As you may have heard, the Congressional Budget Office recently concluded that, as a result of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the American people will be doing less work in five years than they otherwise would have, by about the equivalent of two million full-time jobs. Republicans initially jumped on this line to attack ObamaCare as a "job killer." The whole world (including CBO itself, in about as scathing terms as it ever uses) spent a couple of days hammering them for this and explaining why it was wrong. Basically the point is that the ACA would not reduce the demand for labor, but rather the supply of it: workers would collectively decide to work somewhat less, voluntarily. That's not job-killing, which is when someone gets kicked out of a job they'd like to continue having. The reason the ACA will reduce the supply of labor is that it will make the prospects of not having a job slightly less unattractive, because you'll still be able to get health insurance without being subjected to the nightmare that was the pre-ObamaCare individual market. It will also significantly reduce "job lock," the phenomenon where people would stay in a job they'd really prefer to leave, maybe for another job or maybe for no job at all, because they'd suffer discontinuity in their health insurance. So, leaving your job or working less becomes less scary, and people will do more of it, and will therefore work less.
Republicans are still attacking, because, well, that's what they're there for. Their new critique is essentially a translation of the old arguments against welfare, that it will create dependency on the government, result in people living on the dole, etc. It's the old "makers vs. takers" thing, also known as the 47% controversy. For various reasons, as explained here by Jonathan Chait, this criticism makes a lot less sense when applied to the ACA than it did when applied to welfare programs in the mid-90s, because of the details of program design. But hey, these are Republicans we're talking about, they can't be bothered with the fact that program details make their attack on Obama invalid. So they keep attacking. Paul Ryan, for instance, said the following:
"Inducing a person not to work who is on the low-income scale, not to get on the ladder of life, to begin working, getting the dignity of work, getting more opportunities, rising their income, joining the middle class, this means fewer people will do that."Krugman's response is that the kind of massive inequality in wealth and income we see in modern capitalist society is extremely destructive of the dignity of work. Republicans, if they believe anything, believe we shouldn't really be doing anything to counter rising inequality; thus, it's hard to take their protestations about the dignity of work too seriously.
Kevin Drum looked at Krugman's post and said that, while he basically just agreed with all of the points he was making against the Republicans, but said he found it generally troubling whenever liberals said things that sounded, even accidentally, like they disparaged the dignity of work. My first post would've been an example of that, I think. So I want to say some things about the dignity of work and how it should affect policy considerations, clarifying my earlier remarks and using the latest Republican ObamaCare attack as an instructive example.
First things first: work has dignity. Well, much work has dignity for many people most of the time. People doing work that isn't just unpleasant but that is in fact undignified are in a terrible situation, and every reasonable person should want to help them escape it, but most people do get that sense of satisfaction and accomplishment from the knowledge that they're doing something productive and being fairly compensated for it, even or perhaps especially if the work they're doing is itself unpleasant. That's great! It's particularly great given that society probably can't do without a fair amount of unpleasant work being done by humans, at least until we get mass-produced functional androids. We should pay those people well, but it's also good if they get subjective satisfaction out of doing socially necessary but personally unpleasant things.
In terms of the impact of this fact on policy, though, I think it is vitally important to separate out the demand side and the supply side of the labor market. (Keep in mind that the identities of suppliers and demanders are flipped in the labor market: ordinary people are the suppliers, while firms doing the hiring are the demanders.) The dignitary quality of work is just another reason that a tight labor market is a social obligation. As Kevin Drum's post mentions, people who lose a job suffer more than just the deprivation of money, even though they are theoretically "compensated" for their lack of money with a gain of free time. They've lost the dignity that comes from gainful, productive employment, and that's not necessarily a harm that direct government assistance can really deal with, unlike the lack of money. There are a ton of reasons to think that a prolonged period of inadequate aggregate demand resulting in significant involuntary unemployment, especially long-term unemployment, is one of the worst things short of war or catastrophic natural disaster that can befall a society; this is one of those reasons.
