Work for post-materialists

By W.W. | IOWA CITY

THE Atlantic, with the support of McKinsey & Company, has put together a forum on the question: "What's the single best thing Washington can do to jump-start job creation?" There are some good answers. I agree with Ryan Avent, my colleague at Free Exchange, and Matthew Yglesias that monetary policy that takes the textbooks seriously would help. Indeed, I think Mr Yglesias' proposal that the Fed target a 3-4% rate of inflation is indeed the single best thing Washington can do to create jobs today. Start-up visas for foreign entrepreneurs and automatic visas for foreign science and engineering grad students are great ideas, but these policies won't generate innovation and jobs immediately. If we're worried about the very real possibility that the long-term unemployed will drop out of the labour market altogether, we need quick-acting policy. I think Megan McArdle's suggestion would nicely complement the aggregate demand boost the monetary authority's commitment to a higher inflation target would deliver:

One suggestion is to give [employers] direct incentives to choose the long-term unemployed over those who are already in work, or out of work for only a short time. How? We could exempt new hires from both the employee and the employer sides of the payroll tax, one month for every month that they were unemployed. The result is a direct wage subsidy of more than 10%. But it is a time-limited subsidy, and one carefully targeted to those who need it the most. By the time the tax relief expires, these workers will have been reintegrated into the labor force. This will cost the government something of course—but not nearly as much as supporting them on welfare, disability, or early retirement—or the prison system.

I think this is definitely on the right track.

Still, there's something that bothers me slightly about this whole "job creation" discussion. The implicit idea seems to be that policy should aim to increase employer demand for employees. But it occurs to me that perhaps some of the long-term unemployed want remunerative work, but are a bit sick of "employment". Let me irresponsibly generalise from my own case, acknowledging up front that there is no significant problem of unemployment for individuals with graduate degrees. That said, I have the sense that my own experience reflects a significant shift in the zeitgeist. When I was "laid off" last summer, I immediately sought work, but I have become increasingly averse to the idea of once again becoming a permanent salaried or wage-earning employee. I suspect I'm not alone.

David Ellerman, one of my favourite challenging thinkers, argues that the employer-employee relationship is more like the master-slave relationship than we are inclined to believe. I know this sounds a little crazy, and I don't entirely buy his argument. But take a look; he's on to something. Philosophical questions of self-ownership and the alienability of labour aside, I am convinced that autonomy is profoundly important to most of us, and that the sort of self-rental involved in the employment relation is regularly experienced as a lamentable loss of autonomy, if not humiliating subjection. I think a lot of us would rather not work for somebody else. It's not necessarily that we're burgeoning entrepreneurs eager to start small businesses. It just sucks to have a boss. And I think many young people are staying in college or heading to grad school not so much to improve their job prospects later, but to postpone entering into an arrangement in which "enough money is made out of you to buy an automobile for some other fellow's son", in F. Scott Fitzgerald's words.

In an American Interest essay on income inequality, Tyler Cowen broached the subject of the "threshold earner":

A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure—whether spending time with friends and family, walking in the woods and so on. Luck aside, that person's income will never rise much above the threshold.

This is me. I don't want to maximise income. I want to maximise autonomy and time for unremunerative but satisfying creative work. Reihan Salam has written provocatively on the subject of threshold earners, in addition to introducing me to David Roberts' related idea of "the medium chill". Mr Roberts says he and his wife prefer a "good enough" medium-chill lifestyle to the hot and harried rat race:

We have one car, a battered old minivan with a large dent on one side where you have to bang it with your hip to make the door shut. Our boys go to public schools. Our jobs pay enough to support our lifestyle, mostly anyway. If we wanted, we could both do the “next thing” on our respective career paths. She could move to a bigger company. I could freelance more, angle to write for bigger publications, write a book, hire a publicist, whatever. We could try to make more money. Then we could fix the water pressure in our shower, redo the back patio, get a second car, or hell, buy a bigger house closer in to town. Maybe get the kids in private schools. All that stuff people with more money than us do.

But … meh. It's not that we don't think about those things. The water pressure thing drives me batty. Fact is, we just don't want to work that hard!

This is me, too. Now, again, I don't think the ranks of the long-term unemployed are teeming with highly-educated households that have forsaken regular employment for threshold earning and the medium chill. Still, as Ronald Inglehart has documented, the achievement of high levels of widespread material well-being has precipitated a momentous shift toward "post-materialist" values across the entire developed world. Having secured a relatively comfortable standard of living, we have come to worry less about the stuff we need to get by and more about the pursuit of self-realisation, meaning in life, justice in society, and harmony with the natural world. It could be that an economic shock like the one we've recently suffered will lead to a resurgence of the sort of economic insecurity behind our grandparents' comparatively materialist values. But it could also be that our culture's transition to post-materialism has been sufficiently thorough to have altered how even relatively low-skilled workers are inclined to respond to unemployment.

Laid-off grocery store clerks and construction workers may not have bought into self-consciously post-materialist lifestyle norms, but it's not unlikely that they too have come to prize autonomy and dignity more highly than previous generations, and consequently have become less tolerant of tedious, meaningless and demeaning work. Whatever our level of education, if unemployment benefits and odd jobs add up to enough to keep us above a socially acceptable material threshold, we will not be in a hurry to accept any available employment, no matter how unpleasant or unsuitable.

So, yeah, I'd like to see wage subsidies and a 4% inflation target. But I'd also like to see a shift away from economic policy that pushes us so insistently into the "employee" role. What does the government call you if you are working but not on somebody's payroll with social security and Medicare taxes automatically deducted from your wages? Self-employed! You must work for somebody, even if it's yourself. But I don't want to be a tiny business that hires me. I don't want to be my own boss. I don't want to be a boss at all, or to have one. I just want to work and get paid for it, on terms agreeable to the parties involved.

We need to stimulate the prospects for employment, but we also need to make it easier for people to just work in ways that may not show up in the official unemployment stats. You can think of this as tearing down barriers to "self-employment", if you must. Clearly, decoupling health benefits from employment would help a lot. Less obviously, but at least as importantly, we need to eliminate the insane patchwork of regulations that keep folks from legally cutting hair for money in a kitchen, or legally making a few bucks every now and then taxiing people around town in a 1988 Ford Escort. De-formalising and de-bureaucratising labour certainly makes it harder for government to track who has paid what to whom, who owes how much in various taxes, and so forth. But it would be truly pathetic if the legal/economic organisation of our society was optimised for government surveillance and tax collection and not for the exercise of autonomy in pursuit of a meaningful life.

(Photo credit: AFP)