MOOC

The alienation of labor

pnrj core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, ethics, futurism, inequality, public policy, science and academia , , , , , , , ,

Apr 10 JDN 2459680

Marx famously wrote that capitalism “alienates labor”. Much ink has been spilled over interpreting exactly what he meant by that, but I think the most useful and charitable reading goes something like the following:

When you make something for yourself, it feels fully yours. The effort you put into it feels valuable and meaningful. Whether you’re building a house to live in it or just cooking an omelet to eat it, your labor is directly reflected in your rewards, and you have a clear sense of purpose and value in what you are doing.

But when you make something for an employer, it feels like theirs, not yours. You have been instructed by your superiors to make a certain thing a certain way, for reasons you may or may not understand (and may or may not even agree with). Once you deliver the product—which may be as concrete as a carburetor or as abstract as an accounting report—you will likely never see it again; it will be used or not by someone else somewhere else whom you may not even ever get the chance to meet. Such labor feels tedious, effortful, exhausting—and also often empty, pointless, and meaningless.

On that reading, Marx isn’t wrong. There really is something to this. (I don’t know if this is really Marx’s intended meaning or not, and really I don’t much care—this is a valid thing and we should be addressing it, whether Marx meant to or not.)

There is a little parable about this, which I can’t quite remember where I heard:

Three men are moving heavy stones from one place to another. A traveler passes by and asks them, “What are you doing?”

The first man sighs and says, “We do whatever the boss tells us to do.”

The second man shrugs and says, “We pick up the rocks here, we move them over there.”

The third man smiles and says, “We’re building a cathedral.”

The three answers are quite different—yet all three men may be telling the truth as they see it.

The first man is fully alienated from his labor: he does whatever the boss says, following instructions that he considers arbitrary and mechanical. The second man is partially alienated: he knows the mechanics of what he is trying to accomplish, which may allow him to improve efficiency in some way (e.g. devise better ways to transport the rocks faster or with less effort), but he doesn’t understand the purpose behind it all, so ultimately his work still feels meaningless. But the third man is not alienated: he understands the purpose of his work, and he values that purpose. He sees that what he is doing is contributing to a greater whole that he considers worthwhile. It’s not hard to imagine that the third man will be the happiest, and the first will be the unhappiest.

There really is something about the capitalist wage-labor structure that can easily feed into this sort of alienation. You get a job because you need money to live, not because you necessarily value whatever the job does. You do as you are told so that you can keep your job and continue to get paid.

Some jobs are much more alienating than others. Most teachers and nurses see their work as a vocation, even a calling—their work has deep meaning for them and they value its purpose. At the other extreme there are corporate lawyers and derivatives traders, who must on some level understand that their work contributes almost nothing to the world (may in fact actively cause harm), but they continue to do the work because it pays them very well.

But there are many jobs in between which can be experienced both ways. Working in retail can be an agonizing grind where you must face a grueling gauntlet of ungrateful customers day in and day out—or it can be a way to participate in your local community and help your neighbors get the things they need. Working in manufacturing can be a mechanical process of inserting tab A into slot B and screwing it into place over, and over, and over again—or it can be a chance to create something, convert raw materials into something useful and valuable that other people can cherish.

And while individual perspective and framing surely matter here—those three men were all working in the same quarry, building the same cathedral—there is also an important objective component as well. Working as an artisan is not as alienating as working on an assembly line. Hosting a tent at a farmer’s market is not as alienating as working the register at Walmart. Tutoring an individual student is more purposeful than recording video lectures for a MOOC. Running a quirky local book store is more fulfilling than stocking shelves at Barnes & Noble.

Moreover, capitalism really does seem to push us more toward the alienating side of the spectrum. Assembly lines are far more efficient than artisans, so we make most of our products on assembly lines. Buying food at Walmart is cheaper and more convenient than at farmer’s markets, so more people shop there. Hiring one video lecturer for 10,000 students is a lot cheaper than paying 100 in-person lecturers, let alone 1,000 private tutors. And Barnes & Noble doesn’t drive out local book stores by some nefarious means: It just provides better service at lower prices. If you want a specific book for a good price right now, you’re much more likely to find it at Barnes & Noble. (And even more likely to find it on Amazon.)

Finding meaning in your work is very important for human happiness. Indeed, along with health and social relationships, it’s one of the biggest determinants of happiness. For most people in First World countries, it seems to be more important than income (though income certainly does matter).

Yet the increased efficiency and productivity upon which our modern standard of living depends seems to be based upon a system of production—in a word, capitalism—that systematically alienates us from meaning in our work.

This puts us in a dilemma: Do we keep things as they are, accepting that we will feel an increasing sense of alienation and ennui as our wealth continues to grow and we get ever-fancier toys to occupy our meaningless lives? Or do we turn back the clock, returning to a world where work once again has meaning, but at the cost of making everyone poorer—and some people desperately so?