On the supply side, though, the implications are not so clear. Does the fact that people get this psychological benefit from being employed mean that we should, in various other more tangible ways, work to maximize the incentives people have to do work? As a threshold issue it is worth noting that most of the reduction in work caused by the ACA will take the form of people working fewer hours, not fewer people doing work, and dignitary concerns probably just aren't at play there: I doubt there's much extra dignity in having a 50-hour workweek instead of a 40-hour one, or even a 30-hour one. (Indeed, the kind of 80-hour workweek that results from needing to have two jobs probably reduces the dignity, as it sends the message that society doesn't think the work you're doing in either one of your jobs individually is good enough to justify allowing you to live a decent life.)
So let's just assume we're in a more general context, evaluating public policy that would somehow reduce the marginal non-dignitary benefits to being employed as such. What's wrong with such a policy?
As Paul Krugman said in an earlier post, the simple economics suggest it's not obvious that we care how much work other people are doing. Work produces value, but under the Thirteenth Amendment we generally repay that work with something of value, typically a blend of money and health care. Econ 101 says that, if competition and markets are working the way they should, the value of the work should equal the value of the compensation. That means that, for some worker W, the welfare of (society - W) is not affected by how much work W does. If W decides to do more work at a fair wage, they will both contribute more to the rest of society and take more from the rest of society. Now, because society gets to tax the stuff that W is taking from it, the equivalence isn't complete. So yeah, we have some reason to want other people to be working more, basically because they contribute to the tax base. Some selfish reason, that is.
Invoking dignity, however, as Paul Ryan did, seems to suggest a desire to make other people do work for their own good. But in general we tend to let people pursue their own good in their own way. We have certain exceptions, areas where the case for paternalistic public policy seems particularly strong, and people disagree about the extent of those exceptions. It's kind of a premise of American society, though, that the general principle is individual freedom to pursue one's own happiness. So if W decides that, in fact, the marginal benefit of having a job, salary, benefits, dignity, whatever, aren't enough to outweigh the marginal costs of having a job, there's a presumption against having society try to second-guess him. And conservatives, of course, wouldn't advocate any sort of formal coercion; they just want public policy to set the incentives such that as few people as possible will make that choice. In principle you could do that by maximizing the benefits that come from work, but in practice the "induce people to want to work" agenda is about making not working as unattractive as possible. The more we make it possible to live a decent life without holding a paying job, the more people will choose not to work, and not only will this somewhat reduce the simple economic well-being of the rest of society, but, conservatives sometimes seem to say, we'll be robbing those people of their dignity.
But... who are we to tell those people what their sense of dignity should demand of them? We are talking about voluntary unemployment, by stipulation since I covered involuntary unemployment above. Voluntary unemployment is, y'know, voluntary. Presumably in making the decision whether or not to pursue voluntary unemployment, people do a reasonably good job of weighing the dignitary gains of work. Maybe some of them can't find jobs that feel very dignified. Maybe some of them just don't get much of that sense of dignity from working. Maybe some of them just have some compelling reason to want not to be working, a young child or something. The fact that work is dignifying, to many people at least, presumably means that fewer people will choose voluntary unemployment than would otherwise, which is among other things incredibly convenient from the selfish perspective outlined above. But there's no obvious reason to think that people systemically undervalue their own dignity, and would be wont to choose voluntary unemployment, were that option made relatively liveable, even though they'd actually be better off working once you take dignity into account. Dignity, then, would seem to be a purely neutral factor in the calculus around how public policy should set the incentives around voluntary unemployment: however we set the tangible economic incentives, the fact of dignity will keep voluntary unemployment somewhat lower than it would otherwise be, and presumably people will end up making the best choices for themselves.
But there's Paul Ryan, talkin' about the dignity of work as a reason to make it less attractive not to be working. And this is where, I think, the dignity language starts to trouble me. Because there's kind of an assertion in Ryan's comments that society should get to override an individual's decision that the dignity of work isn't as important to them as something else. If someone isn't particularly interested in the dignity of work, well, Paul Ryan says tough. It'll be good for you anyway, so I'm not really hurting you if I take away your government benefits and make you that much more desperate for paid work. There's this sense that coercion can be justified as a way of insisting upon someone else's dignity, that I somehow have the right to force you to act in a dignified way, under my view of dignity.
