Social Security: Fixed!
As an admirer of the great Megan McArdle I definitely want to come back to the post where she responded to my earlier post on democracy and capitalism, but it’ll have to wait.
Before that I want to address this great post where she explains that the various pensions systems are basically, equally unsustainable:
Everyone is very good at picking out the flaws in the pension systems they don’t like. Basically, there are three entities who can save for your future: You, Some company, The government
but
There is no entity that is capable of ensuring that everyone can consume a serene twenty or thirty years of leisure at the end of their lives.
But, there’s an easy fix.
Here’s my modest proposal for Social Security: abolish it.
Retirement is one of these social institutions that most people can’t imagine society doing without and that I firmly believe should be simply abolished.
By the way, this isn’t some free-market crank thing. It’s not about the government and government spending. I would be equally (ok, perhaps slightly less) uncomfortable with a fully privatized pensions system.
The reason why I am against retirement is basically as a public health issue.
Old age is a period of long, gradual, inevitable decay, but I think it is self-evident that the more active you are, the more these effects are postponed and mitigated. I don’t have many statistics to quote on this but I think it’s out there and this is one of the cases where anecdotal evidence convinces me. I think we all know at least one elderly person whom, once settled into retirement, has gradually but markedly become less alert, in the broadest meaning of the word. Any doctor will tell you that the best way to postpone the effects of aging is to remain active.
Of course one can do that with hobbies but, again, I think we know retired people who intended to do plenty of things once they retired but instead pretty much opted for staying at home and lounging around. And while I have no doubt that doing the NYT crossword puzzle is great for your brain, I don’t think a hobby can replace the constraints of work when it comes to jogging your brain. There are counterexamples of course, great people for whom retirement is a tremendous opportunity to travel, explore, try new things, and these people are awesome, but I’m pretty convinced they’re a small minority. For most people retirement is slow motion implosion.
This is a tremendous waste, both for society at large and for the people concerned.
Retirement is a dated institution based on ancient, obsolete premises that will be replaced by new ones:
Old premise: lifespans are short and there will always be many more workers to support the pensioners. New premise: (this one is obvious) lifespans are only getting longer and there is little way to predict how/if future generations will be able to support growing ranks of pensioners. Postponing the retirement age and/or reducing benefits, on top of being more dishonest than simply switching to a new paradigm, only addresses these structural flaws on a short-term basis.
Old premise: work sucks, and after decades of toil, one has “earned the right” to get paid to do nothing. New premise: work is self-defined, self-led and empowering. Small-scale and global-reach entrepreneurship is a reality and this will make work a joy rather than a painful necessity.
Old premise: most work out there is physically taxing, shortens our lifespans, and can’t be performed well after a certain age. New premise: most work out there is/will increasingly be intellectually engaging, will lengthen our lifespans, and can be performed on a part-time and/or at-home basis.
Old premise: the baby-boomers own the world, and we will shower ourselves with privileges on our grandchildren’s dime. New premise: the grandchildren are coming, and we believe in solidarity but also in earning your way.
The concept of retirement rests on assumptions about the nature of work and life that are less and less true, and will soon no longer be true at all. Most people in the commentariat favor postponing the retirement age and/or reducing benefits to “save” pensions systems, but I believe this is only a short-term fix and, more importantly, is dishonest, since it keeps essentially dangling the carrot of retirement in front of our eyes even though it is an outdated, patronizing concept.
Two things I want to add as an answer to potential objections:
1- No, I don’t want to force people to work for their entire lives. (I want people to choose to work for their entire lives.) Today, many people can and do save to go on extended sabbaticals and take time off work, and having this kind of “gap” on one’s resume (here’s another obsolete concept) is less and less viewed as a bad thing, justifiably.
2- Yes, some old people are just unable to work due to age and/or disease. However, Megan has the answer here:
Perhaps instead of looking for a magic system, we could seek a more flexible and ad-hoc approach—abolishing state pensions, say, and rolling them into a more generous disability benefit.
Yep. Of course society should support those who can’t work, but I don’t see why old people should be a separate category within those — except to create a discriminatory, patronizing category for them.
Everyone repeat after me: retirement is soma.
EDIT: TAS commenters make me better. Two things.
When I make grand pronouncements about how work is going to be radically different in the 21st century you should read this, this and this to see where I’m coming from. You may disagree, but from where I stand (or sit, rather) it’s obvious we’re at the start of a large scale economic shift that will transform the nature of work and make us more productive, empowered and happy.
Also, the reason I’m so one-sided against retirement is that the reality of retirement today is having your kids plop you off in a retirement home where the mind rots to the lowest common denominator of the place and one awaits death. The only way to prevent this is for the elderly to maintain their independence and stay enmeshed into social life as much as possible. If we’re going to stick to a nuclear (fissile or not) family where the elderly generations are not kept and cared for in the family home the only way to keep the elderly truly enmeshed into social life is through actual productive work.
I’ll meet you halfway: raise the age.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 17, 12:29 PM · #
There are many things that alienate me about arch-capitalists, but none is more powerful than your need to constantly tell the people who are suffering through work that they aren’t suffering and they should shut up about it. Work, for very many people, is not empowering, and its not actualizing, and its not proud or dignified. It’s demeaning and backbreaking and it gradually wears the life out of them. That’s just true. It’s not some leftist pose or some conspiracy theory. There are millions of people, millions, who feel the joy drained out of them by being coerced into work they hate to do.
