Who Wants a Job?

Debunking the fetish of full employment...

(Image: Substack AI)

“The progress of civilization has meant the reduction of employment, not its increase.”

~ Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (1946)

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...

“Work will be optional [...] Currency will be irrelevant.”

So predicted the world’s richest workaholic, Elon Musk, a man for whom one might assume both statements have long been true.

But are they, really?

And what about the rest of us, we flailing uncountables of the non-centibillionaire class?

After 200,000 years of blood, sweat and blisters, is it finally time for mankind to down tools, to bask in the purifying sunlight of a work-free, post-money utopia?

Not so fast...

As with most of our fellow, featherless bipeds, we find ourselves both in agreement and disagreement with Mr. Musk, in roughly that order. Let us begin with the common ground, so that we might warm up to the battle ground.

It may come as a surprise to some readers, but work has been optional for quite some time already. Just not all work...and not for all people.

One need only stand back a little to get a fuller picture...

The Age of Abundance

Mercifully, we savage males no longer embark on multi-day hunting expeditions, dangerous and unpredictable, in order to slay wild beasts to feed our starving families. Nor do our womenfolk spend hours of the day beating rags against rocks along the riverbed to keep our clothes clean and disease-free. Nor do our supple-palmed offspring trek barefoot for hours every morning to fetch potable water from the village well.

At the risk of offending our Maasai brothers and sisters, this is generally considered to be a positive development. Indeed, in our era of whining gloomerism and over-fed problems, getting “back to nature” is not so much a grinding necessity as it is a social status symbol for the cosplaying hobbyist.

In the Modern Age of Affluence, men of means pay princely sums to go on fly-fishing retreats in Patagonia or to hunt big game on the African Savannah. Not because they need to, but because the wish to be away from their wives is apparently undiminished by time and times of plenty.

Meanwhile, bendy, well-heeled women seek the quietude of yoga ashrams in India and meditation retreats in Bali, where they may Eat, Pray and Love their over-nourished hearts out.

This high-end trend is clear enough to witness among the uber rich... but, increasingly, it is true for a growing headcount of humanity, where “selective Ludditism” is a luxury often taken for granted.

Hard Men Make Easy Times

In the 21st Century, Modern Man cans and pickles and preserves not to survive the perilous winter ahead, but because it feels good to “get back to basics.” He plants hipster herb gardens not because basil and bay leaves are beyond the budget, but because he wishes to regain control over his own food, and now he has something called “free time” to prepare it. He salts and dries his meat, not to last for the long voyage at sea, but because Jordan Peterson told him carnivore diets are “in.”

Meanwhile, so-called “trad wives” cosplay traditional gender roles – collecting eggs from the coop and baking scrumptious cookies for the children while husband trots off to the daily grind – all the while amassing millions of Youtube followers... and “phat stack” paychecks that often far outweigh those of workaday hubby.

And it’s not only obnoxious influencers and Brooklyn dads decamped to the farm for the pandemic who are enjoying our era of abundance, either. We are all “guilty” recipients of a vast historical bounty, in which most work has been “optional” since before we even realized it needed doing.

Even the purest “man of nature” is grateful for the technological advances made by his forebears. Rare is the amateur woodworker who also forges his own tools as opposed to having them delivered by Amazon, the recreational sailor who prefers celestial navigation over GPS chart plotters, the fair dinkum farmer who hoes his own rows, proudly eschewing the helping hand of John Deere & Co... a helping hand his ancestors would have welcomed with open arms, to be sure.

Like them or not, these are the dividends of modernity, hard won by hard men and women of yore, who crawled down mineshafts during the day, nursed a clutch of sickly (often fatally so) offspring at night, and endured conditions unimaginable to our lily-white, booksmart minds.

Despite the State

And yet, we did not arrive at our current age of superabundance, in which poverty itself is on the State’s endangered animals list, by fattening public employment rolls, by paying people to dig ditches with spoons, to use Milton Friedman’s wry example of preferencing blind job creation over valuable production. Nor did we arrive here by prioritizing wealth distribution over wealth production, by retarding technological progress, or handing the reins over to committees of congressional blowhards, so that they may “direct” economic energies from on high.

