Working less

Many people believe we need to work less if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. We must “dramatically reduce economic activity” says George Monbiot. “We should cut working hours to save the planet” agrees Simon Kuper.

In truth, though, there are other reasons to work less, as Martin Hagglund argued in his brilliant This Life. Our most fundamental possession, he says, is time, and we can only be truly free if we can choose what to do with this scarce asset. For many of us, though, having to work long hours or for many years deprives us of this freedom.

Which runs into the objection that working significantly less would be bad for the economy.

Hagglund’s solution to this is ingenious. What we need, he says, is a “revaluation of value”. We must judge economic success not by how much we produce, but rather by how much free time we have:

To be wealthy is to be able to engage the question of what to do on Monday morning, rather than being forced to go to work in order to survive.

He believes such wealth – such freedom – is impossible under capitalism. Yes, capitalism tries to economise on labour. But it does do erratically and inequitably, by creating unemployment (with the misery it causes) alongside others who work too much.

History suggests he has a point. Working hours increased markedly during the industrial revolution, as E.P. Thompson described (pdf). And whilst they’ve fallen since the late 19^th century, the average working week is longer now than it was in the 15^th century. (I'm using Bank of England data here.) What’s more, the pace of decline in working hours seems to have slowed. In the 30 years to 2019 they dropped less than 6%, compared to an 18% fall in the 1959-89 period: this fact might be connected to the weakening of trades unions in this time.

Of course, working hours are but one measure. By another, free time has increased hugely since the early 20^th century because many of us are enjoying long retirements now. But progress here has stalled. The state pension age has risen, and young people – unable to save because of high rents - expect to work until they drop.

Which suggests Hagglund is right to say we need some radical economic changes if we are to increase free time.

Two other facts suggest as much.

One is that the smaller is the economy, the larger will be the share of government spending therein. If the economy shrinks spending on health and social care will not, so these will take up a bigger share of activity. Jason Hickel says that degrowth is compatible with increasing “people’s access to the resources they need to live long, healthy, flourishing lives.” But that means a big increase in the share of social spending in economic activity. Degrowth – for environmental or Hagglundian reasons – requires decommodification*.

The other is that whilst we wealthy people could easily work less and consume less, those who are working long hours just to get by cannot. One solution to this would be a cultural revalorization of work, to recognize the low-paid as being the skilled workers they in fact often are. But another would be greater redistribution, as Monbiot acknowledges.

In fact, we’ll need redistribution in another sense – from landlords to tenants. Hagglund’s democratic socialism would reduce capitalist exploitation, the fact that we work longer than necessary for the benefit of capitalists. But if we are to work less we also need to reduce rentier exploitation, the fact that we work longer than necessary to pay landlords. Otherwise, working less would mean handing over an even bigger share of one’s wages to landlords.

The inference is clear: cutting working hours and output cannot be an isolated change. It requires other big cultural and economic changes.

Which runs into a problem: how would such changes affect productivity?

You might think this irrelevant for green degrowthers. I’m not sure. Even if we are shrinking GDP we need to improve energy efficiency. And Hagglund’s vision of more time increasing our freedom requires that productivity be high. The sooner we can get our work done the sooner we can knock off, and some of us will want to spend our freer time on some activities that consume resources.

But raising productivity is a massive task even in the best of times. It requires that we overcome not just vested interests but also Baumol’s law (it’s hard to raise productivity in many services), diminishing returns, and a lack of big innovations. Indeed, it might be that it’s impossible to do so, as productivity is determined by global factors rather than those under the influence of national governments.

And shrinking output and working hours would add to these obstacles.

For one thing, it would put us on the wrong side of Verdoorn’s law, the correlation between aggregate demand growth and productivity growth. If companies are to invest in energy or labour-saving technologies they need confidence that future demand will be sufficient to cover the cost of doing so. Degrowth reduces that confidence.

And for another, technical progress and innovation require competition: a lot of productivity growth comes not from incumbents upping their game, but from new entrants and exits (pdf). But degrowth increases the share of the social sector in GDP and shrinks the share of markets.

We mustn’t be wholly pessimistic, however. We’ve decent evidence (pdf) that cutting working hours – at least moderately – can raise productivity (pdf). And socialism could remove the barriers to productivity created by inequality and managerialism, not least by encouraging worker coops.

Nevertheless, all this leaves us with a big question: how to reconcile socialism with the competition necessary (but not sufficient!) to raise efficiency? This is made all the more difficult because nobody in British politics seems to be thinking about it*.

But there’s another issue here. Working significantly less is not a change in degree but one of kind. And it’s one many of us will struggle to adjust to. As Maynard Keynes wrote in a famous essay (pdf):

There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.