And it is always coercive: to say that someone who has to choose between working and starving is really making a free choice is an absurdity. Libertarians gleefully insist that the workers of the world trade the coercion of government for the coercion of the boss and act as though there’s some sort of material difference. Not that many of the libertarians arguing actually have to work in the conditions that they analogize to some sort of self-sufficient fantasy.
Don’t take my word for it. Consult the great mass of American or international worker’s literature. There’s a reason people fight for caps on hours per week, the weekend, paid vacations and set retirement ages. It’s not some leftist artifice but an acknowledgment of the gradual degradation of menial work. Every minute spent at work is a minute not living actual life. Now I’m not agitating to upend the system but I have a great deal of resentment for anyone who tells people that not only do they have to punch a clock and work a job they hate, they have to love it, too.
The first half of the 20th century was filled with advancements for workers that improved their quality of life. Pensions made peoples lives better. So did unions. So did higher wages. So did tons of advancements that libertarians have insisted all have to be sacrificed in the name of progress, and all with the tiring rhetorical tactic of the Serious. Well, wages in this country have been flatlined for years, while the average worker has worked far more hours to maintain that flatlining wage, and the quality of life for the average worker, shockingly, has gone down. Sorry, I don’t think any more concessions to “progress”— you know, the free-market fantasyland vision that has driven us to the edge of economic apocalypse— are necessary.
— Freddie · Apr 17, 12:45 PM · #
As long as increased disability is included with what you are calling for I would be ok with it. But I have a grandfather who is now in his late 70s, but had early onset Alzheimers starting in his late 50s. He continued to work long past where he should have and because he didn’t do a good job planning for retirement (he was a pastor of a lot of small churches that didn’t pay him well and most didn’t provide any retirement). He has been saved only by the fact that he was a veteran and got medical care through the VA. He was uninsurable after he showed signs of Alzheimers. My grandmother has been living ok only because of the generosity of her children and a recent move into low income senior housing. She is only paying $40 a month to illustrate her income.
My great grandfather died of cancer but had Alzheimers for more than 2 decades. My grandfather will die after living with Alzheimers for at least 2 decades. I am very concerned that my mother (in her early 50s) is showing early signs.
Something needs to be done. What it will be will not be easy for many. I am all for a sustainable system. But the new system needs to take into account those need care earlier than 70.
— Adam S · Apr 17, 01:02 PM · #
Tony:
Ha! Not enough! I’m a radical!
Freddie:
This is the kind of reaction I was expecting. I realize that work sucks for many people. But I also think it won’t stay that way for long. Telemarketing sucks, but it sucks less than building the pyramids. Work has been getting less-sucky for a long time. And I really believe that we will see a radical transformation of work over the 21st century.
Which is why the rhetoric about all the hard battles fought for social rights in the 20th century leave me cold. Not because I think that those rights aren’t good and weren’t good when they were there, but because they represent a mindset of the PAST for jobs of the PAST.
And people who complain about “the gradual degradation of menial work” make me think of this.
— PEG · Apr 17, 01:06 PM · #
Adam S:
I’m sorry to hear about your family.
Absolutely agree. Perhaps I should have made it clearer in my original post that what getting rid of retirement would help would be to take into account disability at all ages as opposed to lumping old people into the same category, which is unfair and inefficient.
— PEG · Apr 17, 01:17 PM · #
Ha! Not enough! I’m a radical!
I am a Radical Moderate™.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 17, 01:18 PM · #
“ Sorry, I don’t think any more concessions to “progress”— you know, the free-market fantasyland vision that has driven us to the edge of economic apocalypse— are necessary.”
Freddie, are you familiar with the genesis of, and controversy surrounding the Oregon Health Plan of the early 90s? Especially who opposed the plan and on what grounds?
— Tony Comstock · Apr 17, 02:34 PM · #
Um, you did notice McCardle’s articles regarding the difficulty of people over 40 (or 50, I can’t recall) getting new jobs after being fired?
Step 1: End social security.
Step 2: ????
Step 3: Work will be fun, non-degrading and rewarding. Also, old people will no longer be discriminated against by employers.
I don’t see how this plan can fail.
— Robert Karol · Apr 17, 02:44 PM · #
Robert:
Megan McArdle did not make this argument, I did. If you’re a frequent reader of her blog, in fact, you’ll know that she has a lot of sympathy for those who lose jobs after 50 and for the fate of post-industrial towns (her family being from a post-industrial town).
As for my argument, it’s actually the other way around. I don’t believe that work will be fun if we end social security. I believe that work WILL be fun and ergo we don’t need social security anymore.
— PEG · Apr 17, 03:01 PM · #
I actually agree with Freddie, that some jobs simply don’t lend themselves to a lifetime of labor, and the success of PEG’s proposal depends on the degree to which the number of such jobs stop being necessary. But this
is just tiresome. Do we really need to rehash the role GSE’s played in propping up subprime mortgages, or the role of the Federal Reserve had in making mortgages artificially cheap, or how mark-to-market accounting reforms helped drastically undervalue toxic assets? I don’t discount that shady loan-making in the private sector was a factor in the economic crisis, but the persistent belief that a dedication to a “free-market fantasyland” was even its principal cause is itself a fantasy.