This reminds me of a discussion in Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty." Berlin outlined the distinction between "negative" liberty, basically the right to be let alone, and "positive" liberty, basically the right to self-determination. They seem kind of similar at their origin-points, but naturally wander off in very different directions. In particular, Berlin says, positive liberty has proven unfortunately susceptible to a certain perverse logical chain. True liberty, an old line of thinking goes, consists in following your "higher" desires rather than your "lower" or more base impulses. And it's not very long before we start saying that what seem like incredibly oppressive laws are in fact freeing us from our own low selves, forcing us to act in a higher and more dignified way. Combine that with the common group orientation of positive liberty and we get something very dangerous: that the dignity of the society requires the oppression of its least-dignified members. Like, say, Jews in Nazi Germany.
NOTE: I am not saying that Paul Ryan's comments about the dignity of work are like the Holocaust. Mostly I'm just reciting Berlin's argument. It is also worth noting that this is very much an abuse of the ideal of positive liberty. Actual positive liberty is anathema to dictatorship, oppression, totalitarianism, fascism, etc. But there's something in the rhetoric of positive liberty that's awfully susceptible to this kind of abuse. This is part of why I don't like the continental European focus on dignity as the main value behind constitutional individual rights. It's too easy for dignity to become a prescriptivist concept, where society gets to decide what is and isn't dignified, and then what becomes of the person who wants to act in a way commonly considered undignified? I don't necessarily think European democracies go very far down that slope (their rejection of the American approach to flag burning would be one of the main examples, I think), but the rhetoric worries me.
And I think what Paul Ryan is doing is basically exactly that kind of abuse of positive liberty. He wants to make people as desperate as possible to find work, because he supports the capitalists and the capitalists want a large supply of cheap, readily available labor. They have done since there started being capitalists. In fact, the early capitalists had an explicit political project of destroying any form of subsistence English peasants might have other than paid labor, explicitly to coerce as many people as possible to come work for them on the cheap. Jeremy Bentham, in fact, said that hunger was the most humane way of getting people to work in the factories. (It's pretty much my least favorite thing of Bentham's.) Since the New Deal we've done a lot to ameliorate the effects of that project, making it so that people don't actually starve when they're out of work. Paul Ryan wants to undo that as much as possible, basically for the same reasons that Bentham and his brethren began the project.
And he uses the language of dignity to disguise this fact, to say that he's not really trying to coerce us because he's just bringing us to the dignity of work. I'm not much of a fan of false consciousness arguments and I don't think, for instance, that the modern sense of dignity from work is somehow illegitimate because it may be in part a deliberate creation of those same early capitalists designed to trick people into providing their labor. It might kind of be false consciousness, in origin at least, but the statute of limitations has long since passed on objecting to it; in the here and now, many people genuinely and spontaneously have those feelings. But what Paul Ryan is trying to do, implicitly, is essentially leverage that sense of dignity as a more active false consciousness that will justify his project of turning the federal government more and more into a tool business can use to force people into exploitative jobs.
The dignitary aspects of work are incredibly important. By making work more worthwhile for many people, they make all of society better off. And because you lose that sense of dignity when you can't find work, they make it that much more important for society to provide a tight labor market, though it should be doing that anyway. But nothing about the dignity of work should necessarily change how we as a society try to set the incentives around the choice whether or not to work, and attempts by conservatives like Paul Ryan to invoke it in that debate are a fairly classical twisting of the rhetoric of positive liberty into an apologetic for oppression. Getting back around to my original point, liberals should be very wary of collaborating in that effort. Not because, as Kevin Drum fears, we don't respect the dignity of work, but precisely because we should respect it, we should be especially vigilant against its abuse.
No comments:
Post a Comment