofar as you’re effective at this… it’s the way of nature; it’s our type of virtue!
But Keynes/Russell/Bergmann argue that we’re not in such a position of scarcity, and Bergmann’s emphasis in this is that it’s the knowledge–the technology–that we’ve developed over generations that is the key resource that we can use to free ourselves.
So there’s the age-old Utopian dream that we can use machines (or, hell, magic) to generate all the wealth and goods we need. The objections to this are 1) We’d all then just laze around and die (i.e. this state is antithetical to human nature and 2) It’s an impossibility anyway.
Bergmann agrees with the spirit of #1, due to his Nietzschean take on human nature. We do not want to become the “Last Man,” like the guys in Wall-E that lie on mechanical couches all the time. However, it’s silly to think that other people giving you tasks to do (i.e. jobs) is the correct response to that challenge. Other people that need their tasks done don’t (in the nature of this relationship) give a shit about you; they just want their tasks done as quickly and well and cheaply as possible.
He argues that #2 is wrong, that it’s not impossible, just very difficult, and that the more we can do along those lines (developing high tech self providing but also just businesses that can provide better things more cheaply, which is supposed to be a virtue of properly functioning capitalism) the better. Of course there is shitty work that needs to be done, but if everyone were doing that for 2 hours a day or less (with no pretense that such shitty work is anything more than an economic necessity), then that wouldn’t be bad at all. Of course there is plenty of work to do to bring about more innovation and improvements for people’s lives, and despite people’s passion, without some financial incentive, many of those innovations would not happen: cash is a great motivator. But wouldn’t it be better, if we could pull it off, if such activity were optional? The great parts of job work remain great: the remuneration, the organizational cooperation, the accountability, the having an avenue to channel your energy and creativity. It’s great to be part of an enterprise if you’re into it (more likely, I think, in a small, lean company, like, say, the Partially Examined Life, LLC 🙂 ). But the grueling necessity, the “I have to work two jobs to feed my family,” the “I have to blow off my family to do what my job requires,” the “I feel trapped because I have no real choices,” those all need to go, at a social, not just an individual level, and it’s not a zero sum game such that to enable such real choices means limiting the choices of the exceptionally talented. High-Tech Self-Providing is supposed to be the end-round against massive taxation and redistribution, and the idea of “forcing meaning” on people or deciding for them because they’re crappy at deciding for themselves is entirely foreign to New Work.
Yes, we will be doing Rawls immediately after Bergmann (and hopefully Nozick not far down the road), so we’ll get to the whole issue of why one might have a social conscience and not just work for private good. To me it seems fricking obvious, and the Igor/Emily dichotomy is an incredible oversimplifying distortion of people’s actual situations, displaying a naive social Darwinism typical of conservative talk, but I’m again wading here into that ground that’s so well trodden that it’s not worthy of a philosophy discussion.
Clearly, I still think that even for the Igors (I’ll admit that my present position where I can get away with working part time and having robust hobbies involves a wife who works more hours than I do and some nepotism involved in my job, so I can’t qualify as someone who can set his own schedule out of sheer talent), the situation could still be much better in terms of choices. You seem to have faith in “the system” to enable this as a steady evolution; I’m pessimistic about that, as are most liberals. It’s then, of course, incumbent on the liberal to provide a picture that would work better (which could of course be tweaked later), and that’s the point of Begmann’s book.
In some ways I don’t feel competent to judge the viability of this alternate future: if we could, as he predicts, supply 80% of our needs through a maybe ten hours a week of high-tech self-providing, would there still be enough of an economy left to support employment for the remainder of the time (say, another 10 hours per week)? He thinks yes: even if we have all our food and housing and transportation and appliances and dishes and such taken care of (and he thinks it’s possible to do this efficiently and elegantly, that the quality of these would actually improve in a largely self-providing economy when we can design and “print” out products that we specifically want, choosing from a huge number of blueprints on the web… the situation with houses and cars is of course more complicated), there’s still plenty of economically rewarding work to do… developing such blue-prints, for one… developing a skill and supplying it. So getting rid of full-time jobs doesn’t mean getting rid of the economy, just scaling it back, so that essentially we aren’t having to THINK about money all the fucking time.
To me, this having to be (irritatingly) obsessive about money is what a job is. “Work” can be enthralling, and being a professor is a good example of a job where there’s only certain times (maybe grading papers, at least after you’ve done this more than you’d like) you have to think about money, but as a 9-to-5er, that’s what all the clock-watching is about, and as an hourly worker or entrepreneur, the money element is even more prominent, and if you choose to go “off the grid” and scrape together on part-time wages or the kind of self-providing that’s available now, ironically you end up having to worry about money even more.