— Blar · Apr 17, 03:11 PM · #
I’m usually sympathetic to this kind of thing, but this stuff is starting to sound loony. The miracle healing power of work? Work sucks. That’s why they have to pay us. Even if the jobs at the top are fun and engaging and challenging, there are a bunch at the bottom that truly suck. Do we want 70 year old men scrubbing our toilets while we deny them retirement, insisting it’s for their own good?
— bcg · Apr 17, 03:13 PM · #
Actually “they” have to pay “us” because “we” create more value for “them” than the money they pay us (+ taxes).
Ok, no. But would you really hire a 70 year old man to scrub your toilets?
— PEG · Apr 17, 03:27 PM · #
Actually “they” have to pay “us” because “we” create more value for “them” than the money they pay us (+ taxes).
Isn’t this an argument against paying workers? (We’d create an even BETTER investment if they paid us less!) This explains why an executive would add or subtract staff, but it doesn’t explain why staff come to work.
Ok, no. But would you really hire a 70 year old man to scrub your toilets?
A better question is: If we deny retirement to 70 year olds, will any wind up scrubbing toilets, or whatever terrible job you can think of you’d never want a 70-year-old doing?
— bcg · Apr 17, 03:35 PM · #
I am interested in why PEG thinks that there will be a “radical transformation of work over the 21st century” such that most people’s jobs will be enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. Who, I wonder, is going to serve our food, carry our bags in hotels, staff our offices, keep our accounts, work in retail sales or management, clean our homes and workplaces, nurse us in the hospital, &c, &c? Robots? And then what is everyone going to do? And what about the segment of the population that has little interest in “intellectual stimulation” and lower-than-average cognitive skills?
I’m honestly curious. What’s the scenario you envision?
— Christopher M · Apr 17, 03:38 PM · #
Believe me, as someone who’s looking for a summer internship, it is.
Well, there are some old people “scrubbing toilets” today because of low retirement. I think the questions are:
Are we screwing people by dangling this carrot in front of them their whole lives and then reneging on our promises?
On average, will there be more people miserable with early decay and early death due to idleness than with keeping everyone who can gainfully work employed?
— PEG · Apr 17, 03:43 PM · #
Ending retirement as such only makes sense if our work schedules
become more flexible, i.e. lengthy vacations and thirty-hour work
weeks. But making such flexibility easier is a good thing in itself,
not just for people over 65. Government policies should strive to
reduce overhead costs that apply per employee, and salaries should be
on an hourly basis, rather than an annual or monthly basis.
(I used to bill per hour, but I’ve spent the last few years back at
university.)
— M. Gregoire · Apr 17, 03:59 PM · #
I think one argument that is missing here is the amount of money retired people are making. I don’t really know for the US, but back home (in France) I know quite a bunch of people who earned the minimum wage, or just a little bit more, during their whole working lives. Now that they’re retired, they’d better own their home and/or have children in order to pay for the bills, due to their very low pensions. Yet many of those deliberately CHOSE to retire at the earliest possible age, even when they were enjoying their job. This is something I fail to really understand. Anyone got a clue ?
On the other hand, I knew a 96-year-old shop owner who refused to retire. He was doing all the stuff you expect happily retired people to do, including travelling, learning foreign languages and spending time with his family, except he was working in his shop too. He was interviewed by a local newspaper and he justified that basically by saying he would be bored to death at home — this is your argument for stimulation, PEG. I’m aware this is only a particular case, but what you propose could ideally be embodied by something like this old man’s way of life.
(Disclaimer : I’m PEG’s fiancée and, as such, may not be really objective on what he writes. Plus I hope I’m not making too many grammar mistakes ;)
— Marie-Laure · Apr 17, 04:00 PM · #
Christopher M:
Thanks for your comment, I appreciate it. I’m going to try to unpack it:
A combination of the walking dinausors that are megacorporations and technology. If you make handcrafted jewelry no one in your neighborhood would probably buy it but thanks to Etsy you can sell it across the world to a niche big enough to make a living. It’s the sort of thing I envision, times one billion.
This is the future of work — it’s mostly a combination of this and this.
A combination of college students, outsourcing companies, and yeah, robots and AIs.
I should also point out that some of the jobs you mention I would count as the kind of fulfilling, empowering jobs I envision for the future, IF approached with the right kind of ethic. Serving food is an art and can be fun (BTDT), and nursing an extremely noble calling. Retail sales can be a lot of fun if you have a salesman personality.
Intellectual stimulation and cognitive skills comes in many flavors.
Compare me, a graduate of my country’s top law school, and a carpenter who never finished high school. I firmly believe that 1- it’s going to take less time to train a computer to do 90% fo the jobs I was groomed for than to do his job and 2- his job is more fulfilling and (potentially) financially more rewarding.
I want a future with less lawyers and more carpenters, and each time a carpenter goes into retirement because he can it’s a social and economic tragedy. I want carpenters who are too tired and old to do their work to start a business teaching young people about carpenting online instead of being shuffled by their kids into retirement homes to die slowly and alone, which is the current reality of aging in industrialized countries.
Low IQ is mostly a nurture, not nature problem. We also need to get rid of schools as we know them to let everyone tap their true potential, but that’s another fight for another day.
(Yes, I’m a complete nut.)
— PEG · Apr 17, 04:02 PM · #
I love marrying smart people.
— PEG · Apr 17, 04:03 PM · #
Absolutely agree with this. I also think work schedules will become more flexible as a matter of necessity. Reducing overhead costs will involve shifting taxes from work to consumption and estates — again, another fight for another day.
