A lot of problematic thinking stems from shortcuts and proxies that end up being treated as the real thing.
Take jobs. The US government LOVES to talk about job creation as one of the ultimate goods. Policies and programs and investments are assessed, sometimes almost exclusively, based on the number of jobs to be created; and anything that creates job loss is, of course, negative in the same way.
But here’s the thing – jobs, almost definitionally, suck.
As the saying goes, “choose a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Humor aside, the implication is clear – “work” is, by definition, something that’s not enjoyable to do. Every single one of us would prefer to have fewer jobs and more free time to spend with our children, our hobbies, our friends, or even just ourselves.
So why are we so obsessed with creating more work?
Obviously there are lots of good reasons. Jobs lead to paychecks, which are strictly beneficial to the people who receive them. Jobs (hopefully) lead to produced value, which is beneficial to the people who consume that value. Further, we assume workers are benefiting from public goods paid for by the government – and jobs (at least today) are a major source that funds those taxes to produce those goods.
All of this is true! Any individual who merely takes from the people around them, and never gives back, is reasonably defined as a “bad person.” The problem is that we’re cheating – “never gives back” and “doesn’t have a job” are two extremely different things!
In a world where the average human could sustain themselves – hunter/gatherer societies being the most extreme example – jobs would be optional. Someone who wants to fend for themselves would be welcome to; they’d only be required to work a job in exchange for some value or service from other people which they opted into.
In a world where we, as a society, intelligently pooled our resources to subsidize prosocial activities we want more of – say, stay-at-home parenting – then jobs would be one route to give back to society, but certainly not the only one.
In a post-scarcity world where nobody had to worry about hunger or thirst, jobs would once again be optional for those who wished to do more for their society in some way. Job-workers would deserve extra appreciation and support for their prosocial decision; but someone who preferred to simply while away their days painting in a cabin could do so too.
In the real world, we’re not post-scarcity, and we suck at most methods of resource distribution, possibly with the exception of capitalism. So yes, jobs are important today. Remove jobs from a neighborhood, and the people in that neighborhood will be worse off. Bring jobs to a region, and you are, in fact, helping that region out.
But consider AutoCorp. AutoCorp is automating away their workers, and thus going to close down Factory A. Factory A currently supports 1,000 workers, who make a combined $30M in annual salaries, and produce $100M worth of goods. But with automation, AutoCorp will now be able to produce $300M worth of goods using the same $30M invested.
Absent any reason not to, AutoCorp simply claims all the benefits for themselves, and becomes $200M richer, while its workers at Factory A become (collectively) $30M worse off.
But there are other ways to distribute the gains here! For instance, Factory A’s workers could be given $50M. Then AutoCorp would have +$150M, and Factory A’s workers would have +$20M, compared to when Factory A was open. (Oh, and whoever is selling the new automated systems gets +$30M, so they win too!)
In principle, any action which generates more net wealth can also result in that net wealth being redistributed such that everyone is better off than they were before.
In practice, this is hard. It’s hard because redistribution is hard, especially when everyone always has the incentive to keep as much for themselves as possible. It’s hard because we’ve poisoned our own minds into believing that losing a job is “our fault” or “shameful” and that it’s embarrassing to “take handouts”, meaning the workers of Factory A might be unwilling to accept this money even if it were properly allocated to them. And it’s hard because, in real-world systems, it can be very very hard to tell whether net wealth is in fact being generated or whether someone is simply being conned.
But I’d still argue that the sin of AutoCorp wasn’t in “destroying jobs” – it was either in destroying value, or in selfishly hogging all the value for themselves.
You don’t need to break capitalism to solve this. You could solve this with regulation, taxes, and redistributive services. You could solve it with a change in social norms and expectations. You could solve it with an AI productivity boom or a basic income or various other things.
All of those things are hard. But none are impossible – unless we enshrine “job creation” as some sort of holy virtue, in which case “becoming a utopia where nobody has to work” somehow starts to look negative.
Jobs suck. We do them because the value generated is worth it. But never lose track of the value, not the work, as the thing that truly matters.
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