So, What Do You Do?
The next installment, as we inch closer to revealing my current best hoped solution to the value crisis.
[This article is part 2 of a 4-part series. Minimal prerequisite reading might be this.]
Since jobs equate to both the survival of every worker, and the continuance of the economic growth that all success is measured by, the preservation of jobs is the number ONE responsibility of all governments—so much so that this tenet applies across the entire political spectrum.
“So, what do you do?”
The ubiquitous first question that we pose to a new acquaintance in a non-vocational setting, partly to find something in common to talk about, and partly to determine our relative status (in the interpersonal sense).
It’s true. To your friends and family, you might be a person, but to the rest of the world, you are your job. Since salary is how we recognize value, and GDP is how we score our society, if you are unemployed, toiling to keep a home and family afloat, or devoting your hours in volunteerism, you officially mean nothing. You literally don’t count in the scoring process.
Slavery?
A key part of the definition of slavery is “involuntary servitude” - having no choice but to serve someone else. Our society is currently structured such that everyone* needs an income in order to survive. If you don’t have a job, (and are not some of the excepted few*), you’ll be starving on the streets. Might that not be considered a form of involuntary servitude?
* (The exceptions to “everyone” include the independently wealthy, or those dependent on the generosity of others—minority exceptions which I will conveniently ignore for this article. There is also an admitted bias to “Western” society—that being my predominant audience.)
There are plenty of people who really enjoy their work, and this is not surprising. Humans are programmed to be productive and happy to contribute to society—especially when such contributions are acknowledged by others. However, when we make a job explicitly necessary to survival, some interesting effects occur.
Think about it. We want to live, and society says that the only way to do that is to have a job. We all think that our growing population means there’s more work to do (and there is obviously something to that), but, given our incredible strides in efficiencies, what if it were more accurate to say that a growing population means that there are simply more people that need jobs? To lift a key learning from my second book:
“Jobs are used to grow the economy so that the economy can provide more jobs to make growth possible. Neither jobs nor economic growth are essential for anything but each other.”
We are slaving away at a trap of our own creation. Our entire economic system is based on debt—both in terms of the math of virtual debt, and the consumption of resources faster than they can be replaced. Humanity’s shameful records on wasted energy, wasted material resources, wasted lives, wasted food, and wasted landscapes, are almost all due to our economic need for production to continue at all costs, putting the lowest possible salaries in the hands of potential consumers, just so that the system can attempt to pay the interest on those debts, while continuing to bulldoze our environment in ever-widening circles.
Where does all of that leave our innate, human, qualitative values? Our search for connection, beauty, joy, wonder, knowledge, and meaning? Such instinctive pursuits are difficult to reconcile with an upbringing and education geared to instilling your job as being your eventual purpose—one that will directly and indirectly consume well over 50% of the best waking hours of your life. And how do we resolve this collective cognitive dissonance? By adopting number-based values as the predominant driving force of society, where More is ALWAYS Better.
If you want to be happy, you need a job.
Government By the Jobs, For the Jobs
This brings us to an extremely important realization about the role of government in dealing with any existential crisis, like Climate Change. Since jobs equate to both the survival of every worker, and the continuance of the economic growth that all success is currently measured by, the preservation of jobs is the number ONE responsibility of all governments—so much so that this tenet applies across the entire political spectrum.
(I might add that politicians preserving their own job has equal importance here.)
Anyone who wonders why a government does not take more action on a particular issue, despite promises and international agreements, etc. need only ask one question: What is the effect on jobs? Governments know that many of their citizens are very concerned about the environment and the well-being of both the population and the planet. Governments also know that any threat to jobs is NOT to be implemented, and that they would be thrown out of office forthwith, were such actions to be taken.
“I want you to address climate change. But don’t you dare mess with my job.”
In Part 1 of this little series on solving the value crisis, I showed a diagram of four components of happiness, which all seemed to need money. Let’s expand that diagram of dependencies to show how we currently meet those components, and what it leads to:
So, in this very crude simplification of what is obviously a highly complex process, I am suggesting that our current implementation of how to achieve happiness leads directly to some of civilization’s most damaging behaviours.
The concept of having a job and going in to work is such an everyday phenomenon (almost literally!), that we simply assume it’s a natural thing that has always been, and will continue unaltered into the future. I have already shown above how it is a critical factor in Ecological Overshoot, and how it ties the hands of government action. I draw your attention to three other crises looming closely in the coming years: (1) Artificial Intelligence is predicted to replace a huge swath of our labour force with automation. (2) The scale of wealth and social inequity is poised to exceed anything in our history, going back to the pharaohs of Egypt. And (3) while there are still arguably too many humans on the planet, the birth rate in many countries might actually be plummeting, sending the balance of the labour demographic (and thus our economic paradigm) into collapse. The hinge pin of all of these? Jobs.
So, it is the critical linkage in the blue box that I want to look at next, in Part 3.
I'm hearing more "mainstreaming" of the idea of a guaranteed minimum income. Although this solves the problem of what we do when the economy goes into an Overshoot-induced long-term slide it hardly feels plausible that in today's political environment that such a scheme would come into being, unless the MAGA movement morphs into something unrecognizable, which was always a possibility.