— PEG · Apr 17, 04:17 PM · #
Isn’t Social Security more along the lines of “old age insurance” — that is, a guarantee of a certain level of subsistence should work of some kind able to sustain you become untenable due to infirmity and age? That it is now viewed as a retirement fund appears to be wholly apart from its original intent or structure.
— James F. Elliott · Apr 17, 05:22 PM · #
Doing some back of the envelope calculations, we find that work sucks for 97.5% of people who are not Type A types who constantly feel the need to keep busy. Unpacking various hued shirts, white collar, blue collar, or no collar, statistics demonstrate work for this rather large cohort – sucks. This is what is called “an inexorable fact of human existence”. The actualize yourself through work and/or your career is one big choose your own adventure novel with no bad endings view, most often promulgated by people who don’t work or work very much, e.g., intellectuals or upper management, is what my granpappy called “Bilge”, or, in the alternative, an exercise in the defense mechanism that psychologists like to call “Denial.”
Unless you are an artist, work is not where you paint your masterpiece. You work to live, not the other away around.
This is not the perspective of some left wing freak looking for a path from cradle to grave, craving for the vampire bite of Euro style socialism. Nay, I’m a right wing freak: mid 30’s, paid my way through one of our nations less then stellar law schools while working full time(not recommended),who thinks Edmund Burke, limited government, and classical liberalism, are, as Gidget would say, the ginchiest.
But, man, if could retire tomorrow in order to play in my band, read From Dawn to Decadence over and over again, watch Supernatural Season 2 and 3 on DVD, all whilst drinking beer and eating succulent chicken wings (Extra Spicy, natch), I would. And thanks to the magic of the internet, I can share this dream with the many millions of people who read this blog! Alas, I can’t afford to and do not see how taking money from younger people when I am older to pay for my retirement that I decided not to plan for is either moral or workable in the long term. So, until the day comes when I can say goodbye to all that and embrace the dream, I, like most others not living in denial, show up, smile, do my job, and head for the door as soon as I can.
As for the whole carpenters versus lawyers debate. This is very much like ninjas versus pirates (I’m a Ninja guy). As on the whole lawyers are narcissistic at best, psychopathic at worst, and often somewhere on the autism scale, I gotta go with carpenters.
No quite sold on forcing carpenters to work until hammers fall from their arthritic hands and their hearts give out after driving the last nail into the modular macmansion of some over leveraged middle manager. Sounds like some late Roman Era economic policy, but you do get points for thinking outside the box.
Some day everything’s gonna be double. In the meantime, gotta go bill.
— lovingthelaw · Apr 17, 06:49 PM · #
PEG:
I guess my response was unclear. I was trying to point out that McCardle herself had noticed the difficulty of middle-aged and older people finding good jobs, which is why she still believed in the necessity of pensions of some kind.
And while you didn’t say that ending social security would make work better, you suggest, ‘sometime in the future, work will be better for everyone. As a result, let’s end social security in the near future.’ Given the amount of plausible or reassuring predictions people have made in the past that have not come true, I’d rather see evidence that this was a ongoing trend and not a bunch of anecdotes before we made huge changes to the social contract.
— Robert Karol · Apr 17, 06:54 PM · #
Fascinating post and comments. Given how much growth we’ve seen in the service sector, isn’t the future going to look a lot more like Ehrenreich’s “Nickled and Dimed” as opposed to a reign of google-ers? Say whatever you will about N&D, but the idea that the labor it is “self-defined, self-led and empowering” doesn’t come to mind.
— rortybomb · Apr 17, 07:18 PM · #
As for the radical transformation of work in the 21st century and its place in the argument for abolishing retirement plans, I would say the following: – there will, of course, be changes to work in the coming years and decades. We dont know what it will entail or what it’ll precisely mean for us, our children and grandchildren. Such ignorance of what will occur precludes me from supporting radical or revolutionary change to such an important part of modern liberal free-market societies. Its indeed a big “pari”, a wager, to hope that such transformations will facilitate an end to retirement. Or that such an end to retirement will solve identified and real problems.
Thing is, we may very well be headed to a situation wherein retirement plans will have to be fully reconsidered and maybe even severely curtailed due to the ominous future trends of an ageing population and less affluent younger generations. Maybe, dunno. Need more info and time. Need to feel that “pari” pressing down on my neck the way Pascal insisted his own wager forced all to join in. So far, I’m not feeling it.
I think that in PEG’s post above there are a good number of the suppositions, and implied presuppositions, which pertain to an idea of the “good life”. And that PEG holds to the supposition that work is fundamental to self-realisation as well as socialisation. Work is part of the good life, not just the means serving to get to a good life shorn of work. The notion of work as realisation and means of socialisation, I believe, are true, but not all persons hold that position. Especially, as Marie-Laure enquires, in France where there are good number of persons for whom work necessarily = exploitation. And that such persons also think that retirement, like the RTTs and the 4 week vacations are means to escape the dreariness of life lived under the yolk of work from September to June. That was partly implied in Aubry’s 35-hour work week – ie, that “real life” is elsewhere, anywhere, but at the workplace.