Being free from work can mean being free from roles, from meaning: think of the ennui endured by the women in Jane Austen novels or housewives such as Betty Draper in the mid-20^th century. I’ve a sense of this myself. I’m planning on retiring next year, but I approach this as my teenage self regarded beautiful girls – with desire mixed with fear.

I fear there’s a bigger danger. Recent years have confirmed what Benjamin Friedman wrote in 2006:

The history of each of the large Western democracies – America, Britain, France and Germany – is replete with instances in which [a] turn away from openness and tolerance, and often the weakening of democratic political institutions, followed in the wake of economic stagnation that diminished people’s confidence in a better future.

The biggest support for the Green party, remember, came in 1989 – at the peak of a boom.

Which provides another challenge for degrowthers: how to prevent lower GDP leading to reactionary politics?

If all this reads like a critique of degrowth, it shouldn’t. Rather, my scepticism is directed towards a particular type of politics – very often found among centrists as much as on the left - which I’ll call the “if I were king” conception. We should not think of policies as standalone interventions imposed from the top down. Instead, they are embedded in, and arise from, particular cultures and configurations of class interests. Policy is endogenous.

I don’t think this is a counsel of despair. It is to say that the left and greens must campaign for the cultural change without which degrowth is impossible. The precedent here is perhaps free market ideas in the 50s and 60s. These were marginalized, but years of often-neglected work by campaigners and thinktanks eventually led to them becoming accepted in the 80s. You can do a lot of important political work without having power.

* The papers cited in this sentence are paywalled – hence the links to scihub. Yes, there is irony in this fact.

** I am perhaps unique in believing that the decline in interest in market socialism is one of many intellectual wrong turns we have made in recent years.

Comments

[Paddy Carter]

"Hagglund’s solution to this is ingenious. What we need, he says, is a “revaluation of value”. We must judge economic success not by how much we produce, but rather by how much free time we have"

This is not the same thing, but not unadjacent to:

Utility = f(Consumption, Leisure)

the standard formulation in economics that, one might argue, has not had as much influence as one might have imagined.

[rsm]

Is Benjamin Friedman blatantly cherry-picking his data, and assuming ergodicity?

Did the economic stagnation of the Great Depression lead to Roosevelt's relative tolerance?

Did 2008's economic stagnation lead to Obama's relative tolerance, despite what Friedman wrote in 2006?

Did 2020's economic stagnation lead to Biden's relative tolerance, once again going against Friedman's 2006 prediction?

Conversely, was economic growth in the 1980s accompanied by the rise of intolerance for drugs ("Just say no") and homosexuality?

Does the Easterlin paradox, when considered with Friedman's theory, mean that tolerance and openness don't make people happy?

Should we stop using GDP in public policy, because it is a political statistic that is half made-up and is never reported with the statistical error margins that intellectual honesty demands?

《we’ll need redistribution in another sense – from landlords to tenants.》

Why not simply buy back land from voluntary sellers, and make it commons again? Can landlords make far higher returns from financial derivatives which free them from having to own any of the underlying?

[Blissex]

Our blogger is a bit behind the times: thanks to Thatcher, Blair, and their successors, millions of UK people have chosen a "working less" policy, thanks to massive bonuses, profits, capital gains from working in finance or owning property and shares, Whether in Dubai, Rutland, Portugal, or on a cruise ship, they are working part time, or have retired, comfortably enjoying their free time.

Sure, someone have to "work until they drop" to pay for all that, but it is mostly mostly "losers" or immigrants, who cannot vote or don't vote, and they don't matter anyhow, as no major party represents them.

«the left and greens must campaign for the cultural change without which degrowth is impossible.»

The issue is obviously not "degrowth": thanks to the "cultural" change of thatcherism, the GDP of renters and workers has been degrowthed very successfully for 40 years, and the corresponding gains of owners of property and shares or executives and traders in finance has enabled them to work a lot less, either retiring early or working part time.

The change required is actually a distributional, not cultural, change and there are powerful interests that oppose that, and no major party represents those who would benefit from it.

Only an collapse of the rentierist model and a temporary alliance of productive capitalists and workers can then change the distributional model.

[Blissex]

«The precedent here is perhaps free market ideas in the 50s and 60s. These were marginalized, but years of often-neglected work by campaigners and thinktanks eventually led to them becoming accepted in the 80s.»

This is one of the most stunningly naive opinions by our blogger, who is presenting here the hacks working for property and finance interests as "marginalized" and "often-neglected" and yet still winning a wykehamist debate of ideas.

Happily disregarding how they were funded by wealthy rentier interests, and their often fantastic claims were repeated and amplified by media owned by wealthy rentier interests.

[Blissex]

Along with the usual uselessness like this: “Can landlords make far higher returns from financial derivatives which free them from having to own any of the underlying?”