Though this post is already much too long, I feel like I owe it to you to treat your positive paragraph here; I apologize if in doing so I get redundant:
“What do we want from a labor system? Essentially, we want people who are ‘fitted’ to their role in society.”
No, we want social roles that fit people, not people that fit social roles.
“We might examine fittedness amongst a few dimensions. For example, how much does a person in a role contribute to society versus other roles he might have? In how limited supply are the virtues associated with this role? How much meaning does a person get from their role? How much do they enjoy their role? If the role is in limited supply, how much would others enjoy being in that role? Through the price mechanism, wages summarize these sorts of measures and tell an individual how much society values them in that role in the sense of what wage brings supply and demand for that role into rough equilibrium.”
People are not instruments and should not be reduced to “roles.” Yes, I can choose to play a role (just like I could choose to be in a play that someone is putting on and audition for a role), but no role is big enough for a person’s true self. The playing of roles is important and in many instances fun, but it just shouldn’t dominate human life; that’s what I mean about jobs being “unsuited for human nature.”
Think also about the sorts of roles that aren’t rewarded financially: nobody pays me to be a dad, but it’s important, and as pleasurable as it is it’s also a service, principally towards my kids. And, hell, it takes a village, to care for the young and the old. You’re providing me a service by engaging me in this discussion, but I’m not going to pay you. All this service energy, all these roles that provide meaning for all involved, are not going to be financially compensated except in the rarest circumstances. Right now you’re a grad student (if I understand your situation correctly); you likely have a good degree of freedom to be able to do what you’re doing, and it’s because someone set up a graduate program to give you the freedom to cultivate yourself in this awesome way, and (I’m guessing) because you don’t have the responsibility of kids, which, to deal with properly, you should have even MORE freedom than you have now.
“The Job-System therefore lets individuals decide between what sort of balance of internal and external goods they would like to receive, with those individuals whose virtues are dearer choosing from a more attractive schedule of options.”
Choice is not the same as freedom, and I think you might want to road-test that formulation among a wide swath of working people before you put it to market.
Thanks again for the engagement; I seriously need to get back to work now. 🙂
Mark,
Thanks again for the thoughtful reply. You make great points, and let me flail one last time weakly in my own defense.
1) My view of people’s choices is unrealistic.
Specifically you point out that even in enlightened offices people might have long hours demanded of them. I want to argue that this problem is solvable within the context of the Job-System.
Suppose there are no ‘increasing returns to concentrated work’ such that it is better to have 2 people working 60 hour weeks rather than 4 people running 30 hour weeks. If the people working 30 hour weeks would be willing to accept less than half the salary of the people working 60 hours – then the CEO is bad if he dosen’t move to hiring 4 people for shorter hours. If there are higher returns to fewer people working more hours, then the people offering to work shorter hours could offer a further discount.
Why hasn’t the CEO moved in this direction? The first possibility is that people prefer to work more hours. This could be natural or as a result of the perverse incentives you mentioned: norms about the length of the workweek or laws giving different benefits to full time workers. Again, if these norms/institutions prevent an optimal labor contract they should probably be abolished. So I conclude your CEO is either not truly maximizing the interests of your company, or people in fact want to work longer hours.
2) The meritocracy is contrary to human flourishing
There are two reasons we might like a meritocracy: because we like the incentives it creates or because we believe in some concept of ‘desert’. It sounds like you are on board with the value of incentives so I won’t belabor the point.
That being said, my moral intuition is that people should be rewarded in proportion to their virtues. There are of course some virtues that are unrewarded in the market – say being a good dad and some virtues that are rewarded too highly – say the virtues associated with being a good hedge fund manager. However I can think of no better system for rewarding virtue than the free market system. Here is a very bad philosophy paper by an excellent economist (former CEA chair) explaining this position:
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/defending_the_one_percent_0.pdf
(I would encourage you to read 1 percent as 10 percent though)
3) On personal discovery versus role finding
As someone who fell in love with ‘After Virtue’ (as you’ve no doubt noticed), I think this may be a fundamental divide between myself and a more existentialist position. What does it mean other than some sort of narcissism to think of oneself as completely separate from the cultural roles one inhabits? How do we find meaning if not through socially constructed practices that we choose to participate in? What does virtue mean if not a set of qualities conducive to success in these practices? By your own ‘private language argument’ how can one have a consistent self outside of the context of other people holding you to an external standard? Maybe you need to do another existentialism podcast to clue me in :).
4) Finally on Emily/Ignor
Obviously a gross oversimplification. My only point with this line of argument is that the avenue of getting people more in touch with their true desires (and again I am talking about people in prosperous societies who aren’t desperately poor) is going to be a much more effective avenue for helping them help themselves than giving them more choices. I know you scoff, but joining a commune or monastery or the army or becoming a roadie is an option for those who haven’t become burdened themselves with other commitments (like a dependent) already. To the extent that ‘high tech providing’ gives the responsibility-constrained more flexibility that is great. I am also for generous government assistance for those taking on the burden of a sick parent or whatever.