I used to be more libertarian in regards to entitlements, notably social security, and used to strongly contend the ways in which the middle class in the US (especially) is running the country into the ground due to its entitlement mentality. But I’ve come to see the continued, generations-old, support of entitlement of the sort that S.S. retirement accounts represent as being representative of collective wisdom handed down from generation to generation. Surely, generations don’t pass on the wisdom of tackling problems head-on and in a timely fashion – like the problem of a debt-burden ! But there is the idea that a “net” of some kind is better than no net. Maybe I’m getting old, meaning perhaps I’m becoming less and less convinced of being able to master my destiny – as individual, husband and father – in the face of an unpredictable and sometimes cruel contingency.
— JB · Apr 17, 09:55 PM · #
“This is the kind of reaction I was expecting. I realize that work sucks for many people. But I also think it won’t stay that way for long. Telemarketing sucks, but it sucks less than building the pyramids. Work has been getting less-sucky for a long time. And I really believe that we will see a radical transformation of work over the 21st century.”
Yeah, let’s base today’s policy on predictions of insanely optimistic and profound changes in human society. That’s definitely conservative.
— cw · Apr 18, 12:12 AM · #
I enjoyed the article and posts…intellecutally stimulating ;)
A college graduation speech years ago stands out in my mind…the speaker discussed the differences between a “job”, a “career” and a “calling”. The job you do for money and can’t wait to get to the end of the day. A career you find fulfilling and may do it for years, but you couldn’t say you loved it. Your calling is where you find that you are paid to do what you enjoy doing most, and you are eager to get to ‘work’ most days…you profession is not really “work” any more…you love your job. The orator challenged us to pursue our callings if we wanted to really enjoy life.
If most people had the opportunity and took the proper steps to find their true calling, then PEG’s vision would work. The current reality is far, far from that. I would say, using the terms of that forgotten graduation spearker, most people have jobs, some have careers, and a tiny minority have found their calling.
Having said that, kudos to you PEG for having the optimistic vision of our shared future! It CAN turn out the way you lay things out. I believe I’ve had flashes of insight into the IT work-world of the future (that’s my field) that are consisten with your view…everyone will be like a contractor working for his/herself…companies will put development work out for biddding…people respond with bids stating time and money required..company chooses best fit…all working entities are rated…you work as much or as little as you like or need to…everyone works out of their home or home office…etc.
How to get people to pursue their callings so people aren’t so drained at the end of their careers that they just neeed to veg? One thing is, in elementary/secondary education, to sress the need to match what you do with what you enjoy doing over the need to make TONS OF MONEY.
Getting most people to love their “work” is an objective worthy of pursuing but it is many decades away…it may never happen…and I don’t think ending retirement will make it happen. You can’t terminate retirement in the traditional sense until callings are commonplace.
— Peter · Apr 18, 03:58 AM · #
Posts like this are why I often wish to smack starry-eyed libertarians upside the head and/or magically transform them into 40-something low-level clerical workers with kids to feed, a mortgage to pay, minimal health insurance and a salary that doesn’t stretch far enough.
Beyond that, Freddie’s initial post said most of what I wanted to say, except for this: I’m a software engineering PhD candidate at one of the top-tier schools in the country, and I study strategies for ad hoc coalition formation between selfish entities – that is, getting a bunch of people on the Internet together to form a team to solve a complex knowledge-based problem for money. I like my research, and I hope it’ll be successfully applied to the real world someday on a large and profitable scale.
That said, even though I’m personally involved with one of the kinds of initiatives Pascal points to when he talks about the glorious future of work, I also recognize that said glorious future is mostly bollocks because only a tiny fraction of actual, workaday jobs can ever be untethered from the 9-to-5 grind. Pascal seems to imagine a world of self-motivated entrepreneurs wheeling and dealing through Ebay, Craigslist, and PayPal, but I’m quite sure most people’s working lives will continue to resemble “The Office” sitcom, whether we’re talking 2019, 2109, or any other date in the future.
— Chris · Apr 18, 06:06 AM · #
I find it very telling that you cite Paul Graham. I’ve spent more time than I should’ve reading his essays, and two things have consistently come through: his willingness to make grand declarations about life that only apply to people who work in the same fields that he does, and his utter contempt for anyone who is not an entrepreneur. That contempt comes through very loudly in almost everything he writes about work.
It’s not that the vision Graham puts forward is undesirable. It’s good work if you can get it. But making bold proposals for society based on speculation that you can extend the work habits of the privileged few to everyone seems crazy (in Graham’s case, it’s clear that he’s looking at the economy from 1970-2008 and saying “it will always be like this, except even better!”). I want a social system that will work for people outside of that elite. And while we’re at it, I think we’ve recently seen some limits of a value system that praises taking bold risks above all else.
— Justin · Apr 18, 06:41 AM · #
This sounds a whole lot like something that someone who hasn’t worked very much would come up with. Tell me again how awesome you think this would be when you’ve put in 10 years working for a boss you hate because you can’t get another job and need to feed your kids.
For the vast majority of people, work sucks, will continue to suck and provide marginal fulfillment at best.
However, I think you’re on to something in pointing out that the current situation for many retirees also sucks. I’m not sure exactly what to do about that. I kind of think the two-generation nuclear family is a mistake—my grandparents live (in a finished basement apartment) with an aunt and uncle of mine and were a huge help in taking care of their kids, and as my grandparents got older having the kids around has kept them active as well as providing people who can help take care of them in turn.
What’s worked well for my grandparent’s obviously isn’t possible for everyone who’s at or past retirement age, but it seems like having older folks wasting away in homes at the same time that dual income families have to pay for daycare offers some obvious opportunities.
