All this jobs talk boggles my mind. Jobs suck. Work sucks. If you don’t think your job sucks, ask yourself if you’d keep doing it if they didn’t pay you. Yet politicians on both sides of the aisle fall all over themselves to talk about how many of these accursed jobs they will create. If that makes any sense to you, try this thought experiment: As near as I can tell Paris Hilton doesn’t have a job. Is that a problem? Schadenfreude aside, I think we can agree that the answer, at least as a matter of public policy, is no. Paris Hilton has the resources to maintain a quality of life that we all would find, at a minium, acceptable. So the issue is not job or no job; it’s quality of life. The unemployed are not unhappy that they don’t get to spend their days digging, hauling, collating, selling, teaching, or managing; they are unhappy because they aren’t getting paid and thus can’t buy the necessities and pleasures of life.
So am I advocating an welfare state that grants every citizen a stipend regardless of whether they work, creating a Utopia that lasts for about six days until it collapses into klepto-anarchy? Of course not. I recognize that for the foreseeable future the employment of most citizens is the only sustainable way for all citizens to enjoy a decent standard of living, and I understand that right now finding jobs for millions of Americans is a necessary (though I think not sufficient) for strengthening our economy.
So what’s the big deal? If pretty much everybody has to work anyway, and if job creation is good social policy, why complain about the job creation talk? Part of the reason is simply my own aesthetic sense concerning intellectual consistency and honest. As discussed above, jobs are a means to an end – quality of life – not an end in themselves, and I find rhetoric that treats them as such to be per se ugly. It is as if the case for curing cancer were made in terms of the number of rounds of chemo we can administer as opposed to the number of lives we can save.
But I think the treating of jobs as ends in themselves is more than just an intellectual faux pas for many, particularly those on the right. Labor is seen as inherently good, and idleness is seen as inherently bad. At its most benign, I think this is an expression of the old Protestant work ethic, and I can even agree with it somewhat. I do think work builds character; I just that good is overvalued compared to the good of having time to spend on one’s own passions and pleasures. But I think there is a darker impulse behind some of these pro-work sentiments that to me smacks of a feudal-like belief that the purpose of the lower classes labor is to create wealth for the upper class. This is most apparent to me in the hypocritical way industry is moralized: The idle poor are lazy; the idle rich are eccentric. An unemployed kid who plays Halo all day is a bum; a CEO who plays golf all day is a job creator. When Bill O’Reilly says he’ll work less if his taxes are raised he’s being rational; the state employee who thinks he should work less when his benefits are cut is being ungrateful.
There is also a practical reason not to treat jobs as ends in themselves. I said that for the foreseeable future I expect most people to have to work. That is true. Nonetheless, I can foresee a future where non-trivial portion of the population simply does not have anything of value to contribute to the labor market. I predict technological advances are going to shrink the need for unskilled labor (and probably labor in general) far faster than the unskilled versus skilled demographics of our population will shift towards the skilled, if it even does shift in that direction. What if we are prosperous enough to provide for everyone, but simply don’t need everyone’s labor? I don’t think the horizon for this question is that far off, and I don’t think you need to be a fan of collectivism to believe it worthy of an answer. And in the further, unforeseeable but imaginable future, it may be that few if any of need to work. Will we still cling to jobs as totems of righteousness in a post scarcity world, or will learn to decouple labor from living once that coupling is no longer necessary?
