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Wednesday, September 7, 2022

On the moral value of work

The title of Peter Coy’s Labor Day op-ed caught my attention: Work Is Intrinsically Good. Or Maybe It’s Not?, NYTimes, September 5, 2022. After quoting Thomas Carlyle, Coy observes:

Many of us agree that work is inherently good, character-building and a manifestation of one’s seriousness and reliability. However, others of us make a forceful argument that work for its own sake is pointless and ridiculous. Who’s right?

The antiwork movement is the one that’s getting most of the attention lately. There’s China’s “lying flat” movement. There’s quiet quitting. There’s the Great Resignation. And there’s the fact that lots of people simply don’t want to work anymore. In the United States, the labor force participation rate has fallen for two decades, and there were more than 11 million unfilled jobs on the last day of July this year.

But on this Labor Day, I want to focus on the other group: those who are anti-antiwork (or simply pro-work).

But then he equivocates, but only for a moment:

Why is work valuable for its own sake, though? In textbook economics, after all, leisure is the good stuff and work is the necessary evil. “How have so many humans reached the point where they accept that even miserable, unnecessary work is actually morally superior to no work at all?” the anthropologist David Graeber asked in a 2018 book.

Last week I read a smart piece of psychological research that I think answers Graeber’s valid question. Its title says it all: “The Moralization of Effort.”

Human beings evolved in societies that valued cooperation, the theory goes. People who work hard tend to be team players. So working hard in primitive societies was a costly but effective way of signaling one’s trustworthiness. As a result, our brains today are wired to perceive effort as evidence of morality. “Just as people will engage in unnecessary prosocial behavior to differentiate themselves as a superior cooperative partner,” the paper says, “displays of effort, including economically unnecessary effort, may serve a similar function.”

This concept isn’t new, but the “Moralization of Effort” paper tests it, and finds strong support for it, using seven clever experiments involving hundreds of people in the United States, South Korea and France. The choice of countries is interesting. Koreans are known to be hard workers. They even have a word for death by overwork: gwarosa. The French work fewer hours than most and pride themselves on their savoir vivre.

Later:

While the work-is-good mind-set may have had evolutionary advantages, it can backfire in the modern world, the authors contend. Millions of workers may “signal moral worth through structured drudgery,” they write, echoing Graeber. “We fear it has also created harmful incentive structures that reward workaholism and joyless devotion to mundane efforts that produce little value beyond the signal of effortful engagement.”

I think the pro-work camp, while quieter, remains larger and more influential than the antiwork camp that’s drawing all the headlines lately. Just look at the strong opposition to the universal basic income idea championed by Andrew Yang and others.

I count myself among those skeptical of the (strenuous) moralization of work. But I’m not sure what to replace it with.

There’s more at the link.

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Two posts on the skeptical side:

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