— TW Andrews · Apr 19, 02:14 AM · #
lovingthelaw:
I understand where you’re coming from and I see your point. I do think things will get much better very fast over the next decades.
Oh, and as for people who think work can be cool being people who don’t work very much… My schedule for today began at 5:30 am and ends around 11pm.
JB:
That’s an excellent point. Even though I’m pretty convinced of the points I’m making, the probability that I’m just dead wrong is overwhelming. But there’s a long way from writing a blog post to actually drafting legislation.
I’m trying to introduce original, sometimes dumb-assed, thoughts in the blagosphere.
cw:
Heh. Point well taken.
Peter:
Thanks! That was the goal. And thanks for the other kind words.
There is an obvious chicken and egg problem here. I think the concept of retirement itself serves to perpetuate an understanding of work which I find to be antiquated. By and large I agree with you. My hope is that as work becomes better and more pleasant, people will just stop retiring (like my mother for instance), but “free” money to do nothing is a very powerful attraction.
Chris:
Ok. Why?
TW Andrews:
I’ve never done that, and certainly don’t intend to (I’m incapable of working very productively for anyone other than shareholders), but my mother did. Then she quit and started a business. She’s now richer and, much more importantly, happier.
Aye, there’s the rub.
— PEG · Apr 20, 09:14 AM · #
Ok. Why?
Two reasons, at least to start with: A) in many circumstances, while the high-level tasks that a worker does are relatively simple to model, there’s a great deal of stuff that you can’t model for online interaction, either because it’s 1) crucial that people be in the same location, at the same time, working on the same thing in a very subtle, detail-oriented way (e.g. hands-on troubleshooting of hardware) 2) difficult to properly define what exact skills are being brought into play (e.g. impromptu answers to quick questions that turn into longer lectures about more important topics) or 3) tempting not to enable people to do things that look entirely worthless, but are probably quite valuable from a networking/morale standpoint (watercooler bullshit, etc.)
B) Because transitioning to the kind of online worker existence you’re talking about is probably impossible for most people, because it’s simply beyond their abilities.
For an idea of what that kind of existence would probably be like, take a look at Vernor Vinge’s short story “Fast Times at Fairmont High”, where people really are multi-tasked six ways until Tuesday, expected to and capable of learning new skills and technologies all the time, and generally able to marshal their considerable technological, intellectual, and human capital resources to solve any problem that comes up. Vinge being Vinge, it’s very fun and thought-provoking to read, but when you actually sit down and consider what it would be like to live in that environment, it becomes extremely wearying. I personally feel I might be capable of essentially learning the equivalent of a new operating system and/or major programming language every few months, forever, but I wouldn’t want to, and when I think about my family and friends who aren’t technologists (but are still relatively bright, high-functioning, grad-degree having people) I’m relatively certain that they couldn’t, even if they tried their damnedest – it’s a huge struggle for most people to learn the skills they do know, acquired in a relatively short amount of time, let alone to repeat that skill forever. (In other words, just because they can run 40 yards in 6 seconds for a sprint doesn’t mean that speed can scale to a marathon distance.)
In fact, the work environments we have now are set up because they reflect how the majority of people actually learn and deploy skills – they pick up some basic measure of competence doing a job, and put themselves in a situation where they can deploy that competence at a sustainable level for a long time – a lifetime of B-level effort, in other words. And we set our work environments up so that B-level effort from everybody, in aggregate, is acceptable – while we could do the same thing with fewer people if everybody gave their A-level effort all the time, so few people are capable (or desirous) of doing so that it’s pretty much just a pipe dream, except for tiny small shops. This has been my experience whether we’re talking law firms, engineering works, medical practitioners, consultants, you name it. Expecting otherwise is pretty much living in a fantasyland.
Which brings me back to my original point that that’s what you, PEG, seem to be doing. You say your schedule begins at 5:30am and runs until 11pm, but I’d be curious as to A) what kinds of tasks are involved (e.g. how much of it involves painful, boring work like reading through, say, patent invention disclosures for hours on end, as opposed to attending seminars or other meetings) B) how common such a day is for you (are you doing this every day, or is this an unusually intense day) or C) even if you’re doing days like this now, to what extent you’d be able to do it most days of your life until you’re… well, presumably 90 or so, given that you’re arguing for abolishing retirement. And before you say you could do this forever, I’d point to the work policies of places like Accenture, which is relatively famous for taking bright, driven, capable people, letting them work for 80+ hour weeks for years on end, and seeing about half of them burn out from said work within 5 years. Any system that demands such effort from people without taking that kind of burnout rate into account is, as they say, not ready for prime time.
— Chris · Apr 20, 04:51 PM · #
Chris:
Thanks for your insightful comment. Many things there I’ll try to address most of them.
First of all, I’m sure I’ve been unclear about this, but I don’t believe everyone will run a startup in the future, or rather a Silicon Valley-style startup where you work 18-hour days for years on end. I believe most people will be entrepreneurs in one way or another, but only a minority will have the capacity or the inclination to work “full time” i.e. 80+ hours a week. I linked to Paul Graham but I also linked to the BusinessWeek story about “Mom and Pop Multinationals” and the tremendous article “Shop Class as Soulcraft.”
My fiancée’s father, for instance, is an independent craftsman. Some weeks he works 60 hours, some weeks he works 30. But he’s happy and independent, and has earned enough money to put his daughter through college, and that’s what matters to me.