Well, first of all, to some extent this is a false dichotomy. There are jobs that are highly meaningful but also highly productive, such as teaching and engineering. (Even recording a video lecture is a lot more fulfilling than plenty of jobs out there.) We could try to direct more people into jobs like these. There are jobs that are neither particularly fulfilling nor especially productive, like driving trucks, washing floors and waiting tables. We could redouble our efforts into automating such jobs out of existence. There are meaningless jobs that are lucrative only by rent-seeking, producing little or no genuine value, like the aforementioned corporate lawyers and derivatives traders. These, quite frankly, could simply be banned—or if there is some need for them in particular circumstances (I guess someone should defend corporations when they get sued; but they far more often go unjustly unpunished than unjustly punished!), strictly regulated and their numbers and pay rates curtailed.

Nevertheless, we still have decisions to make, as a society, about what we value most. Do we want a world of cheap, mostly adequate education, that feels alienating even to the people producing it? Then MOOCs are clearly the way to go; pennies on the dollar for education that could well be half as good! Or do we want a world of high-quality, personalized teaching, by highly-qualified academics, that will help students learn better and feel more fulfilling for the teachers? More pointedly—are we willing to pay for that higher-quality education, knowing it will be more expensive?

Moreover, in the First World at least, our standard of living is… pretty high already? Like seriously, what do we really need that we don’t already have? We could always imagine more, of course—a bigger house, a nicer car, dining at fancier restaurants, and so on. But most of us have roofs over our heads, clothes on our backs, and food on our tables.

Economic growth has done amazing things for us—but maybe we’re kind of… done? Maybe we don’t need to keep growing like this, and should start redirecting our efforts away from greater efficiency and toward greater fulfillment. Maybe there are economic possibilities we haven’t been considering.

Note that I specifically mean First World countries here. In Third World countries it’s totally different—they need growth, lots of it, as fast as possible. Fulfillment at work ends up being a pretty low priority when your children are starving and dying of malaria.

But then, you may wonder: If we stop buying cheap plastic toys to fill the emptiness in our hearts, won’t that throw all those Chinese factory workers back into poverty?

In the system as it stands? Yes, that’s a real concern. A sudden drop in consumption spending in general, or even imports in particular, in First World countries could be economically devastating for millions of people in Third World countries.

But there’s nothing inherent about this arrangement. There are less-alienating ways of working that can still provide a decent standard of living, and there’s no fundamental reason why people around the world couldn’t all be doing them. If they aren’t, it’s in the short run because they don’t have the education or the physical machinery—and in the long run it’s usually because their government is corrupt and authoritarian. A functional democratic government can get you capital and education remarkably fast—it certainly did in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.

Automation is clearly a big part of the answer here. Many people in the First World seem to suspect that our way of life depends upon the exploited labor of impoverished people in Third World countries, but this is largely untrue. Most of that work could be done by robots and highly-skilled technicians and engineers; it just isn’t because that would cost more. Yes, that higher cost would mean some reduction in standard of living—but it wouldn’t be nearly as dramatic as many people seem to think. We would have slightly smaller houses and slightly older cars and slightly slower laptops, but we’d still have houses and cars and laptops.

So I don’t think we should all cast off our worldly possessions just yet. Whether or not it would make us better off, it would cause great harm to countries that depend on their exports to us. But in the long run, I do think we should be working to achieve a future for humanity that isn’t so obsessed with efficiency and growth, and instead tries to provide both a decent standard of living and a life of meaning and purpose.

The necessitization of American consumption

pnrj inequality, macroeconomics, public policy , , , , , , , ,

Dec6 JDN 2459190

Why do we feel poorer than our parents?

Over the last 20 years, real per-capita GDP has risen from $46,000 to $56,000 (in 2012 dollars):

It’s not just increasing inequality (though it is partly that); real median household income has increased over the same period from $62,500 to $68,700 (in 2019 dollars):

The American Enterprise Institute has utterly the wrong interpretation of what’s going on here, but their graph is actually quite informative if you can read it without their ideological blinders:

Over the past 20 years, some industries have seen dramatic drops in prices, such as televisions, cellphones, toys, and computer software. Other industries have seen roughly constant prices, such as cars, clothing, and furniture. Still other industries have seen modest increases in prices that tracked overall inflation, such as housing and food. And then there are some industries where prices have exploded to staggering heights, such as childcare, college education, and hospital services.

Since wages basically kept up with inflation, this is the relevant comparison: A product or service is more expensive in real terms if its price grew faster than inflation.

It’s not inherently surprising that some prices would rise faster than inflation and some would rise slower; indeed, it would be shocking if that were not the case, since inflation essentially just is an average of all price changes over time. But if you look closely at the kinds of things that got cheaper versus more expensive, you can begin to see why the statistics keep saying we are getting richer but we don’t feel any richer.

