Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (38 page)
Read Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition Online
Authors: Charles Eisenstein
The men and women at the ticket counters and gate counters have slightly more stimulating work, work that might take a few days or weeks to master, rather than a few hours, but still, their work falls far short of engaging the ability and creativity of a human being (although it might be satisfying for other reasons, like service to others, making people happy, meeting people, etc.). The same goes for the flight attendants. Only the pilots, air traffic controllers, and mechanics do work that might reasonably occupy the learning capacities of the human mind for more than a few months
.
Strange it is to me, that the very worst, most brutal of all these jobs also receive the lowest pay. I understand the economics of it, but something in me rebels against that logic and wants the baggage handlers, drivers, and cashiers to be paid more, not less, than the pilots
.
Without these menial workers, this airport and this society would not run in its current form. My travel depends on their labor, labor for which they are paid barely enough to survive
.
And why do they consent to such work? Certainly not because of any aspiration to spend their lives doing it. If you can ask one of them why they do it, they will tell you, if they are not too insulted to speak, “I have to do it. I have to make a living, and this is the best work I could find.”
So my trip today is only happening because people are doing jobs they don’t want to do, for the sake of their survival. That’s what “making a living” means. A threat to survival is, essentially, a gun to the head. If I force you to labor for me under threat of death, then you are my slave. To the extent we live in a world that runs on the labor of many people doing jobs that are beneath
human dignity, not just in airports of course, but in factories, sweatshops, plantations, and nearly everywhere else, we live in a slave world. Anything we obtain from the labor of slaves comes at an insupportable spiritual cost: a painful void or disintegrity deep within that makes us ashamed to look people in the eye
.
Can we bear to shrug this away and resign ourselves to living in a slave world? I want to be able to look every man and woman in the eye, knowing that I do not benefit from their indignity
.
* * * *
I have a more selfish motive, too, for not wanting to live in a slave world: the products of slave labor embody the spirit that goes into them. Who but a conscript would produce the crappy, dispirited, toxic, ugly, cheap objects and buildings that surround us today? Who but a slave would be so resentful and unpleasant in providing services?
10
The vast majority of our “goods and services” are made by people who only do so for the money, who only do their work because they “have to.” I want to live in a world of beautiful things created by people who love what they do.
Anyone indoctrinated with the prejudice that work is something objectionable will think me naive to propose a system where no one is forced to work. Who would grow the food? Remove the garbage? Sweep the streets? Work in the factories? I do not suggest that unpleasant work will be eliminated any time soon; just that there will be less and less of it. Already, despite our politicians’ best efforts to create
more
of it in the form of jobs, and despite our best efforts to keep consumption growing, there are fewer “jobs” available.
But who will remove the garbage? Must we resign ourselves to a society where the worst jobs are left to the least fortunate? Must we resign ourselves to a society in which some people must do work that is beneath them, coerced into it by money-based survival pressure? When we agree that some degrading jobs are necessary, and when we agree that we must have an economy that forces some people to do those jobs (or go homeless and hungry), then we are essentially agreeing to slavery: “Do it or die.” So, is it possible to have a modern economy, with its fine division of labor, that doesn’t necessitate careers as toilet scrubbers and garbage collectors? Let us consider the matter in some detail, applied to that epitome of degrading labor, garbage collection.
11
Why do we need garbage collectors in the first place? Why is there so much garbage to collect? It is because we consume so much throwaway junk, because we don’t compost food scraps, and because we use so much packaging that is not reused or recycled. Throwaway products and packaging are possible because they are artificially cheap. Most of the costs of resource extraction and industrial processing to make the packaging are externalized, as is the cost of disposal in landfills and incinerators. When, as proposed in
Chapter 12
, these costs are internalized, throwaway production will become much less economical, and such things as refillable containers will gain an economic logic to reinforce their environmental logic. Similar considerations apply to composting food scraps, as home gardening will gain an economic motivation with the removal of hidden subsidies (transport, water, chemicals,
etc.) for distant mega-agriculture. There is really no reason why we should produce so much trash.