I absolutely agree that’s how it is today, and you know what? It sucks. It just does!
Plus it’s hugely inefficient economically. And when, thanks to the leverage of technology, startups with 24/7-working fanatics start destroying mammoth-like companies (watch out for the online banks), it doesn’t mean everyone is going to turn into 24/7 fanatics, but it does mean people are going to look beyond what they’ve got and realize that it’s not good for them and not sustainable.
When your neighbor quits his job at General Widget Co to start a business teaching Farsi online, or being an online rent-a-CFO or rent-a-lawyer for small businesses or selling his wife’s homemade quilts — none of which require particular coding or technical skills, they do require some effort to get started but once you found your niche market you don’t need “A-level” effort all the time —, and you realize that your neighbor 1- makes roughly the same amount of money, probably more, 2- maybe works more than you some weeks but less than you some other weeks and more importantly has flexibility (i.e. can pick up the kids at school at 4 even if it means he has to work for a couple hours in the living room after the kids are in bed), and most importantly 3- is just gosh-darned happier and more fulfilled than you, you’re going to think about quitting your own job at American Widgets Inc. and doing what he’s doing.
That’s how these things happen. It goes from neighbor to neighbor to neighbor and all of a sudden it goes exponential.
It’s a normal weekday for me, yes. The tasks involved are anything from commuting to going to classes to group projects to working on two entrepreneurship projects to attending networking events to writing and commenting at TAS.
I do like to believe I can do this for the rest of my life — there’s only one way to find out of course — but that’s not my recipe for the rest of the world. I don’t want everyone to work as hard as me. But I do want them to have the same independent streak that I do (he said so humbly).
Absolutely, but the work at places like Accenture sucks. It’s boring, dull, repetitive work, and there’s no amount in the world you could pay me (ok, maybe some) to do that kind of work even ten hours a week, because I know there’s better stuff out there. Which is incredibly selfish in a way — I’m getting married and instead of getting a steady job to put our fledgling family on sound financial footing I’m going to take huge risks as an entrepreneur and not be there for the first few years yadda yadda — but that I still let myself do because I think that’s how people will do it 20 years from now. Probably not with the same intensity, but hopefully with the same spirit.
— PEG · Apr 21, 09:20 AM · #
Pascal-
Respectfully, everything you write above is just reinforcing the general vibe I’m getting from you – bright and enthusiastic, but also naive and inexperienced. I’m sorry if that comes off as being condescending, but I think it needs to be said. Case in point:
Ok, here’s the thing: most people would not consider that work by any stretch of the imagination. You’re very busy, sure, and you’re productive as far as being a good student and furthering your career/network/whatever, but that’s nowhere near the kind of sustained effort that most people have to produce for a paycheck, let alone satisfy a client of their own business. (I know because I’ve been on both sides of that line, in school and in industry.)
Case in point, you said this about working someplace like Accenture:
Well, actually, no, work at Accenture is not that bad, all things considered. There’s too much of it, but there’s a fair amount of variety in what you do, compared to, say, the kind of stuff a first-year law associate or a software developer is doing, and the compensation is excellent. And the compensation can be excellent in all those cases because, at the end of the day, you’re producing something that people are actually willing to pay for. (Whether they’re getting their money’s worth is another story.) But producing that stuff – whether it’s legal research briefs, or working code, or a new business strategy – takes hours upon hours of sustained effort that isn’t broken up by frequent networking events, or opportunities to post on a blog, or other fun opportunities that are essentially the difference between a student lifestyle (which you pay other people for) and real honest-to-god work (which other people pay you for).
And keep in mind that the jobs above – law, engineering, consulting – are the good jobs in society. The crap jobs – healthcare records clerk or data entry, for example – are at least as boring, but pay way less.
Ah, but what of entrepreneurship, you ask? Well…
Nope, sorry. The first problem with that is that the technology which allows you to be a rent-a-lawyer (or whatever) to anyone on the planet (rather than just being limited to your immediate community) also allows anybody else to be a rent-a-lawyer (or whatever) to the whole planet – including to the people in your immediate community who used to be your bread-and-butter. Supply of talent goes through the roof, but it’s not at all clear that demand will also increase proportionately, even as the bigger supply makes the actual price of a given service much cheaper. (Our current capitalist system has already done a really good job of providing us with adequate supplies of lawyers, accountants, quilts, Farsi teachers, etc. and there’s not nearly as much room for innovation as you might think.)
What’s more, most people are not the smartest guy in the room, and as such, if they’re running their own businesses, the only thing they can really compete on is the amount of work and effort they’re putting in – which’ll almost certainly be a great deal more than they were putting in at their old job, for almost certainly less money.
(And all that’s overlooking the fact that being a lawyer or Farsi teacher or whatever has just as much of a hands-on component as being a techie that’ll make it difficult to do online – I used technical examples in my post because that’s what I’m familiar with, but the problems with moving work online are certainly not just limited to those working in technical domains.)
Ok, now I know you’ve been reading too many happy technological evangelization articles about this stuff. PEG, dig it – that’s a narrative about how the backers of this stuff would like to see it happen, it’s not an actual model of what actually will happen. (Again, I know, because I’ve written exactly that kind of narrative for my dissertation work.) Various aspects of the Internet were already supposed to free us from the grind of the office – whether it was online stock trading, eBay arbitrage, or freelance software developers doing everything over wireless email. And, with a vanishingly small number of exceptions, the vast majority people who try this stuff at home end up going broke very quickly, and the happy technological narratives that led them there end up moldering in some forgotten corner of the web, or in old copies of Businessweek.