But there are huge swaths of society that aren’t in desperate financial states. For these people, if they have already chosen life options that prevent them from flourishing, giving them more options is of dubious importance – they might make an even worse decision.
Very good; I appreciate your not taking offense at my tone. I’ll take a look at your link. The current response is primarily to point #3:
Yes, the big shift in Virtue Ethics from Aristotle to Nietzsche is the idea that what makes an individual impressive is not the same as, and is often antithetical to, what makes someone a good citizen. The example Bergmann would give in class is “Would you want Mozart for your roommate?” Probably not.
So likewise, yes, for most professions, there is an arete: there is an excellence in shoemaking, and so someone could attain this excellence to a high degree and be an impressive individual because of it, but simply being a good shoemaker is not sufficient for being an impressive (and I think it’s useful in this context to use that word instead of “virtuous” simply because of the mild and meek connotations of that word in English now, which were certainly not in the word arete) individual, or rather, on a Nietzschean view, you’d have to really make an art of shoemaking, really put your damn soul into it, and still, we’d say that if that’s all you did, then you’re pretty warped (I’m channeling Jung’s comments on living as a whole self here; I’m not sure Nietzsche would have a problem with being warped in such a way).
We acknowledge in the modern era (in a way that I guess they didn’t so much even 100 years back) that we as individuals are greater than our role, than our job and our class, but (channeling Marx here) if we LIVE in such a way that 80%+ our waking time is on doing this job activity (plus necessary activities like sleeping and eating), then maintaining that you somehow transcend this, whether through being spiritual (at a church our out of it) or through loving your family, is just fooling yourself (existential bad faith, or Marxist false consciousness, or one of those epithets).
Skiedelsky (who I’ll write about in another post at some point) is an economic historian (he’s got a famous biography of Keynes) who preaches that eudaimonia is to be found in working less, but like MacIntyre, is Catholic (or maybe Anglican or something else… doesn’t matter exactly for this purpose) and expresses doubt that in the absence of a culture traditions and rituals that people will en masse be able to find meaningful effort for themselves when the job system is pulled back to free us more. For Bergmann (as existentialist), the counseling to find what you really, really want is the solution to that. The idea is that the “what you really, really want” is not a whim, not something subjective, but a built, objective thing (remember that for Sartre the ego is built, yet objective once it’s built; you can be in bad faith EITHER by reducing yourself to an object like “I am a shoemaker” but also by denying the facts about this objective thing you’ve built: saying “I am not really a shoemaker INSIDE” when you just make shoes all day). So that’s what saves meaning (and ethics) from that version of the private language argument we find in MacIntyre. Bergmann’s insistence (following Hegel) in particular that we are self-ignorant and so really can’t do this searching for our true desires by ourselves adds another layer of “objectivity” to the result: there IS a check on whether, once you discover something about yourself, you can misremember or change your interpretation of it or whatever and so fool yourself. Yes, such self-deception is part of the dynamic, but there’s a mechanism for moving forward and overcoming it.
Here’s the rub as I understand it:
Modern people understand themselves as different than the roles they inhabit. They spend most of their time filling these roles and are therefore unfulfilled (Sartre’s ‘Bad Faith’).
There are three solutions to this problem:
1) Rebel against roles, and everyone be a super self-authentic, completely unique existentialist exemplar
2) Turn people back into sheep who meekly assume any role they are born into
3) Get people to choose the roles that fit them best
I think 3 is the most realistic option.
“3) Get people to choose the roles that fit them best”
Response:
1) I would allege that the vast majority of roles as defined by the job system don’t “fit” anyone at all. Is anyone meant to sit at a desk or stand at a register or sit behind the wheel of a vehicle for 8 hours a day for year after year, even given appropriate breaks? I’m reminded of the animals in the Flintstone cartoons that would serve as the characters’ can openers and hat racks and such: a pelican (OK, this is obviously not a real example from the show, but the joke that always occurs to me when thinking of it) who sits all day in the bathroom waiting for Fred to come in and use his mighty beak as a toilet. Fred flushes, the bird gulps it down and turns to the camera to shrug and say “it’s a living!”
2) The job system does not provide a sufficient number of “roles” and certainly can’t handle everyone (nor, as I’m sure you’d agree) should bullshit jobs be invented just so people have stuff to do)
3) By promoting a system whereby jobs take up the bulk of one’s energies (unnecessarily, according to the Keynes/Russell/Bergmann argument), we shut down all that energy that could be better channelled to taking care of each other, creating art, making our surroundings beautiful, and all the other things that people do value but aren’t readily commodifiable.
