Work For It

So I came across an article, provocatively titled “The War on Work—and How to End It.” In case you couldn't guess, the article has a fairly conservative bent, and, as such, it rather neatly lines up with conservative orthodoxy when it comes to it's subject - how to get more people back into the labor force.

Consider the following knock on the minimum wage: "Advocates of a $15 minimum hourly wage, for example, don’t seem to mind, or believe, that such policies deter firms from hiring less skilled workers."

And this complaint against the unemployment benefits in general: "Increasing the benefits received by nonemployed persons may make their lives easier in a material sense but won’t help reattach them to the labor force. It won’t give them the sense of pride that comes from economic independence. It won’t give them the reassuring social interactions that come from workplace relationships. When societies sacrifice employment for a notion of income equality, they make the wrong choice."

But what's interesting about this is that Professor Glaeser doesn't seem to think that less skilled workers should just be cast adrift; after all, he notes: "Nominal wages actually fell over both the 1870s and the 1890s because workers had to accept low pay. With no government safety net, long-term unemployment meant deprivation—or even death." So what's the answer?

Making work pay needs one final, major policy initiative: wage support, which would replace the [Earned Income Tax Credit]. The EITC had the right overall idea, but it is cumbersome and indirect. Instead, the federal government could simply provide pay to increase the earnings of minimum-wage workers by a fixed amount—say, $3 per hour. Consequently, a worker paid $7.25 would take home $10.25 hourly, with the difference paid for by taxpayers.

This raises a question for me - Are workers not going to be told where that extra $3 an hour is coming from? Because I don't see how someone who's miserable due to lacking "the sense of pride that comes from economic independence" if they're drawing unemployment, disability insurance or just depleting their savings is suddenly going to find it in a job that only pays enough to live on because of taxpayer dollars have been reduced in amount, and given a different name. And this becomes a subsidy to employers, who can then push wages down because they know that someone else will make up the difference - which WalMart (among others) has already been accused of doing. And since "Such a program would be expensive, so it should be matched with spending reductions for other social services," if something happens to this poorly-paid job, the guy is in real trouble. (And I say guy, because the focus of Professor Glaeser's piece is "prime-age" {between 25 and 54} men. I have no idea what he has in mind for women and children.)

It's worth noting that Professor Gleaser believes that while long-term unemployment in a welfare state doesn't man deprivation to the degree that it used do, it still means death - he links high rates of unhappiness and suicide to unemployment. But he feels that you can't realistically do away with both, so he'd rather have deprivation. Which is logical. But the insistence that inequality not be considered a factor in the current dismal state of affairs strikes me as ideological.

I detect (correctly or not, I am uncertain) that old conservative trope of "Makers and Takers" at work. There is a clear presumption that with the right incentives, that entrepreneurs can come up with enough work that requires physical presence in (or near enough to) the place where the good or service must be delivered to take up all of the current slack in the labor market, including small businesses in low-income areas. But even if you take that at face value, and a lot of smart people are dubious about that, this only works if this entire enterprise lifts, if not all boats, the boats at the lower end of the spectrum. A small business in a low-income area, in order to succeed, has to be in an environment where the low incomes of the residents are not so low that they're unwilling or unable to buy whatever's on offer.

For an individual low wage worker, the point of a $12 an hour wage with $3 pitched in by taxpayers or a $15 an hour minimum is to raise that worker's income to the point, where, hopefully, they can contribute to the overall economic health of their area without risking destitution if something goes a bit sideways on them. As production of goods and services becomes more efficient, the number of people needed to produce the necessities decreases. Therefore, more and more people rely on the ability to produce discretionary items, whether you call them simply non-essentials or label them as luxuries. Either way, people have a choice as to whether or not they're going to buy them. Poverty creates a problem in that it restricts the ability of people to make discretionary purchases, because, generally speaking, very wealthy people don't spend as much of their available wealth on these things. As Nick Hanuer pointed out, he might have 1,000 times more money than the average person, but he doesn't spend 1,000 times more on cars.

