Against busyness

A nice post at the HBR blog by Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia and Anat Keinan describes how being busy is now celebrated as a symbol of high status.

This is not natural. Marshall Sahlins has shown that in hunter-gather societies (which were the human condition for nine-tenths of our existence) people typically worked for only around 20 hours a week (pdf). In pre-industrial societies, work was task-oriented; people did as much as necessary and then stopped. Max Weber wrote:

Man does not “by nature” wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose. Wherever modern capitalism has begun its work of increasing the productivity of human labour by increasing its intensity, it has encountered the immensely stubborn resistance of this leading trait of pre-capitalistic labour. (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (pdf), p24)

The backward-bending supply curve of labour was normal.

E.P. Thompson has described (pdf) how pre-industrial working hours were irregular, with Mondays usually taken as holidays. He, and writers such as Sidney Pollard (pdf) and Stephen Marglin, have shown how the working day as we know it was imposed by ruthless discipline, reinforced by Christian moralists. (There’s a clue in the title of Weber’s book).  Marglin quotes Andrew Ure, author of The Philosophy of Manufacturers in 1835:

The main difficulty [faced by Richard Arkwright] did not, to my apprehension, lie so much in the invention of a proper mechanism for drawing out and twisting cotton into a continuous thread, as in…training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automation. To devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright…It required, in fact, a man of a Napoleon nerve and ambition to subdue the refractory tempers of workpeople accustomed to irregular paroxysms of diligence.

Today, though, such external discipline is no longer so necessary because many of us – more so in the UK and US than elsewhere – have internalized the capitalist imperative that we work long hours, as Bellezza, Paharia and Keinan show*. Which just vindicates a point made by Bertrand Russell back in 1932:

The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own.

In some cases, though, such long hours are inefficient even by capitalistic standards. In fund management, for example, laziness can pay off**. Shann Turnbull’s idea of the cybernetic company suggests that a well-run firm should in many respects run itself without the need for busy management. And I suspect that in many creative occupations, we get our best ideas in the bath or just chilling.

Russell said that “a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work.” I suspect the harm isn’t just cultural – important as that is – but also economic. In fact, most economists agree we'd be happier of there were more public holidays.

All of this is, of course, a fancy way of saying that I’m going on holiday.

Happy Christmas everyone.

* Personally, I believe the opposite. If a man still needs to work hard after an Oxbridge education and thirty years of house price inflation, there's something wrong with him.

** One reason for this is that fund managers have only a handful of good ideas and time spent looking beyond these encounters diminishing returns. In fact, the returns might be negative, if research causes the manager to chase noise rather than buy genuinely under-priced assets.

Comments

[Aaron Headly]

A good manager I knew was once asked what he did all day. "Well, if I'm doing my job right, pretty much nothing" was his answer.

[Luis Enrique]

this is only second-hand information, but the celebration of busyness is very Japanese. I think they have a special word for doing a funny walk-run on the way to the photocopier to make it look like you're super busy. They suffer from terrible presenteeism, and it's totally acceptable to fall asleep in meetings because it's a signal of how terrifically busy you are. A friend of mine was once in a meeting where everybody there except her fell asleep.

[Richard]

Have a good holiday, don't work too hard!

[ejh]

"Personally, I believe the opposite. If a man still needs to work hard after an Oxbridge education and thirty years of house price inflation, there's something wrong with him."

Funnily enough I finished my Oxford exams thirty years ago last summer. Alas no sign yet of an end to the grind.

[Jim]

"If a man still needs to work hard after an Oxbridge education and thirty years of house price inflation, there's something wrong with him"

Thats nice for those with an Oxbridge education, what about the other 99%?

[James]

I wonder how much of this is due to coming through a period of relatively high unemployment. Previously most people not engaged in work were not engaged through choice - the retired, those studying etc.. Now work is seen less as a grind and more of a privilege.

As someone who has spent time unemployed I can sympathise with those who envy people who are working hard.

[Eminent emigrant]

(Obligatory "I'm not a racist but...")
This may be a terrible caricature, but your description of pre-industrial man sounds very... African.

[Parus major]

Which 'Christian moralists' assisted capitalism? G. K. Chesterton for one certainly didn't, railing furiously and consistently against the treament of workers under the contemporary sweating regimes. *Social* historians, who are mostly Marxist-leaning, and therefore likely to suffer an anti-Christian bias, are not to be trusted entirely when it comes to the business of social summaries, I feel.

In fact I can see nothing in orthodox Christianity that would allow anyone to support or oppose any particular political or economic system per se*. Christians should derive their social positions from dogmas about the real nature of man (which would mean that capitalists are prone to sin like everyone else, something which escaped Mrs Thatcher when it came to the Gospels, in her famous attempt to co-opt Christianity for the 'free' market). If certain moralists justified capitalist practices, they certainly weren't doing it *as Christians*, even though they technically might have been considered Christian by others.

*As Chesterton pointed out, all economic systems employ 'capital'. He thought contemporary capitalism should have rather been called 'Proletarianism' in view of the concentration of wealth and property in the hands of a diminishing few. Hardly a 'right-wing' position is it?

[Peter K.]

Happy Holidays. I've enjoyed your blogging all year.

[Dave Timoney]

@Parus major,

Chesterton wasn't a Christian, he was a Catholic (and a famous lover of paradoxes). I would echo Chris's pointer to the title of Weber's famous work. The belief that capitalism instrinsically serves the "work of God" comes from Protestantism. Catholic doctrine tends more towards corporatism - the integration of capitalism within a "natural order" - which in turn reflects history: Protestantism as a disruptive force and post-Reformation Catholicism as a conservative one

[GregvP]

@Eminent emigrant: No, not African. Human.

You're not paying attention. Look around you. If you're in an office (and not a call centre or the like), you'll see people working intermittently and goofing off-er, looking up something on the internet-for half the time. And meetings. Most meetings are just social grooming and cultural conditioning, contributing nothing to the bottom line.

If you're involved in childcare, you'll see the same patterns. And in finance. And the medical industry. And real estate. And the same is true for most other industries.

@Parus: Chesterton is irrelevant, having been born at least two hundred years too late. Think of the Lutherans, Calvinists, and Puritans-- especially the last. We still call the attitude described by Russell in Chris's quote Puritanical.

[Jim]

"If you're in an office (and not a call centre or the like), you'll see people working intermittently and goofing off-er, looking up something on the internet-for half the time. And meetings. Most meetings are just social grooming and cultural conditioning, contributing nothing to the bottom line."

Try looking at people with proper work to do, involving actual stuff. Houses don't build themselves while you 'goof off' on the internet, nor do cabbages get picked or cars get assembled.

[Bob]

"a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work"

OK. But we still need quality leisure time. What do you suggest people do with their day? That is as much of a problem as bad work and downsides of work.

[Matthew]

Having recently gone from employment to self employment I have realised how much of the stuff I did when office based was makework bullshit. Now I am self employed (and earning much the same as I did before) I perform tasks that need doing and then stop. Sometimes I work harder than I did before , but mostly substantially less.

[Innocent Abroad]

"If a man still needs to work hard after an Oxbridge education and thirty years of house price inflation, there's something wrong with him"

Or a divorce or three...