Rather, we arrived here despite the State’s best efforts.

Over time, nations tend to grow wealthier the freer they are, owing to economies of scale, technological innovations, market efficiencies and the phenomenon economist Israel Kirzner calls “learned processes,” the systematic improvement of “alertness,” whereby trial and error and accumulated experience allow us to better identify opportunities in the marketplace, and thus navigate our world.

All this has resulted in less grunt work and a generally higher standard of living for all. As Henry Hazlitt observed in his classic text, Economics in One Lesson:

“The progress of civilization has meant the reduction of employment, not its increase.”

And yet, modern economists remain enamored of “work for work’s sake,” entranced by what Hazlitt called the “fetish of full employment.”

This is no mere accident.

Since roughly the time of the industrial revolution, man has been sold the idea that he is defined, to some increasing degree, by his job. (It took women until their so-called “liberation” to share in this delusion.) Over the years, he was conditioned to measure his self worth in accordance with his job title, and the material possessions his position at the company could thus afford him. His job was not simply an action he performed for a given amount of time, something apart from his identity, but a core characteristic of what he saw when he looked in the mirror every morning and before he laid his weary, company man head down of an evening.

We have always been suspicious of the idea that there is something we ought to do “for a living.” It all seems vaguely... reductionist. One ought to add value where one can, sure enough. But what one does “for a living” ought to be concerned with the voluntary part of one’s life, not the necessary part... one’s avocation, not one’s vocation.

Preference > Position

Most people sense this intuitively. It’s why conversations tend to be infinitely more interesting when they begin with “What do you like to do?” as opposed to “What do you do?” One is a preference... the other a position.

Pose the former question and watch your interlocutor’s eyes light up as he tells you about a few of his favorite things. Ask the latter, and prepare for a drone-a-thon of uninspired shoptalk drudgery, followed by the unmistakable sound of a soul leaving a body.

Married to his job like a mob victim is married to his concrete boots, so man is defined in impolite society by the rate at which he slips beneath the surface.

And yet, it need not be this way. Take, for example, the tale of two men, who pass their days under the hoods of old cars...

One tinkers in his spare time, appreciating the design and craftsmanship of the vintage makes and models, admiring the care and attention to detail and, of course, enjoying the pure pleasure of working with his hands. Though he is not “on the clock,” he spends every free moment in his garage, the soundtrack of his youth on the radio, memories of the back seat in the front of his mind.

The other is a mechanic by trade. With two kids in school and a baby on the way, plus a brand new, 50-year mortgage hanging over his head, he works double shifts whenever he can get them, just to make ends meet. He got into the grease monkey trade because of his love of old cars, but pretty soon, each one comes to look like the last, a series of jobs he needs to get done before he can return home, exhausted, to the strangers he lives with. And now, with all the new “smart” cars on the road, even the work he has grown to loathe is drying up.

Both men do the same work... one with vim and vigor, the other with dread and disgust... but only one endures a “job.”

And yet, doing a job for the sake of doing a job is not progress, as Hazlitt points out:

“The real question is not how many millions of jobs there will be in America ten years from now, but how much we shall produce, and what, in consequence, shall be our standard of living?”

After all, nothing is easier than to indulge the fetish of full employment, says Hazlitt, “once it is divorced from the goal of full production and taken as an end in itself. Coercion can always provide full employment.”

In the end, human beings flourish not because they are shackled to the necessity of menial labor, when they are chained to the proverbial wheel, but when they are emancipated from it and thus able to pursue opportunities of an infinitely higher order.

Whether that’s tinkering under the hoods of old cars, writing unread novels, or building rocket ships to Mars, the master of his own time brings to his task a purpose outside of and apart from “mere” monetary profit, and thereby unlocks a deeper value in his life.

Now, does that mean currency will become “irrelevant,” as Mr. Musk assures us?

Ah, here is where your humble editor differs from the world’s richest man.

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. As always, a big thanks to generous Notes members who help us spread the message of Free Markets, Free Minds and Free People far and wide.

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P.P.S. Speaking of unread books… your editor also moonlights as a pre-award winning novelist. You might even say it is his avocation. Until tomorrow, you can still order the paperbacks in time for Christmas delivery. See here…