Which is not to say work can’t be done at the margins to slightly increase the utility of online work, but there’s no magic bullet here which’ll cause a sudden and complete sea change.
Last thing, I think you misunderstood my point re: B-level effort. You said:
My point was actually that B-level effort from everybody, in the aggregate, was sustainable. It’s permanent A-level effort that’s not sustainable, because most people don’t have the interest or the ability to sustain that level of involvement – they have lives, they have families, they have an innate tendency towards conservation of effort. As commenters tried to tell you above, the system we have in place now, where company workers pull 8 hour days instead of 12, work five days a week instead of 6 or 7, etc., was instituted because doing it the other way was a hellish existence that wore people down very quickly – retirement didn’t used to be such an issue because relatively few people survived that kind of pace for long. And giving people a light at the end of the work-tunnel, in the long run, is a better and more productive motivator than returning us all to the breakneck capitalism that characterized the Gilded Age.
— Chris · Apr 21, 09:52 PM · #
Chris-
Look, obviously you and I aren’t going to agree here. I actually think a happy middle can be found between the two of us.
I know that I’m young and wildly optimistic, and experience is a relative thing. Not many 22 year olds have led important non-profits, had an op-ed published in one of their country’s most prestigious newspapers, etc. etc. And I’ve also had my share of shitty jobs and “real jobs”, from telemarketing to bartending to corporate law. :)
In fact my blog posts are more meant to spark debate and throw crazy ideas out there than really put forward stuff I believe in 100%. In reality, I would much rather have people forego retirement voluntarily, simply because they don’t want it, but even I have not much optimism toward that.
Don’t worry, I know what “real work” is like. :)
But here’s the thing: you seem to define work as “that which sucks.” If I’m being productive and putting in sustained effort, that’s work.
I remember a criticism of Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Workweek (which I think is mostly crap, I’m not that starry-eyed) that it was based on a semantic argument: Ferriss defines stuff he doesn’t like as work and stuff he likes as not-work. He had his online business selling growth hormones or whatever that he spent four hours a week on and for the rest of the time he trained as the world record holder in tango. Well, if you want to be the world record holder in tango, that’s work. Ferriss was superb about promoting his book to bloggers and through his blog. Being a great blogger is work, whether you do it professionally or not.
You and I might quibble about whether attending school and doing schoolwork is “work”, but starting two businesses and working on a new entrepreneurship initiative within the school incubator is not work?
That’s actually something I seriously worry about. But thankfully in markets there is room for more than one actor, and I do believe that “niches can go crazy.” Selling premium tea online is a pretty good racket because the margins are huge but the market is getting pretty crowded. So a friend of a friend started a business selling health tea online and it’s working pretty well. I guess we’ll see. :)
Part of me thinks that the fact that people used to die younger might have more to do with things like medical technology than the day rate of work.
Your point is well taken but HEY. There aren’t really that many machine line workers today. I have no doubt that the majority of work in the Gilded Age was horrible, etc. and I very much admire those who fought for rights for workers in those times.
But hey, times have changed. The nature of work has changed from the industrial age to the service age in the 20th century, and being a data entry clerk sucks, but it sucks less than being a coal miner in 1934. Work was radically transformed in the 19th century, and then radically transformed again in the 20th century. Is it so crazy to believe that it can radically be transformed in the 21st century? Or is work the only thing that is not affected by technological and social change?
— PEG · Apr 22, 07:56 AM · #
Pascal-
And I tend to think that a happy middle ground is beside the point – you’re advancing a thesis that I think has been (and will continue to be) proven wrong by history and reality. What you or I say here doesn’t settle things – it’s what happens in the world that’s important.
That said, I think we’re going around in circles here, so let me just make this argument once more and let you have the last word, if you so choose – the post above is basically arguing that this kind of “be your own boss doing what you love to do” approach is something that the majority of people can and will be doing, to an extent where retirement can be abolished. I think that’s problematic because most people don’t have the kind of individual, profitable skills that would be required for such a model. Instead, most people make their living by doing whatever the work of the day is – whether that’s farming, factory work, or data processing. But when you’re just undifferentiated labor in a pool, you take the prevailing market wage and work conditions and deal with it.
Meanwhile, those who do have individual skills that they can be entrepreneurial with will find themselves in competition with those who can offer similar goods or services, and profit will inevitably trend towards zero, according to the laws of market capitalism… unless they’re offering something truly unique, in which case it’s not a feasible model for most people to follow by definition.
This shouldn’t be all that radical or arguable a notion, I feel – it’s pretty close to what any basic economics textbook says. At the end of the day, it’s all about producing goods and services that actually allow people to survive at a given standard of living – and almost by definition, those are goods and services that people will pay money for. Work isn’t necessarily “that which sucks”, as you say, but it’s worth pointing out that many of the things you cite as examples don’t make money for the participants (or don’t generate anything close to a living wage). And until you start showing how your model really can generate enough money to support a substantial portion of society, it’s just conjecture that looks painfully inaccurate compared to the vast majority of human experience.
— Chris · Apr 23, 06:29 AM · #
I take your point.
As you’ve said we’ve been going around in circles. Thanks for taking the time to argue respectfully and (I think) productively. That’s why I blog. :)
— PEG · Apr 24, 08:46 AM · #