12
The evolution of trash collection will be different in its details from the evolution of factory work, janitorial services, supermarket cashier work, or any of the often unpleasant and degrading occupations that make the world go ’round today. Each will be reduced or eliminated in a different way. Small, multicrop farms eliminate much of the drudgery of stoop labor. Small inns, bread-and-breakfasts, and couch-surfing reduce the need for professional hotel maids. Technology, mechanization, and robotics will continue to obviate assembly-line labor. Incentives to produce fewer but more durable goods reduce manufacturing and increase maintenance and repair work, which is far less routine and more fulfilling. Industrial design will gain a new incentive to minimize tedium rather than cost since jobs will be filled by desire rather than necessity.
Few people will willingly work on an assembly line for eight hours, pick endless rows of tomatoes, or clean toilets all day unless they feel they have no alternative. We will give everyone an alternative; therefore, the economy will have to evolve to eliminate such roles. We won’t need to eliminate them completely. Dishwashing, toilet cleaning, and stoop labor are tedious and degrading only if we do them too long. I have worked on my brother’s small organic farm and with a small construction outfit. None of that work was oppressive because we worked on a small scale doing a variety of
tasks. Sure, there are tedious chores, such as digging three rows of potatoes or cutting slots into two hundred struts, but these weren’t multiday ordeals, and were usually accompanied with banter or afforded an opportunity for reflection. A season or two collecting garbage a few hours a day, or washing dishes, flipping burgers, or cleaning hotel rooms, isn’t so oppressive. Indeed, there are times in life when we want to rest into some routine labor. I have had such times myself, when routine physical labor was a balm to the spirit.
The vast reduction in what goes by the name of “work” today is not going to leave us idle, to dissipate our time in vapid pleasures. I stated above that human needs are finite, but we do have certain needs that are in a sense infinite. The need for connection to nature, the need to love, play, and create, the need to know and be known—none can be satisfied by buying more things. We are attempting to satisfy our need for the infinite through an accumulation of more and more of the finite. It is like trying to build a tower to heaven.
The nonmonetary realm properly includes all that cannot be quantified. Today we live in an overabundance of the quantifiable and a paucity of the unquantifiable: huge but ugly buildings, copious but empty calories, ubiquitous but trashy entertainment. Do you not agree that a shrinking of the money realm would be a refreshing change?
A finite need—calories, shelter, clothing, and so on—is a quantifiable need and thus fits naturally into the realm of commodity and therefore of money. We meet them easily, and indeed, thanks to technology, more and more easily.
13
It stands to reason that we
should have to work less and less hard to meet our finite needs and that a greater and greater proportion of human time and energy could be spent on the infinite: art, love, knowledge, science, beauty. Accordingly, it also stands to reason that a smaller and smaller proportion of human activity be in the money realm, the job realm.
Up until now, we have instead sought to make the infinite finite, and thereby debased art, love, knowledge, science, and beauty all. We have sold them out. When commercial application guides science, we end up not with science but with its counterfeit: pseudoscience in service of profit. When art bows to money, we get “art” instead of
art
, a self-conscious self-caricature. Similar perversions result when knowledge is subordinated to power, when beauty is used to sell product, and when wealth tries to buy love or love is turned toward gaining wealth. But the age of the sellout is over.
The long ascent of the monetized realm is drawing to a close, and its role in our work and our lives is changing so as to upend long-held intuitions, fears, and limitations. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, money has been, increasingly, both a universal means and a universal end, the object of limitless desire. No longer. Its retreat has begun, and we will devote more and more of our energy to those areas that money cannot reach. The growth of leisure, or, more accurately, the growth of labor done for love, goes hand in hand with the degrowth of the money economy. Humanity is entering its adulthood, a time when physical growth ends and we turn our attention to that which we want to give.
1.
Infinitely elastic demand, for example, justifies eternal deferment of a leisure economy based on the so-called lump-of-labor fallacy. I shall rename this the “lump-of-labor-fallacy fallacy,” because this specious “fallacy” says that the amount of labor needed by the economy can always grow; therefore, improvements in technology won’t allow us a shorter workweek or less time devoted to production.