The things that increased the most in price are things you basically can’t do without: Education, childcare, and healthcare. Yes, okay, theoretically you could do without these things, but the effects on your life would be catastrophic—indeed, going without healthcare could literally kill you. They are necessities.

The things that decreased the most in price are things that people have done without for most of human history: Cellphones, software, and computer software. They are newfangled high-tech goods that are now ubiquitous, but not at all long ago didn’t even exist. Going without these goods would be inconvenient, but hardly catastrophic. Indeed, they largely only feel as necessary as they are because everyone else already has them. They are luxuries.

This even explains why older generations can be convinced that we are richer than the statistics say: We have all these fancy new high-tech toys that they never had. But what good does that do us when we can’t afford our health insurance?

Housing is also an obvious necessity, and while it has not on average increased in price faster than inflation, this average washes out important geographic variation.

San Francisco has seen housing prices nearly triple in the last 20 years:

Over the same period, Detroit’s housing prices plummeted, then returned to normal, and are now only 30% higher than they were 20 years ago (comparable to inflation):

It’s hardly surprising that the cities where the most people are moving to are the most expensive to live in; that’s basic supply and demand. But the magnitude of the difference is so large that most of us are experiencing rising housing prices, even though on average housing prices aren’t really rising.

Put this all together, and we can see that while by the usual measures our “standard of living” is increasing, our financial situation feels ever more precarious, because more and more of our spending is immediately captured by things we can’t do without. I suggest we call this effect necessitization; our consumption has been necessitized.

Healthcare is the most extreme example: In 1960, healthcare spending was only 5% of US GDP. As recently as 2000, it was 13%. Today, it is 18%. Medical technology has greatly improved over that time period, increasing our life expectancy from 70 years in 1960 to 76 years in 2000 to 78 years today, so perhaps this additional spending is worth it? But if we compare 2000 to 2020, we can see that an additional 5% of GDP in the last 20 years has only bought us two years of life. So we have spent an additional 5% of our income to gain 2.6% more life—that doesn’t sound like such a great deal to me. (Also, if you look closely at the data, most of the gains in life expectancy seem to be from things like antibiotics and vaccines that aren’t a large part of our healthcare spending, while most of the increased spending seems to be on specialists, testing, high-tech equipment, and administrative costs that don’t seem to contribute much to life expectancy.)

Moreover, even if we decide that all this healthcare spending is worth it, it doesn’t make us richer in the usual sense. We have better health, but we don’t have greater wealth or financial security.

AEI sees that the industries with the largest price increases have the most government intervention, and blames the government; this is clearly confusing cause with effect. The reason the government intervenes so much in education and healthcare is because these are necessities and they are getting so expensive. Removing those interventions wouldn’t stop prices from rising; they’d just remove the programs like Medicaid and federal student loans that currently allow most people to (barely) afford them.

But they are right about one thing: Prices have risen much faster in some industries than others, and the services that have gotten the most expensive are generally the services that are most important.

Why have these services gotten so expensive? A major reason seems to be that they are difficult to automate. Manufacturing electronics is very easy to automate—indeed, there’s even a positive feedback loop there: the better you get at automating making electronics, the better you get at automating everything, including making electronics. But automating healthcare and education is considerably more difficult. Yes, there are MOOCs, and automated therapy software, and algorithms will soon be outperforming the average radiologist; but there are a lot of functions that doctors, nurses, and teachers provide that are very difficult to replace with machines or software.

Suppose we do figure out how to automate more functions of education and healthcare; would that solve the problem? Maybe—but only if we really do manage to automate the important parts.

Right now, MOOCs are honestly terrible. The sales pitch is that you can get taught by a world-class professor from anywhere in the world, but the truth is that the things that make someone a world-class professor don’t translate over when you are watching recorded video lectures and doing multiple-choice quizzes. Really good teaching requires direct interaction between teacher and student. Of course, a big lecture hall full of hundreds of students often lacks such interaction—but so much the worse for big lecture halls. If indeed that’s the only way colleges know how to teach, then they deserve to be replaced by MOOCs. But there are better ways of teaching that online courses currently cannot provide, and if college administrators were wise, they would be focusing on pressing that advantage. If this doesn’t happen, and education does become heavily automated, it will be cheaper—but it will also be worse.

Similarly, some aspects of healthcare provision can be automated, but there are clearly major benefits to having actual doctors and nurses physically there to interact with patients. If we want to make healthcare more affordable, we will probably have to find other ways (a single-payer health system comes to mind).

For now, it is at least worth recognizing that there are serious limitations in our usual methods of measuring standard of living; due to effects like necessitization, the statistics can say that we are much richer even as we hardly feel richer at all.