You can make the point that the wealthy assist everyone with their investments, but they often want returns on those investments that are rather much higher than, say, the rate of inflation. And to the degree that the rate of inflation measures the growth of the money supply when compared against the availability of goods and services, one can legitimately question whether or not those returns are simply extracting wealth from the society as a whole.

A high minimum wage is designed to be a form of wealth transfer from the capital to labor. The fact that it tends to increase unemployment is indicative of the fact that wealthy people can choose to forgo investing when the payoff is not to their liking, because they face little consequence for doing so. In the late 1800's the lack of a social safety net meant that if an employer decided that the return on investment wasn't to their liking, it was the workers who faced hardship. And that lead them to compete with each other to raise the employers returns. Minimum wages are designed to do away with that.

Now, I understand that a lot of people will tell me that I'm incorrect about this, but it seems to me that at some point, there will have to be a better return on labor, as opposed to capital, for the system to thrive in the long term. And that means there have to be more situations were capital can't simply walk away from a deal, or insist that labor share their pieces of the pie more evenly. I'm not one of those "eat the rich" types, because I have no problem with people being wealthy. But I do understand that an unchecked imbalance leads to problems like unemployment.

Professor Glaeser notes: "While droughts and pestilence often threatened disaster, joblessness was no part of then-rural America. If you didn’t work, you starved, and there was always another patch of land to hoe and seed. Unemployment arrived only when workers moved to cities." Note that for this to be true, it has to be due to cities being more efficient than rural areas, as the assumption is that urban areas could support non-workers that rural areas could not. The reason, however, why there was always another patch of land to hoe and seed was that you could always move somewhere that other White settlers had yet to set up shop, drive any natives from the land, and take it for your own. Had settlement been more confined, however, it's entirely possible that there wouldn't have been another convenient patch of land to take over. And in that situation, you have what we have now, rural employment due to the unavailability of "free" land for subsistence agriculture. Which, one may point out, was typically the primary driver of movement to cities. Unemployment didn't arrive when workers went to cities - many workers simply moved it with them and it accumulated in cities when some number of them were unable to leave it behind, because going back to a rural area where there was no means of supporting oneself made little sense.

Unemployment is a result of their being more people than are needed to do the work of supplying the available demand for goods and services, whether that's due to low aggregate demand on the consumption side, misinvestment on the labor side or some mixture of the two (which are the same thing, really). The way one combats unemployment is to redress that imbalance. And there are a lot of ways of doing it. Personally, I think that the returns on labor and capital have to be more equal than they are now, but that's just me. And while I don't know that we can effectively legislate that balancing (I think we can't), I'm pretty sure that pushing in the other direction won't be helpful, either.

Contradiction

I was having a discussion with a person who was telling me about how the marginalized shouldn't be viewed as having lesser value than any other person. My response was: "But that's why they're considered marginalized, isn't it?"

In the end, it was a matter of understanding and definition. I'm not one for the idea of intrinsic worth - for me, value is determined subjectively, by other people, and we value some people (or what they can do for us, anyway) more than we value others.

But there was a part of me that wondered if it wasn't words like "marginalized" and "powerless" that were the issue, because they informed people of what other people thought.

The Obvious Argument

When I was somewhere in my pre-teens, my father and I were talking, and he'd asked me about some or another thing that I'd said, and I replied, "Dad, it's obvious."

To which my father replied, "Obvious, Aaron, is something that's so crystal-clear that you are the only person who sees it." Of course, he was right about this, and as I've grown older (I'm now older than my father was when we had that conversation), I've come to appreciate the wisdom of that statement more and more.

And so I tend to be disappointed when people trot out "obvious" in social and/or political debates arguments. (This includes religion.) Mainly because it's usually deployed when the person speaking, for whatever reason, has no intention of supporting the argument, point or fact that they've just uttered. The really bummer for me, however, is when "obvious" is used to close off the conversation. In this context, one can imagine connotation of "obvious" being self-evident not only to the degree that no proof is necessary, but to the degree that even requesting proof is a sign that one lacks the intellect, discernment and/or good intent to accept any proof that would be offered; therefore, none will be.