One of Bergmann’s findings is that people, when interviewed one on one, are almost always more intelligent and thoughtful than you’d think. While you’ve described #1 like a Nietzschean hero, being able to handle freedom is not something that only the educated or gifted can attain. If we had a shift in the culture to actually enable such freedom, then for the most part parents would try to teach their kids in the same way that now they try to drive them to get good grades and be nice to each other. (A better example would be parents teaching kids to be civically engaged, but I don’t know that that happens much… I would again posit that minus people being exhausted enough by their jobs that they want to use their off time watching TV and/or getting drunk, then you’d get lots more civic engagement too.) Bergmann (and Skidelsky and others) do talk about changes in education needed to meet this challenge. (Luckily, we already have a strong strain of that floating out there at the college level: it’s called liberal arts.)
…Was also thinking more about your equating roles as given in actual employment situations and traditions a la MacIntyre. I think Jung had a pretty good take on this: there was about rituals and roles in the past a numinosity that we in the modern age have simply lost. To sign on with a company and engage in the “company spirit” is a gross parody of what may have worked in olden times. (though I find this reverence for the past suspicious too…)
A couple points. First, the jobs that you pick out as particularly meaningless seem arbitrary. I actually know a guy who got great joy out of driving a truck for a living: listening to baseball games, seeing America, radio-ing buddies, honking for kids. I know it is hard to think of who would be able to find joy and arete in a job as a pelican-toilet, but is it really inconceivable? As they say, it takes all kinds.
On (2) I’m gonna disagree with you factually. Outside of the business cycle, the labor market equalizes and the demand for work is equal to the supply of work.
On (3), those who are not in desperate financial straights are not required to devote the bulk of their energy towards their jobs. This would be especially true if we were able to address the normative and institutional problems described above.
On the analogy between MacIntye’s practices and modern jobs, I think this is the most important link in my argument. Clearly some modern jobs (like musician, professor, athlete, doctor and policeman) come very close, having archetypes, codes of conduct, traditions and associated virtues. For other jobs the connection is harder to see. However, I think it is still there.
Take for example railway construction. Dreary full time job, backbreaking and unpleasant. Yet I think here we can identify a practice. How? By looking to the heroic tradition of steel driving!
Think of the ‘John Henry the Steel Driving Man’. What virtues are associated with steel driving? Strength, indomitableness, confidence. What are the internal goods of steel driving? Hearing ‘that steel ring’ sweetly from a well hit blow, the knowledge that one is contributing to the great project of uniting the country and one might imagine the camaraderie of men at camp.
Even factory work has its attendant traditions and virtues one might associate with. Take for example the tradition of trade unionism with its virtues of fraternity and equality or the tradition of ‘Kaisen’ (the term for the continuous incremental bottom-up improvement within Japanese car companies) and its associated virtues of conscientiousness and industry.
Perhaps we can agree that certain less obviously ‘meaningful’ jobs could be injected with more practice like qualities. I’m all for sponsoring heroic poetry about garbage men.
Seth, could you please explain to me why this would be the case?
“Outside of the business cycle, the labor market equalizes and the demand for work is equal to the supply of work.”
I can make up an explanation; tell me if this is in the ballpark: Whenever businesses have money, they tend to want to grow, which means hiring more people. Assuming that we’re not in a depression where businesses aren’t willing to expand (which is not the situation we’re talking about), then there will always be plenty of jobs up to the point where too many jobs = too many choices for employees = having to pay employees too much to make it worth hiring at all.
OK, so on this picture, I still don’t see why the equalization point would be the number of jobs approximately equaling the number of applicants. On the contrary, any hiring process that I’ve ever heard about involves many more applicants than jobs. Can you fill me in?
The picture also, of course, leaves out technology entirely, which is entirely the argument of this whole strain of thinkers: if instead of hiring, companies can just invest that salary money in technology instead and end up getting a bigger increase in productivity, then they certainly will. Does your picture entail that such investments don’t have any effect, because the growth that the technology brings will thus generate more wealth for the company and so more drive to hire? (So that pre-tech, they might hire five people; post-tech they might hire one and a bunch of tech but then grow more and so hire another person and another load of tech, etc. until the 5 is reached? The end result being the same hiring but a hell of a lot more growth due to the tech?)
Thanks again for your valuable input.