There is this interesting point which hints at some useful topics:

«Should we stop using GDP in public policy, because it is a political statistic that is half made-up and is never reported with the statistical error margins»

Indeed the GDP index is largely made-up and it should be mentioned with error estimates (IIRC most national statistic agencies do report in footnotes some guesses of the possible counting errors).

There are two implicit important points in that rhetorical question:

* What is usually mentioned is not "GDP", which is a vector of physical quantities, but some (arbitrary) GDP *index*, constructed from GDP and some (arbitrary) vector of prices.
Sometimes it gets worse and GDI ("I" for "Income") is reported as if it were GDP ("P" for "Production"), as if all reported incomes resulted from production (following J.B. Clark).

* "statistical error" can relate to one of two things (descriptive and inferential statistics) that are often confused: the most common one is estimation error, if the "measure" is on a *sample* and it is used to estimate the same "measure" on the population, and counting or arithmetic error if the statistic is on the population itself.
Since GDP is supposed to be a descriptive statistic of a population (gross domestic production), not of a sample, the error estimated for it would be a counting or arithmetic one (by and large, even if some components of production are estimated from samples), not something like a confidence interval like for inferential statistics.

[Tim Worstall]

I adamantly refuse to believe any data at all on working hours that doesn't include household production hours.

So much so that I'd argue - not prove, just argue - that total working hours went down at the IR. That abolition of spinning as a major female household task makes up for an awful lot of factory going.

[Jim]

Mmmm, I would like to be a comfortably off landowner like the family Austen. With a good living off the CoE chucked in. But those Georgian silver teapots did not make themselves and the tea did not come to Hampshire by magic and someone had to dig up the clay and coal to make the bone china as well as grow the corn and raise the beef.

Fundamentally they were spongers. Ms Austen wrote nice stories built around the antics of spongers. We would all like to live on free handouts.

Work less? Have you seen the 'second jobs' our MPs have? A spot of advising here, a spot of lawyering there. The propensity of humans to cheat and lie and grab property and stuff seems unbounded. I suppose we might get to robots toiling in the fields and driving JCBs on building sites but I think that idea has more than a few snags.

I also doubt that increased leisure will bring peace. One has only to look at segments of academe where there is very little to do or study. Lo and behold, they find all sorts of crazy things to squabble about. Humans seem more and more like up-market monkeys, grabbing all the best bananas and fighting off competition. I am sure we will do nothing to save ourselves.

[rsm]

Blissex, what kind of doublespeak is this?

《Since GDP is supposed to be a descriptive statistic of a population (gross domestic production), not of a sample》

How is GDP different, in theory, from a poll? Don't both use samples to produce a "descriptive" statistic of a population? And doesn't the standard error reflect the statistical uncertainty of so doing?

《the error estimated for it would be a counting or arithmetic one (by and large, even if some components of production are estimated from samples),》

Aren't all production totals estimated from samples? Even government expenditures are extrapolated, because final figures don't come in till long after the GDP for the relevant period has been fixed?

Quoting our blogger's penultimate entry:

《recall basic national accounts identities. These tell us that GDP is the sum of consumer spending (C), government spending (G), investment (I) and net exports (NX). It’s also the sum of incomes: profits (P), wages (W), other incomes such as those of the self-employed (O), and taxes on production (T). 》

How are any of those totals not extrapolated from samples? Does anyone (except an economist, of course) think "Investment" can simply be summed up by taking reported totals from every company in the country? In practice, aren't they doing "inferential" statistics, and thus should calculate and report standard errors associated with each inference from sample to population?

And, when you combine the "Investment" estimate with the "Net Exports" estimate, don't you have to combine standard errors, which means you effectively multiply them (the reader is invited to do internet searches on techniques of combining standard errors)?

In the end, if they reported the actual standard error on their inferences, would it be so wide as to make GDP useless for policy making?

Which is why they don't report standard error?

[GREGORY BOTT]

Degrowth will come because credit events will force liquidation no matter what you think you want. Nations will bankrupt, social structures will liquidate and history will reset. All property and money will be useless. Best not have a large population overgrowth, a Asiatics?????

[ltr]

Terrific essay as usual, but I would lean strongly to the argument that meaningful progress on climate change will necessarily mean emphasis on growth. Indonesians or Indians are not going to support climate change programs that are not producing developing, but such programs can and should support growth as China clearly shows.

[reason]

This statement "... Which runs into the objection that working significantly less would be bad for the economy ..." is meaningless. The economy is a tool - it doesn't have it's own purposes.

[ltr]

Hagglund’s solution to this is ingenious. What we need, he says, is a “revaluation of value”. We must judge economic success not by how much we produce, but rather by how much free time we have:

"To be wealthy is to be able to engage the question of what to do on Monday morning, rather than being forced to go to work in order to survive."

[ The problem is that this may be true through western Europe, but is not true through the global south. What then? ]