And sure, sometimes, this is merely a smokescreen to cover the fact that someone has made a statement of faith, or born of their worldview, and they've never actually looked into it deeply enough to know, or be able to articulate supporting evidence. Accusing the other of being too stupid, gullible or false-hearted to accept proof can be a useful, if insulting, way of hiding ignorance. But it can also simply be a way of casting the other person as too "lesser" to be bothered with. And that's something that our discourse already has enough of.

Intoxicity

Firefox has this functionality called Pocket, which (apparently randomly) suggests articles for you. When I fired up my long-neglected laptop this morning and launched the browser, it was ready with a link to an article called "Stop Giving Toxic People Your Time." Thinking (incorrectly) it was actually something I'd read before, I clicked over to it. I realized my error the moment I saw the datestamp, but what the heck, I had time.

I didn't make it far. Early in the piece the author notes:

We say that others make us feel that way. But that’s false. You decide how you feel about the things that happen in your life.

Events can’t harm us. Our perception of an event harms us. That’s one of the most important ideas of Stoic philosophy.

In other words, you decide what meaning you give to the things that happen in your life. If your friend tells lies about you behind your back, and you get upset, that’s because you decided to get upset.

I could hear the alarm bells. Not because I essentially disagree with what the author was saying. But because of how they were saying it.

I'm a firm believer in taking responsibility for one's feelings and emotions. And that means understanding that other people do not genuinely control them. And in that sense, the idea that other do not make us feel certain ways is entirely correct. If a friend tells someone else a damaging falsehood about me, my reaction to that is not their doing. It's mine, and I should own it, if for no other reason that avoiding self-talk that posits myself as being at the mercy of others helps me to feel more in control and able to manage my life. But I also realize that my perception of, and reaction to events is not a simple matter of conscious choice in the moment.

It's like seeing a dark shape looming up in front of you when you weren't expecting it. The perception of possible danger and the fight or flight response to it is a part of us, not the coat that we'd forgotten that we'd hung on the coat track last night. And because those things are part of us, we can control them. But just in the same way that we learned some or all of our response to that situation, and that learning took time, we have to learn different responses, and that learning also takes time. It may also never be 100% effective. A person can practice their powers of perception and observation all they want, but if they're color-blind, no amount of practice will change that. This is where an understanding of the concepts of a Fixed Mindset and a Growth Mindset are very useful. In the world of corporate buzzwords, they've become the new Goofus and Gallant, but in reality, both are useful - the trick is knowing which one applies in any given circumstance. And that's something that business types and self-help gurus alike can miss in their desire to boil things down to simple and understandable bites.

The article goes on to say:

The great Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, said this in his Manual For Living:

“Avoid fraternizing with people who don’t share your values. Prolonged association with those with false ideas can only tarnish your thinking.”

It’s something I truly live by. I’ve seen others destroy people’s lives too often to take this idea carelessly.

And I bet that you’ve had your share of, for lack of a better term, “toxic” people in your life.

And that's when I decided that I'd had enough.

Now, I'm not familiar with Epictetus - this was the first I'd heard of him. And so I don't really know what his philosophy is like. So I'm not going to pass judgement on it. I will take exception however, to the way it's been deployed here. I suspect that the apparent equivalence of "people who don't share your values" and "those with false ideas" is ephemeral in that a continued and deeper reading of Epictetus' Manual For Living would provide some way of understanding which ideas are false and which are not. But in the context of "Stop Giving Toxic People Your Time," a difference in values (and the author goes on to say "I think that less than 1% of the population has values.") becomes how one determines if someone else is toxic, and a danger.

But for me, if you're going to take those twenty-one words as something to live by, you have to understand that this: "Prolonged association with you and your false ideas can only tarnish their thinking," is just as likely to be true. In other words, if a lack of shared values equals toxicity, then that toxicity flows both ways.

Not trusting my immediate emotional response to be an accurate one, I read a little farther, but didn't see a nod to what I considered an important point - that our understanding of the world is subjective.