Hey guys, I wanted to say that I’ve really enjoyed reading this back and forth. I am, however, far more convinced by Mark’s arguments than Seth’s. I want to address your initial 6 points of contention but unfortunately don’t have the time at the moment, so I’ll just make one comment about your last post…
I can’t say I’m incredibly familiar with MacIntyre, but I think that “John Henry” may actually be the WORST possible example to support your argument here, as it’s essentially a Luddite fable about machines leading to widespread unemployment and so becoming the enemy of the worker. Even besides, it’s an example of culture arising as a way of people coping with the terror of back breaking labor (remember that John Henry literally dies of overwork at the end). A musicologist would tell you that it’s an outgrowth of the slave song tradition, which certainly implies (if only anecdotally) a continuity between how a certain historical community experienced the job system and how that same community previously experienced slavery (in fact, just to cement the link between forced labor and wage labor further, in many interpretations of the song/tale, John Henry is actually a prisoner on a chain gang).
Mark,
Let me respond. I hope this won’t sound like mumbo jumbo.
Let me introduce a toy model of the economy. It is a simplification, but I think it will serve to explain why economists don’t worry about jobs disappearing. In a way, there are more elements here than are strictly necessary for making my point, but I hope it will serve to illustrate how Macroeconomists think about labor markets.
There is one industry with a large amount of firms. These firms take in labor and rent capital and create an output good, which can either be invested (into new capital) or consumed. Firms’ only desire is to maximize profits.
There are also a bunch of households. Each household also has some capital (money in the bank) as well as a time endowment. Households want to maximize utility, which is increasing in consumption and leisure (i.e. they prefer more stuff to less stuff, and less work to more work).
Each firm knows that by combining certain ratios of labor and capital it can make a certain amount of output. Even without sitting down and doing the math, you should agree that faced with these three prices – the price of the output good, the rental price/cost of capital/interest rate (three sometimes divergent things which are identical in this toy model), and the wage (or price of labor) – as well as the knowledge of in what proportions these things may be combined in order to make output, the firm can make a profit maximizing decision.
NOTE! The decision of how much labor to hire and capital to rent is not a function of “having money”*, only a function of the prices it faces.
Similarly, the households want to save money for the future, enjoy leisure, and consume today. They know how happy they will be with different amounts and ratios of these factors. Knowing this and the three prices – wage, interest rate, output good – they choose how much labor to provide and how much to save for the future.
Mathematically, now all the terms in the above model are determined. The magic of prices does its work. The price of the output good adjusts precisely so that supply is equal to demand. Exactly analogously, wages adjust so that the supply of hours worked is equal to demand for hours of labor.
Why do economists think that capitalism is good at matching supply of labor to demand for labor? For the same exact reason it is good at making the supply of pencils equal to the demand for pencils!
Now of course there are people looking for work even during good times for the economy. Most reasons for this are pretty benign. One source of this is ‘frictional unemployment. Firms go out of business, or people move for personal reasons and have to find new jobs. For matching reasons, this process is not instantaneous. Hence there are always a few percentage points of unemployment just due to this lag time.
I should really go to bed, but I will post tomorrow extending this analysis to the much more complicated case of changing technology. The short answer will be that the above analysis will still hold, but there may be some unpleasant distributional effects (inequality) depending on exactly how you want to model it.
*That is because in this model profits are realized instantaneously. In a more complex model there would be a financial industry which the firm could borrow from if it had a profit opportunity. Then you might have problems with financial frictions, but it doesn’t effect the story I’m telling above.
“Mathematically, now all the terms in the above model are determined. The magic of prices does its work. The price of the output good adjusts precisely so that supply is equal to demand. Exactly analogously, wages adjust so that the supply of hours worked is equal to demand for hours of labor.”
So I get that labor here is treated like any other commodity. But if that’s the case, then just as the demand for many a commodity simply goes away (buggy whips), then there’s nothing to prevent the demand for labor from going away as a particular type of labor becomes obsolete (particularly if there isn’t some upswing in demand for some OTHER type of labor).
In a sense there’s always demand for labor if it’s cheap enough, in that every one of us, if we could get someone to do crap for us for basically nothing, would pursue that option instead of doing the crap ourselves. So if that’s what you mean by increased inequality as a result of changing patterns in the labor market due to technology, that would match what I’ve heard in other contexts: there are more jobs (though not THAT many) at the top, requiring high degrees of technical skills, and there are more jobs at the very bottom, but that the middle ones are disappearing. (Just watched an interview with Paul Krugman about this.) The result is the working poverty that Bergmann complained about, i.e. the job system being unable to provide those roles that people should be matched with according to your earlier comment. The rewards and punishments involved in the meritocracy get more extreme, and social Darwinists have to just shrug and say “sorry, most Citizens; you’re just not providing the value needed right now and will have to get more technical training to get up the ladder,” knowing that this will only be a realistic possibility for some limited percentage (certainly below half) of those listening.
I look forward to the rest of your explanation.