A similar argument, Jevon’s paradox, rests upon the same foundational assumption. Jevon’s paradox says that improvements in efficiency don’t lead to less resource use (including labor), but rather to more. For example, if lighting becomes cheaper, we will use more of it. If we switch to compact fluorescent bulbs that use one-fifth the electricity, we’ll install five times more of them. Since they are so cheap, maybe I’ll install some new ones in my backyard in case we have a party next summer. Applied to the degrowth factors I described above, Jevon’s paradox says that cheaper advertising will mean even more of it. But this, again, assumes an infinite upward elasticity of demand. It assumes that our capacity to use lighting, advertising, and so on is infinite. A more sophisticated version of this argument would say that even if demand is fully saturated in one area, any improvements in efficiency will free up money that will be applied toward some other area. So the assumption is that overall needs are infinite. Accompanying that assumption is another: that there is no limit to the amount of nature, culture, and so on that we can bring into the money realm. In earlier times, it indeed seemed as though nature’s resources were unlimited, but today the limits are obvious. The economically educated reader can apply a parallel logic to other concepts of classical economics, such as Say’s law, the broken window fallacy, and so on. All partake of the story of Ascent: that our rise to dominion over nature will continue forever.
2.
Keynes,
Economic Consequences of the Peace
, 20; emphasis mine. I was alerted to this passage by
www.lump-of-labor.org
.
3.
Moreover, millions more houses are far larger than necessary. In some countries, thirty people live quite happily in the space that an upper-middle-class American family inhabits. Interestingly, the economic depression is beginning to reverse this trend toward isolation and the atomization of family as grown children are forced to move back in with their parents or vice versa.
4.
This would not entail permanent inflation unless the total money supply increased. However, in the system outlined herein, there are many ways to reduce the monetary base to allow a money-supply-neutral social dividend. Besides traditional methods such as taxation and central bank open market operations, the redemption of resource-backed currency could also be employed to control the money supply. Finally, decaying currency and negative interest on bank reserves reduce the money supply by the demurrage rate. Give the current money stock and a demurrage (negative interest) rate of 5 percent, this would allow a money-supply-neutral annual payment of $1,000 per household. If large amounts of other debt instruments are monetized in bailouts, as may become necessary to rescue the financial infrastructure, the revenue from demurrage could easily be ten times that.
5.
Of course, at the same time much larger amounts of public money were being lavished on the very financial institutions that were complicit in the crisis to begin with.
6.
Hassett, “U.S. Should Try Germany’s Unemployment Medicine.”
7.
James, “Cure for U.S. Unemployment Could Lie in German-Style Job Sharing.”
8.
By
uneconomic
I mean that it generates a negative financial return on investment, less even than the demurrage rate. One could make an economic argument that if
all
costs were internalized, and all effects on society and the ecosystem quantified, then all beneficial activity would become economic. However, the quantification of everything is part of the problem. It is better to leave some of the world unquantified and in the realm of the gift.
9.
According to a number of studies by social psychologists and economists, money is only an effective motivator in routine, mindless tasks. For anything requiring creativity and conceptual thinking, the introduction of monetary incentives can actually impede performance. This seems quite obvious, since they would distract from the task at hand. See the work of Dan Pink for more information on this topic.
10.
The fact that people are often friendly and pleasant even in such jobs is testament to the unquenchable nobility of the human spirit.
11.
Degrading, that is, in our perception. Any work that isn’t violent to others can be performed with dignity, playfulness, or love.
12.
The very phenomenon of trash is relatively recent. My ex-wife, growing up in rural Taiwan in the early 1970s, remembers that there was no such thing as a garbage truck in her village. Everything was reused, recycled, composted, or burned. Even today, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, without much infrastructure to support recycling and reuse, my household garbage production is about one-fourth that of my neighbors. So I think it is perfectly reasonable to expect that in a generation, we will need perhaps one-tenth the trash collection that we have today.
13.
The fact that billions of people today are in want of the bare necessities of life isn’t because we can’t meet their needs; it is because we don’t meet their needs (see
Chapter 2
). The reason is an economic system that induces artificial scarcity and misdirects the flow of labor and resources.