I'll freely admit to not having values. After all, I said it myself, people don't have values or principles, they have interests. The appearance of values is little more than understanding, articulating and pursuing our interests in ways that don't saddle others with the costs, if they haven't expressed a willingness to bear them. But it's worth bearing in mind that this isn't an objective statement. The reality of pursuing one's on interests without shifting the costs is not something that can be scientifically determined. It all depends on how we understand the world around us.

And that understanding of the world around us is not itself objective. I currently live in the suburbs of Seattle, but I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. And "Seattle cold" and "Chicago cold" are not the same. So when the people I know who grew up here describe the weather as "cold," I tend to chuckle. But I also realize that this isn't a defect on their part; they don't have the same lived experience I do. Just as I have it on pretty good authority that "Chicago cold" and "Anchorage cold" are not the same. I have no idea how I would deal with "Anchorage cold." But seeing how people from Anchorage deal with "Seattle cold," I suspect that I'd be in for a kicking if I tried it unprepared.

My personal understanding of myself as a person without values has come from a desire to avoid making value judgements about how others live their lives. Which I get is a problem for some people. But that's their problem, and not mine. My interests tell me that I'm better off understanding things in terms of adaptive/maladaptive, legal/illegal or safe/risky than good/bad or value-driven/valueless. Because I like people, and defining them as "toxic" while avoiding the label for myself, flies in the face of that.

Is One Always the Loneliest Number?

So I was listening to NPR's Hidden Brain podcast on how American ideas of masculinity make men lonely, and one of the lonely men in question made an interesting point.

Host Shankar Vedantam sets up the point with this observation:

Paul's childhood offered a model of a close-knit community. His life in his 40s was nothing like that model. Looking back, Paul says he ignored the warning signs that his social world was shrinking.

Guest Paul Kugelman then finishes the point thus:

I really don't think I dealt with it, candidly. I think I viewed it as sort of a circumstance rather than a problem. It was kind of like gravity. But there was also a part of me that realized I was alone.

It was thought-provoking in the realization that I tend to look at life the same way. Being a grown man, and a single one at that, intimate friendships are off-limits. But, as Mr. Kugelman did, I view it as a circumstance, rather than a problem. It's simply something that one deals with and adapts to. Of course the thing about adaptation is that people do so with varying degrees of willingness and success.

Being an ineligible bachelor, and a Black person whose world is overwhelmingly White, I adapted to being alone with a certain level of enthusiasm. While Mr. Kugelman was somewhat unsatisfied with the fact that at the end of the day, it was just him, I've come to find that liberating. Not that I consider myself an introvert - I tend to prefer a certain level of social interaction, and take steps to maintain the same. But I relish having time when it's just me, and I don't have to wear the roles that I'm expected to around other people.

The point of the podcast, though, is that I shouldn't view the world this way, because it's bad to be alone. Because being alone comes with: Worse health outcomes. Heart disease. Greater stress. Accelerated age-related problems. And, occasionally, hugging inanimate objects. And, in the service of not being completely flippant about this, I suppose that I have to include suicide on the list, as well. And so it's something to be avoided. Something best thought of as a problem, rather than a sort of circumstance.

But what if the issue isn't being alone, but how well one adapts to it? Of course, I realize that I have a dog in this fight. After all, I come home to an empty apartment day after day. And while in my younger days, people telling me that it was more difficult to live a healthy life as a singleton would have been greeted with "Watch me," I'm now a lot less oppositional about these things. I still think that I'll manage just fine, thank you very much, but part of that has to be the idea that I'm okay with being alone, and because I like being single, I've more willingly adapted to that situation.

And so I'm curious about that. I'd done a quick Google search, to see if the topic was being studied, and I was somewhat surprised to see that most of the results dealt with how to recover from losing a spouse. There was one that dealt with the topic as a life choice, but it was more about being an introvert, rather than active adaptation to a life spent by oneself. I'm not a big internet researcher, so I'm unlikely to spend a lot of time trying to track this down, but it will be interesting to learn. Perhaps I'll get around to asking Mr. Vedantam.