Edit: lo and behold another article on this redistribution of jobs as the lead Salon story today: http://www.salon.com/2013/09/20/rip_the_middle_class_1946_2013/
Another question related to this account of the labor market as another example of supply/demand that always reaches an equalization:
-When there are more pencils than people need, so that it’s no longer profitable to make pencils, manufacturers make fewer pencils: reduce supply to better match demand
-When there’s more work than employers need, so that work pays super shitty, people don’t have the option to just work less and thus better match demand (maybe drive up wages due to the smaller labor supply)
So the analogy doesn’t work.
Likewise, when there are too many pencils, the company could instead of making fewer pencils dye them all blue and have a giant marketing campaign to drive up demand for these new, awesome BLUE pencils.
When there’s too much labor, yes, people as individuals can improve their skills to try to better compete against the other laborers, but there’s no mechanism available for workers to attempt to drive up the overall demand for work.
This is in part just to point out the obvious asymmetry between a company mass-producing goods and an individual that has only his own labor to rent out. Does this not play a role in the operation of the economic ecosystem, or do the models ignore the obvious effects of such power differentials?
Mark,
Because this will probably be my final post before the show, I’d like to thank you for the stimulating conversation. It certainly helped me to think about my own perspective more carefully and I hope it has helped you as well.
In the following, I am limiting my time horizon to something like the next hundred years. Of course it is possible to imagine a post-scarcity future where we all have the option of becoming ‘last men’. However, what such a society would be like would be little more than informed speculation.*
Let me address your second post first. As I discussed in my last post, the wages of individuals is tied to how labor and capital can be combined to create outputs. I’ll call this relationship the productivity of labor. So wages are directly related to productivity.**
The productivity of large amounts of the population (everyone who is currently employed) is currently far above zero. It is far above where it was for people in the 1950’s, the 1900’s and the 1850’s. During these time periods labor was much less productive due to inferior technology and lower capital stocks. However, unemployment rates are about the same back then as they are today! I conclude that the productivity of labor would have to plunge by more than the amount it has increased over the last 200 hundred years before we have to seriously worry about completely un-demanded labor. Geometrically, I am saying that even if the supply of labor is perfectly inelastic (i.e. fixed) the supply curve is still going to intercept the demand curve at a positive wage given even an extreme shift in productivity.
To predict that an even more extreme shift will happen is, of course, extremely speculative, especially considering that in the past technology growth and capital stock growth have overwhelmingly tended to increase the productivity of labor. Now of course I am speaking of one homogeneous ‘labor’ here, and so a richer model would not preclude the wages of some groups of workers rising and the wages of others falling. I will revisit the inequality issue below.
Now to the meat of the question. How will increasing technology change the amount of ‘desirable’ jobs. I say desirable, because as you concede in the first post “in that every one of us, if we could get someone to do crap for us for basically nothing, would pursue that option instead of doing the crap ourselves.”
I will begin by talking about how economists usually discuss technological growth, and then I will try to model a different kind of technological growth that I think will fit what you are thinking of better.
In general Macroeconomists think of technological growth as a really good thing. This is because they see it entering the production function through a ‘labor augmenting’ process. . Think about secretaries that used to type letters on typewriters. A simple modern computer is approximately the same cost as a typewriter in real terms (lets say) so the technological growth is in the replacement of typewriters with computers. Now it seems likely that with modern computers that can easily duplicate and edit documents, one secretary now can do the same amount of work as four secretaries could in the days of typewriters.*** Now you might be concerned about this putting the other secretaries out of work. However, this is the ‘luddite fallacy’. At least in the model I laid out in the post above, such a technological improvement will lead to increased wages (as secretaries are now more productive) as well as more demand for the output of what secretaries make (because there is only one good, and workers are being paid more). This may lead to more or less actual hours of secretary-ing getting done (because of wealth effects – richer secretaries may prefer to work lower hours), but everyone is clearly better off.
This is how technological growth was modeled for a long time, and still widely is today. Instead let us consider a different kind of technological growth with a more automated flavor.
Suppose we invent a new kind of robot that can work in a fast food restaurant. The way I would model this is by saying that McDonalds now has the choice of two different production functions to employ: one where it uses a moderate amount of capital (a storefront, some kitchen equipment) and a moderate amount of labor (some fry cooks some tellers) or it can employ a large amount of capital (robots) and a small amount of labor (one technician).
Suppose the second option is cheaper at current prices. Then McDonalds will want to switch to it. This will have the effect of increasing the cost of capital for the economy as a whole as well as decreasing the price of labor, so one might imagine some labor from McDonalds shifting to another field.
Remember, in equilibrium other industries are delicately balanced between the perfect amount of capital and labor. So, the reduction in wages and increase in interest rates caused by McDonalds changing its technology may get them to shift in turn in the opposite direction.
Suppose however that this change happens not just to McDonalds but to the economy as a whole. If the supply of labor is roughly fixed in the short run workers are actually ok. At American rates of saving it will take decades to build all the robots necessary to take over all their prior jobs. Also in the very long (100+ year) run it is unclear how afraid they should be. If you have a gazillion robots per person, there will be plenty of demand for robot technicians.
In the 20-100 year run though there may be some cause for concern. First, I should note that gdp growth will be doing fine. We’ll be making much more than we ever have. However, the lions share of this output will be going to the owners of capital. Why? Because the price of capital has skyrocketed, and wages are going down!****
This is the source of inequality I am referencing. To the extent that wealth is unequally distributed today, such a shift in production functions will exaggerate inequality (although even this statement relies on guessing about marginal propensities to consume vs. save).
The other possible source of inequality is through the mechanism Krugman mentions. This mechanism also sounds plausible.
So yeah, if we get the ‘wrong kind’ of technological growth, you may very well increase inequality. Not ‘destroy jobs’, but rather replacing a some of our current middle income jobs with lower income (though not necessarily less intellectually stimulating or fulfilling) ones. Simultaneously more of national income will go to the already rich. To the extent that this is undesirable for its own stake it could be solved via direct transfers or a richer safety net etc.
I hope you have found my ramblings at least partially (wink wink nudge) illuminating over the last few days – if only as a devil’s advocate. By this discussion I have actually been inspired to work on a model of long run growth in the presence of labor-replacing capital. I’d try to do it as an overlapping generations model and try to simulate out a hundred years or so into the future. You’ll be the first person to get a copy if the project pans out.
*If you are looking for an excellent novel that I think gets what living in a post-scarcity economy would be like I encourage you to look into “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” by Doctorow. Even in such a society there’d have to be capitalist elements based around social capital, even if it were not so formalized as it is in this novel.
**I should really say marginal productivity, but I am speaking loosely. In a perfect market wages will equal marginal productivity exactly. Things like efficiency wages, minimum wages, sticky nominal wages, union power, monopsony employer power etc. will often prevent marginal productivity from equaling wages exactly, but again these should mostly wash out when we are talking about the economy as a whole
***This example is stolen from here: https://mnmeconomics.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/labour-augmenting-technical-progress/
****I should again note that this would be pretty unprecedented. Labor’s share of income has been remarkably consistently in the 2/3rds range for all kinds of economies.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG
However, if you squint at that chart it kind of looks like it is headed for a downswing.
p.s. I really don’t have the energy to go into it, but that Salon article is full of bad economics. Praising Nixon’s trade barriers? Anecdotes about scrappy factory workers?
(3) The system does not reward the production of value, but rather the virtue of hard work. This is bad because it is a version of slave morality
You misconstrue the argument.
Here’s the quote from Russel:
“those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry. This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work.”
The whole essay is found here: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
“In a mostly well-functioning capitalist area like the US, compensation is tied directly to value”
Can you please explain the science of this statement? I don’t see how compensation is tied directly to value in a mostly well-functioning capitalist area.
For example if you create a product lets say a very good computer program and give it away for free the compensation you will get from it is zero, but the value of the product seems to be able to be much higher than zero? Infact I would say it could be anything at all.
K,
Thanks for providing the whole quote. I apologize for misunderstanding it based on just the snippet I heard.
On ‘rewarding value’ well, obviously if you make something great and give it away you are not going to get any monetary compensation (though you may get some sort of compensation in terms of recompense). But if he sold it, the amount of money he would receive would be in proportion to how unique and useful his contribution has been.
Hi Seth,
It seems to me that many forms of compensation in the US are not tied “directly to value,” and this is true in a non-trivial way.
Many forms of compensation (say, CEO pay) result instead from “rent-seeking”, cronyism, regulatory capture, and other cheats. Now, are these exogenous problems, not intrinsic to “the jobs-system”? I don’t know, but I don’t think the answer is so obvious.
Even if my salary may not result from rent-seeking (and actually it does a bit), that doesn’t negate the critique that the US “model” all too often rewards behavior divorced either from “hard work” or from “value creation”.
Of course, this does not mean “the system” (as if the US had only one system) rewards some “slave morality” virtue, as per Russell’s essay. But I wonder if you’re not substituting one myth (people get paid commensurate with their hard work!) for another (people get paid commensurate with their value creation!).
Both statements are true when they’re true, but it’s not clear to me that one assertion has better explanatory value than the other. To re-state K’s challenge, where’s the empirical evidence either way?
Prices, because they take into account the desire and supply of a good or service, have something to do with how much people value a good (except in pathological cases). In fact, it is the only objective measure of value I know of that lots of people would agree to. What is the ‘value’ of an IPhone? The only number I would be able to come up with is its market price.
Wages are a price. Specifically, the ‘price’ of a person’s time. So again, in non-pathological cases, wages are tied to value.
Now, you list several examples of pathological cases: rent-seeking (though some forms of this are more problematic than others) etc. These are clearly issues that need to be addressed at the government and social level through proper regulations and norms.
So the idea that wages are tied to value is of course a generalization. But it is a much better generalization than wages being tied to ‘hard work’ (other than through the mechanism of hard work ==> more value). The idea that a potential employer cares how hard you are secretly pushing yourself in order to make your quota of pins seems way off (although as I write this there may be some sort of contract-theory equilibrium in which your boss does care; but this would be a relatively minor effect and I digress).
Sure wages in a free-market economy are set by supply and demand. The price of goods are also set by supply and demand. But how is the wage tied to the price of the goods? Other than setting a limit on the possible wage payed I see no way in wich the price of the goods affect the wage payed for producing it.
K,
This is actually very straightforward. As I discuss in a post above, the outcome of supply and demand will set wages equal to marginal productivity. What is marginal productivity? It is the additional output of a firm from hiring one more hour of labor.
Why is this the equilibrium outcome? If wages are above marginal productivity, a firm would save money by firing workers – it would have less products to sell, sure, but it would have even lower labor costs. If wages are below marginal productivity this also cannot be an equilibrium – other firms would come in and offer higher wages to steal workers away, in the knowledge that their benefit to the firm would exceed their costs.
So we might imagine two types of workers. One is good at making pants and one is good at making shirts. Suppose there is a shock to the economy of some sort, and the price of pants goes up. This in turn increases the return to pant making. When the benefits of pant making go up, the marginal productivity of those making pants go up as well (under reasonable assumptions about other possible effects).
In other words, an increasing price for a product will, ceritus paribus, lead to a higher wage for those with special skills in creating that product.
Also, is your K name Kafka inspired, or just an initial?
It’s just an initial. Anyway thanks for the answers to the questions.
http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/783/wed-91113-has-economics-failed-us
http://www.thersa.org/events/rsaanimate/animate/rsa-animate-re-imagining-work
Here is The Royal Society of the Arts Take on New Work.
Awesome precog. I look forward to this one especially because I, like so many others, have had these questions in mind for some time. I don’t know if Bergmann’s suggestion will work out or if they lead others to think of something a little different but it is good to get clearer on the issues and have a discussion.
I recently listened to these interviews with John Durant author of “The Paleo Manifesto”
He’s got an evolutionary psychology back ground and has some interesting perspectives.
He speaks of our “environment” ,which includes politics and economics, in reference to how he starts out the book talking about gorillas in the zoo.
The Paleo Manifesto w/ John Durant
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/undergroundwellness/2013/09/20/the-paleo-manifesto-w-john-durant
726: John Durant Offers Up His ‘Paleo Manifesto’ For Healthy Living
http://www.thelivinlowcarbshow.com/shownotes/8644/726-john-durant-offers-up-his-paleo-manifesto-for-healthy-living/
John Durant: The Paleo Manifesto, Why Great Thinkers Stand Up, and Orange-Eyed Aliens
http://www.fatburningman.com/john-durant-paleo-manifesto/
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“The poor man’s son, whom heaven, in its anger, has visited with ambition, admires the condition of the rich. Through the whole of his life, he pursues the idea of a certain, artificial and elegant repose, which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquility that is at all times in his power, and which, if in the extremity of old age, he should at last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable to that humble security and contentment, which he had abandoned for it.”
“Power and riches appear then to be what they are, enormous machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniences to the body. They keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always as much and sometimes more exposed than before to anxiety, to fear and to sorrow, to diseases, to danger and to death.”
from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759
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much respect
I’ve been thinking a lot about Bergmann and Marx and Heidegger.
I think some context to or look at the bigger picture and how we got to where we are.
I’m not the first to say this so it isn’t original but when humans went from hunting and gathering and to argriculture and “civilization” is when society went from being kind of communal to hierarchical.
With slavery and elites and a military class.
And when you have humans in large concentrations they can’t provide for themselves they have to go and conquor and take from neighbors. We see that in ancinet Egypt, Sumeria, Aztecs, Incas, Greece, Rome, modern Europe, and the U.S.
This seems like an unusual podcast for this kind of discussion and an unusual author for the discussion but i think it makes an important contribution to the discussion as does the podcast discusion of the Paleo Manifesto top link.
Her critique of “civilization” starts 0:18:50
http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com/episode-858-lierre-keith-on-the-vegetarian-myth
I mean no disrespect to vegetarians. One of her books is called the vegetarian myth which it is really the argricultural and civilizational myth. It isn’t about vegetarianism it’s about the factory farm system plant and animal.
“Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers’ elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative…. Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers’ outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
“Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
“To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the public didn’t want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses’ environmental practices.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed