Peter Frase

We seem, mercifully, to have reached a bit of a [backlash](http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/3/nate-silver-new-mediajournalismwebstartups.html) to the [data journalism](http://www.salon.com/2014/04/21/538s_existential_problem_what_a_mystifying_failure_can_learn_from_grantland/)/[explainer](http://theplazz.com/2014/05/2190465/) hype typefied by sites like Vox and Fivethirtyeight. Nevertheless, editors in search of viral content find it irresistible to crank out clever articles that purport to illuminate or explain the world with "data".

Now, I am a big partisan of using quantitative data to understand the world. And I think the hostility to quantification in some parts of the academic Left is often misplaced. But what's so unfortunate about the wave of shoddy data journalism is that it mostly doesn't use data as a real tool of empirical inquiry. Instead, data becomes something you sprinkle on top of your substanceless linkbait, giving it the added appearance of having some kind of scientific weight behind it.

Some of the crappiest pop-data science comes in the form of viral maps of various kinds. Ben Blatt [at Slate](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/04/viral_maps_the_problem_with_all_those_fun_maps_of_the_u_s_plus_some_fun.html) goes over a few of these, pertaining to things like baby names and popular bands. He shows how easy it is to craft misleading maps, even leaving aside the inherent problems with using spatial areas to represent facts about populations that occur in wildly different densities.

Having identified the pitfalls, Blatt then decided to try his hand at making his own viral map. And judging by the number of times I've seen his maps of [the most widely spoken language](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/language_map_what_s_the_most_popular_language_in_your_state.html) in each state on Facebook, he succeeded. But in what is either a sophisticated troll or an example of "knowing too little to know what you don't know", Blatt's maps themselves are pretty uninformative and misleading.

The post consists of several maps. The first simply categorizes each state according to the most commonly spoken non-English language, which is almost always Spanish. Blatt calls this map "not too interesting", but I'd say it's the best of the bunch. It's the least misleading while still containing some useful information about the French-speaking clusters in the Northeast and Louisiana, and the holdout German speakers in North Dakota.

The next map, which shows the most common non-English and non-Spanish language, is also decent. It's when he starts getting down into more and more detailed subcategories that Blatt really gets into trouble. I'll illustrate this with the most egregious example, the map of "Most Commonly Spoken Native American Language".

Part of the problem is the familiar statistician's issue of sample size. The American Community Survey data that Blatt used to make his maps is extremely large, but you can still run into trouble when you're looking at a small population and dividing it up into 50 states. Native Americans are a tiny part of the population, and those who speak an indigenous language are an even smaller fraction. The more severe issue, though, is that this map would be misleading even if it were based on a complete census of the population.

That's because the Native American population in the United States is extremely unevenly distributed, due to the way in which the American colonial project of genocide and resettlement played out historically. In some areas, like the southwest and Alaska, there are sizable populations. In much of the east of the country, there are vanishingly small populations of people who still speak Native American languages. And without even going to the original data (although I did [do that](https://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/language/data/other/detailed-lang-tables.xls)), you can see that there are some things majorly wrong here. But you need a passing familiarity with the indigenous language families of North America, which is basically what I have from a cursory study of them as a linguistics major over a decade ago.

We see that Navajo is the most commonly spoken native language in New Mexico. That's a fairly interesting fact, as it reflects a sizeable population of around 63,000 speakers. But then, we could have seen that already from the previous "non-English and Spanish speakers" map.

But now look at the northeast. We find that the most commonly spoken native language in New Hampshire is Hopi; in Connecticut it's Navajo; in New Jersey it's Sahaptian. What does this tell us? The answer is, approximately nothing. The Navajo and Hopi languages originate in the southwest, and the Sahaptian languages in the Pacific northwest, so these values just reflect a handful of people who moved to the east coast for whatever reason. And a handful of people it is: do we really learn anything from the fact there are 36 Hopi speakers in New Hampshire, compared to only 24 speaking Muskogee (which originates in the south)? That is, if we could even know these were the right numbers. The standard errors on these estimates are larger than the estimates themselves, meaning that there is a very good chance that Muskogee, or some other language, is actually the most common native language in New Hampshire.

I suppose this could be regarded as nitpicking, as could the similar things I could say about some of the other maps. Boy, finding out about those 170 Gujurati speakers in Wyoming sure shows me what sets that state apart from its neighbors! OMG, the few hundred Norwegian speakers in Hawaii might slightly outnumber the Swedish speakers! (Or not.) Even the "non-English and Spanish" map, which I generally kind of like, doesn't quite say as much as it appears---or at least not what it appears to say. The large "German belt" in the plains and mountain west reflects low linguistic diversity more than a preponderance of Krauts. There is a small group of German speakers almost everywhere; in most of these states, the percentage of German speakers isn't much greater than the national average, which is well under 1 percent. In some, like Idaho and Tennessee, it's actually lower.

I belabor all this because I take data analysis seriously. The processing and presentation of quantitative data is a key way that facts are manufactured, a source of things people "know" about the world. So it bothers me to see the discursive pollution of things that are essentially vacuous "infotainment" dressed up in fancy terms like "data science" and "data journalism". I mean, I get it: it's fun to play with data and make maps! I just wish people would leave their experiments on their hard drives rather than setting them loose onto Facebook where they can mislead the unwary.

The news that a section of the West Antarctica ice sheet is now [irreversibly](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/science/earth/collapse-of-parts-of-west-antarctica-ice-sheet-has-begun-scientists-say.html) melting into the ocean is awesome and terrifying. As a vivid illustration of the scale of climate change, it merits the aghast reactions that I've seen from the lefties around me.

Yet I can't help but think about what I wrote [recently](http://www.peterfrase.com/2014/03/the-comforts-of-dystopia/), about another prediction of ecologically driven disaster. That prediction of civilizational collapse turned out to be based on tendentious speculation, while the findings about the Antarctic ice are the product of extended research by two separate teams of serious researchers. So in this case, it's tremendously valuable to know what's happening no matter what the political impacts are.

But I once again wonder if the publicity around these findings will wind up doing much good. It certainly could, if the combined enormity and easy comprehensibility of this new finding gets more people to take climate change seriously.

Yet I fear it will, instead, mostly be taken up by people who already make "being very serious about climate change" a significant part of their identity. And if the news is read in an apocalyptic way, it can as easily breed fatalism as political will.

While the irreversible nature of the melting ice sheet is touted above all else, just as important is the time scale over which it will unfold. The rise in sea levels, which could be five feet, ten feet, or even more, will occur over the span of a century or more. From the New York Times article:

> The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis.

While 100 years is an infinitesimal amount of time in geological terms---hence what makes the phenomenon so shocking and important---it is nevertheless an extremely long time in the context of an industrialized human society. It's hard to imagine human society dealing with environmental changes of this magnitude, but perhaps no more so than picturing the regimes of 1914 reckoning with the upheavals of the past century.

Societies will adapt, even if those adaptations will entail enormous expenses and dislocations. And indeed, adaptation is already happening. This mostly doesn't mean fanciful [geoengineering](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/25/geoengineering-side-effects-potentially-disastrous-scientists) schemes, but rather things like the [secretary of Housing and Urban Development](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/magazine/how-to-think-like-the-dutch-in-a-post-sandy-world.html) working with a water management expert to bring Dutch water-control techniques to the United States, or congress debating the impacts of [flood insurance](http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/03/bill_blocking_large_flood_insu.html) policy on low income homeowners.

It's true, as Matt Karp [writes](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/a-second-civil-war/) at *Jacobin*, that overturning the fossil fuel-based economy will require a monumental political struggle and a massive redistribution of wealth. But we should not think merely in terms of an epochal battle to either defeat Big Oil and "save the planet" or else perish. Equally important is to contest the adjustments and adaptations that we now know *must* be made, even if we could somehow decarbonize the economy tomorrow.

These adaptations will impose costs and burdens, and the ruling class will do what it can to impose those burdens on those who can least bear them. In other words, the politics of climate change are and will continue to be intertwined with class struggle across all domains, not just in the fight against the fossil fuel industry. I believe, of course, that socialism is also the best answer to the ecological crisis. But I also agree with [Christian Parenti](http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/a-radical-approach-to-the-climate-crisis) that "in the short-term, realistic climate politics are reformist politics, even if they are conceived of as part of a longer-term anti-capitalist project of totally economic re-organization."

To me, Marco Rubio's [climate change denialism](http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-rubio-denies-climate-change-20140511-story.html) and Obama's [dithering](http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/203169-11-senate-dems-press-obama-to-give-keystone-the-green-light) over the Keystone pipeline are at least as terrifying as the latest word from Antarctica. As is the rise of a [climate apartheid](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2014/jan/21/new-privatized-african-city-heralds-climate-apartheid) that allows the rich to evade the consequences of a warming world. Fortunately, our immediate political obstacles, unlike the movements of the glaciers, are at least potentially susceptible to change through collective action.

I've been having some conversations about Occupy and its legacy, and whether it "succeeded". I tend to think that if such a question is meaningful at all, I'd have to answer by going the [Zhou Enlai](https://mediamythalert.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/too-early-to-say-zhou-was-speaking-about-1968-not-1789/) route. But then I was thinking about the improbable media breakout of Thomas Piketty and his doorstop treatise *Capital in the 21st Century*.

A few years ago, Piketty and his colleague Emmanuel Saez were obscure economists, well known to income data nerds like me but otherwise anonymous as they went about generating pictures like this:

Then Occupy happened, and we saw things like this:

And now we have this:

Both Piketty's theory and Occupy's practice are open to criticism---some of both will be forthcoming in *Jacobin*. And of course the salience of inequality, and hence Piketty's star profile, aren't wholly a product of Occupy. Still, one could hardly ask for a simpler illustration of the dialectic of theory and practice, and of Marx's [contention](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/law-abs.htm) that "theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses."

Having filed my taxes in my customarily last-minute fashion, I thought I'd get in on the tax day blogging thing. Via [Sarah Jaffe](http://adifferentclass.com/), I came upon the following interesting passage from Victor Navasky's history of the Hollywood blacklist, [*Naming Names*](http://www.amazon.com/Naming-Names-Victor-S-Navasky/dp/0809001837):

> Conversely, during the blacklist years, which were also tight money years for the studios, agents often found it simpler to hint to their less talented clients that their difficulties were political rather than intrinsic. Since agents as a class follow the money, it is perhaps a clue to the environment of fear within which they operated that, for example, the Berg-Allenberg Agency was, even in late 1948, ready, eager, willing, and able to lose its most profitable client, Dalton Trumbo (at $3000 per week he was one of the highest paid writers in Hollywood)---and this even before the more general system of blacklisting had gone into effect.

The first thing that struck me about this that wow, that's a lot of money. It's not clear where the figure came from. But Navasky did interview Trumbo for the book, so I have to assume it came from the man himself. Now, presumably Trumbo wasn't working all the time, but rather getting picked up for various jobs with slack periods in between. But supposing for a moment that he did: $3000 a week (or $156,000 a year) would be a pretty cushy life *now*, so it would have been an astronomical amount of money in 1948. (And it's highly likely that there were people in Hollywood who were making that much. Ben Hecht is said to have gotten [$10,000 a week](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0372942/bio).)

The second thing is to note that even being as rich and famous as Dalton Trumbo wasn't enough to protect him from the blacklist. In general, of course, the rich stick together and protect their own. But there are some lines you still can't cross, and the blacklist was one of them. In the end, ideological discipline trumped the solidarity of rich people. Which is what makes the rare radical defectors from the ruling class so significant.

But my final thought was, I wonder what Trumbo's net income would have been, had he made that much money? After all, that was the heyday of high marginal tax rates in the United States, those legendary 90 percent tax brackets that seem so unimaginable to people now. So I got to wondering how much Trumbo would have paid in taxes then, and how much he would have paid on a comparable amount of money today.

Fortunately, the Tax Foundation provides excellent data on historical tax rates. I used the spreadsheet [here](http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/fed_individual_rate_history_nominal_adjusted-2013_0523.xls), which describes the federal income tax regimes from 1913 to 2013. Using that data, we can get a rough approximation of how much our hypothetical Dalton Trumbo would have paid in taxes, although of course it doesn't take into account any particular deductions or loopholes that may have played into an individual situation---and it's well known that few people actually paid the very high marginal rates of that time. So take this as a quick sketch, meant to demonstrate two things. First, how much our tax rates have changed, and second, how marginal tax rates really work.

Here's a table showing how Trumbo's income would have broken down in 1948. Each line shows a single tax bracket. The first three lines show that rate at which income in that bracket was taxed, and the lower and upper bounds that defined which income was taxed at that rate. The last two columns show how much income Trumbo received in each bracket, and how much tax he would have owed on it.

This is a nice illustration of how marginal tax rates work. There is still, unbelievably, widepread confusion about this. People think that if the marginal tax rate is 90 percent on income over $150,000---as it was in 1948---then that means you'll only keep 10 percent of all your income if you make that much money. But Trumbo wouldn't pay 90 percent on all of his $156,000, only on the $6000 that was over the $150,000 threshold.

So what was Trumbo's real, overall tax rate? The tax figures above sum up to a total bill of $117,220. The Tax Foundation data also describes some additional reductions that were applied that year: 17 percent on taxes up to $400, 12 percent on taxes from $400 to $100,000, and 9.75 percent on taxes above $100,000. Taking those reductions into account, the tax bill comes down to $103,521.

So Trumbo would have had a net income of $52,479 in 1948, for an effective tax rate of 66 percent. Now, that's not 90 percent, but some will surely say that this seems like an unreasonably high level, for reasons of fairness or work incentives or whatever. But let's keep in mind just how where our Trumbo falls in the 1948 United States' distribution of income. Here's a graphical representation of the above data:

Each bar is a tax bracket. The width of the bar shows how wide the bracket is, while the height shows the income earned in that bracket. The red-shaded portion shows how much of that income was paid in tax. This is a bit visually misleading, because the amount of income in each bar corresponds only to the *height* of the box, not its volume. But I'll swallow my data-visualization pride for the sake of a quick blog post.

A few things to note about this graph. You can see how much of the income in the higher brackets was taxed away, due to the extremely high rates there. You can also see that the tax system is progressive, because the height of the red bars slopes upward, even when the amount of money contained in the brackets remains the same. But the most important thing to pay attention to is that dotted line that you can barely see on the far left. That's the median personal income in the United States for 1948, which according to the Census Bureau was around $1900. In other words, almost all of this would have been irrelevant to half the population, who would have paid just the lowest rate, 20 percent, on all of their income.

If we adjust Trumbo's income for inflation with the [Consumer Price Index](https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/incpovhlth/2012/CPI-U-RS-Index-2012.pdf), his income would be equivalent to over 1.5 million dollars today. And the tax bill would have been over 1 million dollars. But how would that kind of pay be taxed now? Here's a table like the one above, except applying current tax rates to Trumbo's inflation-adjusted pay:

What a difference 65 years and two generations of neoliberalism makes! Now Trumbo's effective tax rate is only 36.15 percent, and he takes home $968,000 after a $548,000 tax bill. To finish things up, here's a graphical representation like the one above:

This time, most of the income falls into the top bracket. But since the rate there is only 39.6 percent, our hypothetical 2013 Trumbo still keeps most of his money. And once again, these brackets are mostly irrelevant to most of the population---note the line marking median income.

The punchline to this story, of course, is that it was things like the Hollywood blacklist that helped set the stage for the period of conservative reaction that gave us these tax rates. Check this nice [documentary](http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/Trumbo/70081095) on Dalton Trumbo to get a sense of a Hollywood radical who puts most of our contemporary celebrity liberals to shame.

*The spreadsheet used to estimate these figures is [here](http://www.peterfrase.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/TrumboTaxes.xlsx), if you care to play with it yourself.*

I'm currently working on a longer treatment of [Four Futures](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/), my social science fictional speculation about the possible successor systems to capitalism, in a world characterized by pervasive automation and ecological crisis. That book is slotted for *Jacobin*'s [series](http://www.versobooks.com/series_collections/112-jacobin); more about that at a later date.

Four Futures was, itself, an extension of ["Anti-Star Trek"](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/), a post that still gets some love [around the Internet](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-12/levine-on-wall-street-pigs-get-fed-fake-hogs-get-slaughtered) from time to time. The core intuition of both pieces of writing was that while we live in a world that abounds in utopian potential, the realization of that potential depends on the outcome of political struggle. A rich elite that wants to preserve its privileges will do everything possible to ensure that we don't reach a world of leisure and abundance, even if such a world is materially possible.

But one of the things I've struggled with, as a writer, is the tendency of my more speculative writing to mine a streak of apocalyptic quiescence on the radical left. To me, the story I'm telling is all about hope and agency: the future is here, it's [unevenly distributed](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/), and only through struggle will we get it distributed properly. I suppose it's no surprise, though, after decades in retreat, that some people would rather tell themselves fables of inevitable doom rather than tackling the harder problem of figuring out how we can collectively walk down the [path to paradise](http://www.amazon.com/Paths-Paradise-On-Liberation-Work/dp/0861047621).

So of the four futures I described, the one that I think is both the most hopeful and most interesting---the one I call "communism"---is the least discussed. Instead it's exterminism, the mixture of ecological constraints, automation, and murderous elites, that seems to stick in peoples' brains, with the anti-Star Trek dystopia of intellectual property rentiers running a close second.

But strip away the utopian and Marxist framework, and all you have is a grim dismissal of the possibility of egalitarian politics. You get something like [this](http://qz.com/185945/drones-are-about-to-upheave-society-in-a-way-we-havent-seen-in-700-years/#/), from Noah Smith, which echoes my account of exterminism but updates it to our present drone-obsessed times. For a lot of isolated intellectual writer types, it can be perversely reassuring to think that achieving a better world is not just difficult, but actually impossible. How else to explain the appeal of [Chris Hedges](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6BOvprpI6c)?

Another piece of news that recently aroused this sensibility was [this Guardian post](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists) about an alleged "NASA study" predicting the "irreversible collapse" of industrial civilization. Here, via [Doug Henwood](https://twitter.com/DougHenwood/status/447042624269336576), is a [critique](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/03/21/popular-guardian-story-collapse-industrial-civilization/) of the study itself and the lazy media that propagated it. And another Twitterer links to [this](http://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2014/03/16/truly-inane-apocalyptic-journalism-at-the-guardian/), which is even more damning. In short, the study---which the original author didn't even bother to link to---had little to do with NASA, and was a crude theoretical model based on a handful of equations. Frankly, as far as futurology goes, I think "Four Futures" was built on a far sounder scientific foundation.

What depresses me is not so much the perambulations of a crank with a Guardian blog, such people will probably be with us forever. But many people I know and like were eager to share this thinly sourced bit of nonsense around Facebook and Twitter, suggesting that it spoke to a desire for apocalyptic scenarios among ostensibly pragmatic leftists.

This fatalism is the perfect complement to the equally inane positivity that pervades bourgeois discourse, whether it's coming in the form of self-help as [dissected](http://www.alternet.org/story/143187/barbara_ehrenreich%3A_the_relentless_promotion_of_positive_thinking_has_undermined_america) by Barbara Ehrenreich, or as the phony utopianism of silicon valley [plutocrats](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/10/delusions-of-the-tech-bro-intelligentsia/). The ruling class tells us that the future is inevitably bright, while left curmudgeons reassure themselves with the conviction that it's inevitably gloomy. We don't win from playing this game, taking our meager emotional returns while our opponents take their payment in a much more tangible form.

It seems I'm in book-announcing mode this week. Today marks the release of three books from *Jacobin* magazine's [collaboration](http://www.versobooks.com/series_collections/112-jacobin) with Verso Books. The trio includes Benjamin Kunkel's *Utopia or Bust* (slightly silly profile of Kunkel [here](http://www.vulture.com/2014/03/benjamin-kunkel-marxist-novel-utopia-or-bust.html)), Micah Uetricht's *Strike For America* (excerpt [here](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/uncommon-core-chicago-teachers-union/)), and Melissa Gira Grant's *Playing the Whore* (excerpt [here](http://www.thenation.com/article/178683/lets-call-sex-work-what-it-work)). I have my own contribution to this series planned for the future, but more on that later. For those in New York, the launch [event](https://www.facebook.com/events/1394747350786910/) is on Wednesday the 12th.

The books are all worth your time. But I want to especially highlight Melissa's which I think is an incredibly important work. I'm proud that for some time now, *Jacobin* has been consistently putting forward an alternative to the dominant narratives about sex work. I may have been [first](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/03/the-problem-with-sex-work/) to write there on these issues, but that was only opening the door to people far better versed in these issues than I, like [Melissa](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/happy-hookers/) and [Laura Agustín](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/08/prostitution-law-and-the-death-of-whores/).

*Playing the Whore* synthesizes a huge body of theory, research and activism by and for sex workers. But I hope it doesn't get pigeonholed as being about sex, or about sex work, or about feminism, though it is about all those things. There's a huge wealth of insight here about the meaning of contemporary labor, and the many complexities of trying to develop new identities that make class politics possible.

Crucially, the book reorients discussion of sex work in the direction of class politics more generally, and away from dehumanized narratives of victimization or the overwrought feelings of would-be middle class saviors. As Grant says toward the end of the book: "There's one critical function sex worker identity must still perform: It gives shape to the demand that sex workers are as defined by their work as they are by their sexuality; it de-eroticizes the public perception of the sex worker, not despite sex but to force recognition of sex workers outside of a sexual transaction".

Rather than attempt my own clumsy summary, I'll just tease you with more of Grant's own words. Here are some of the lines that stood out to me from each of her ten chapters, which I hope will encourage others to pick up the book and delve into the rich context that motivates them.

* **"The Police"**: "Rather than couching crackdowns on sex work as fighting crime, now some feminists appeal to the police to pursue stings against the sex trade in the name of gender equality. We can't arrest our way to feminist utopia, but that has not stopped influential women's rights organizations from demanding that we try."

* **"The Prostitute"**: "since the middle of the seventies, 'prostitution' has slowly begun to give way to 'sex work.' It's this transition from a state of being to a form of labor that must be understood if we're to understand the demands that sex work is work . . . the designation of sex work is the invention of the people who perform it."

* **"The Work"**: "All that is intentionally discreet about sex work . . . are strategies for managing legal risk and social exclusion and shouldn't be understood as deceptive any more than the discretion and boundaries a therapist or priest may maintain. But this necessary discretion warps under the weight of anti-sex work stigmas and policing."

* **"The Debate"**: "Is this the real fear then: not that more people are becoming prostitutes but that the conventional ways we'd distinguish a prostitute from a nonprostitute woman are no longer as functional?"

* **"The Industry"**: "To insist that sex workers only deserve rights at work if they have fun, if they love it, if they feel empowered by it is exactly backward. It's a demand that ensures they never will."

* **"The Peephole"**: "Surveillance is a way of knowing sex workers that unites the opportunity for voyeurism with the monitoring and data collection performed by law enforcement, by social service providers, or by researchers."

* **"The Stigma"**: "Naming whore stigma offers us a way through it: to value difference, to develop solidarity between women in and out of the sex trade. . . . Whore stigma makes central the racial and class hierarchy reinforced in the dividing of women into the pure and the impure, the clean and the unclean, the white and virgin and all the others."

* **"The Other Women"**: "Sex work informs their analysis of sexualization not because sex workers' lives are important but because sex work makes women who don't do it feel things they prefer not to feel. It is the whore stigma exercised and upheld by other women."

* **"The Saviors"**: "For those working in the antiprostitution rescue industry, sex workers are limited to performing as stock characters in a story they are not otherwise a part of, in the pity porn which the 'expert' journalists, filmmakers, and NGO staff will produce, profit from, and build their power on."

* **"The Movement"**: "Without its student liberation movement, its black liberation movement, its women's liberation movement, and its gay liberation movement I can't imagine San Francisco birthing a prostitutes' rights movement from a houseboat docked Sausalito."

Today marks the English-language publication of Thomas Piketty's eagerly awaited [*Capital in the Twenty-First Century*](http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty-ebook/dp/B00I2WNYJW). I haven't read the book yet, so I can't comment on the adequacy of its approach to the problem of capital in the twenty-first century. But I can comment on a specific problem of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" that turns out to be illuminating.

In his review of the book, Dean Baker [complains](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/capital-in-the-twenty-fir_b_4932184.html) that Piketty's account is overly deterministic, largely due to an inattention to the details of institutional structures which shape the distribution of wealth and income, and which are potentially subject to change by political means. In particular, he draws attention to one of his, [and my](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/), recurring themes: intellectual property. Using drug companies as a case in point, Baker notes that this industry makes up 2 percent of GDP and 15 percent of corporate profits, based entirely on "government granted patent monopolies".

Drug patents may be the most egregious example, but there's plenty more where that came from. After reading Baker's review, I headed over to Amazon, with the thought of picking up an ebook edition of Piketty's book. There I found that the Kindle edition retails for a whopping $27.48, for a grand total of $1.45 in savings over the physical, hardcover edition.

Only copyright law and digital copy protections make this possible, of course---copying an ebook is trivial and nearly costless. And who benefits from that? Presumably some royalties accrue to Piketty and his translator, Arthur Goldhammer. Which I can't really begrudge, although Piketty already enjoys a comfortable faculty position at the Paris School of Economics.

But the other beneficiary is the publisher, Harvard University Press, and it's a bit harder to see how they need the money. HUP is a division of Harvard University, which, some incidental educational operations aside, is primarily an enormous [investment fund](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Management_Company) presiding over $32 billion dollars in [assets](http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/09/harvard-endowment-up-2-billion-to-32-7-billion). Which brings us around to another of Dean Baker's objections, which is that the unusual success of Harvard's investments may not simply be due to the expertise of its financial managers. He proposes insider trading as another plausible (albeit unsubstantiated) explanation: "graduates of these institutions undoubtedly could [provide] their alma maters with plenty of useful investment tips."

All of which is to say that while I laud Piketty's support for increased taxation of income and wealth, the peculiar case of his own book illustrates Baker's important counterpoint. It's a point that could equally be directed at certain Marxists and other leftists, for whom all efforts at reformist politics are doomed to fail *a priori*: "capitalism is far more dynamic and flexible than the way Piketty presents it", and thus we should pay close attention to "the specifics of the institutional structure that is crucial for constructing a more egalitarian path going forward."

I see that a couple of my longtime interests---guard labor and the relationship between wages and productivity---have surfaced in the *New York Times* and the *Economist*, respectively.

The Times published an [article](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/15/one-nation-under-guard/) by the economists Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev, advancing their research on what they call "guard labor": the work of security guards, police, the armed forces, prison staff, and others whose function is chiefly "guarding stuff rather than making stuff", in the words of another economist they quote.

Bowles and Jayadev first proposed the concept of guard labor, as far as I know, in [this paper](http://ideas.repec.org/p/ums/papers/2004-15.html) from about ten years ago. Their basic insight is that maintaining a system of unequally distributed private wealth requires a large amount of repressive labor that is not directly productive. I first drew on their idea a few years ago in my [sketch of the economy of anti-Star Trek](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/) (and I should note that the economics of Star Trek has also gotten another [recent treatment](https://medium.com/medium-long/29bab88d50).) I returned to it in ["Four Futures"](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/), which also considers the increasing significance of guard labor in a society characterized by abundant and unequal wealth alongside ecological scarcity.

In their latest update, Bowles and Jayadev advance their analysis by empirically analyzing guard labor in a cross-national perspective, and relating it directly to income inequality. They find, unsurprisingly, that higher levels of inequality are strongly correlated with a stronger share of guard labor in the economy. To over-simplify only a bit, societies with a greater social distance between the rich and poor require more people to protect the haves from the have-nots. Thus Bowles and Jayadev suggest that reducing economic inequality is an important part of rolling back our increasingly militarized, carceral society.

Meanwhile, at the Economist, we have Ryan Avent (technically unattributed, according to the magazine's annoying convention), writing about an apparently unrelated topic: the [relationship](http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/02/labour-markets-0) among productivity, economic growth, and wage stagnation. The post is long and contains a number of interesting detours, but the basic point is simple: "productivity is often endogenous to the real wage." What this means is that technological change in the production process isn't something that happens independently of what's happening to the wages of workers. Rather, high wages spur productivity growth because they encourage businesses to economize on labor. Conversely, lots of workers competing for jobs at low wages is a recipe for slow growth, because there is little incentive to use labor-saving technology when labor is so cheap.

As it happens, this is exactly what I suggested [a few years ago](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/cheap-labor-and-the-great-stagnation/), in response to Tyler Cowen's theories of technological stagnation. I've [elaborated](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/02/the-dialectic-of-technology/) the point, and even [drawn on](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/03/technological-grotesques/) the mainstream economist Daron Acemoglu, who also crops up in Avent's post. But economics writers have been remarkably resistant to the idea that wages and technology can dynamically interact like this, and the Economist post still treats it as a scandalous proposition rather than something that seems compelling and obvious on its face. Thus we find ourselves trapped in an endless, unhelpful debate about whether or not technology is some kind of independent, inevitable cause of unemployment and wage polarization.

Having examined various aspects of the problems that arise from a glut of too-cheap labor, Avent ends up very close to where I do on these issues, in particular on the value of [reducing labor supply](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/). A higher minimum wage is important, since it provides the necessary incentive to economize on labor. But it's not sufficient, because we also need to reduce the amount of hours of work, both through shorter hours and lower labor force participation. That means something like a Universal Basic Income not tied directly to employment. Which brings us back to the same place Bowles and Jayadev end up as well: massive redistribution to tackle income inequality and share out the benefits of a highly productive economy.

Avent notes with amusing understatement that "redistribution at the scale described above would be very difficult to engineer." It will require, in fact, pitched class struggle of no less intensity than was necessary to build the socialisms and social democracies of the 20th century. But taking that path is the only way to get to something resembling the two egalitarian endings I sketched, as part of my speculative political economy choose-your-own-adventure in ["Four Futures"](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/), which I called communism and socialism. The alternative is to continue along the path Bowles and Jayadev describe, to a society locked down by guard labor---whether that's the rentier dystopia of [pervasive intellectual property](http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/10/heres-why-your-asthma-inhaler-costs-so-damn-much) I called rentism, or the inverted global gulag of [rich enclaves](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2014/jan/21/new-privatized-african-city-heralds-climate-apartheid) scattered across a world of ecological ruin, which I called exterminism.

I'm pleased to see that a silly partisan dispute over an obscure finding in a Congressional Budget Office report has gotten people talking about the merits of working less. Alex Pareene has a good [reaction](http://www.salon.com/2014/02/07/obamacare_discourages_working_great/) to the finding that the Affordable Act will lead some people to quit their jobs: good! As he says, "People should be free from shitty jobs." Even Paul Krugman is [in on the act](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/inequality-and-indignity/), pointing out the dishonesty of right-wingers who praise the dignity of work even as they attempt to make actual work as undignified as possible.

But in a more selfish way, I'm also glad that Kevin Drum is [on hand](http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/02/we-shouldnt-denigrate-diginity-work-even-accidentally) to warn liberals against denigrating the dignity of work. He notes and approves of the fact that "Most people *want* to work, and most people also want to believe that their fellow citizens are working. It's part of the social contract."

This isn't a view confined to liberals, and it crops up in some exchanges I've had with *Jacobin* co-editor Seth Ackerman. In a [response to me](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/05/the-work-of-anti-work-a-response-to-peter-frase/), Ackerman makes a similar argument: "there is . . . an impulse to resent those with 'undeserved' advantages in the distribution of work", and therefore "there will always be this social demand for the equal liability of all to work". Thus he insists that "emancipation from wage-work should happen through the reduction of working-time along the intensive margin", i.e., through a reduction in working hours among the employed. Alex Gourevitch, meanwhile, makes a somewhat [different case](http://thecurrentmoment.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/work-is-potentially-one-good-thing-a-response-to-livingston-and-other-post-workists/), celebrating the value of "discipline" and the "renunciation of desire" against what he perceives as the embrace of pure hedonism and immediacy by anti-work writers.

The problem that crops up in all discussions of this kind, however, is the ambiguity of the term "work", particularly in a capitalist society. It has at least three distinct meanings that are relevant. One, it can mean activity that is necessary for the continuation of human civilization, what Engels [called](http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/preface.htm) "the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life". Two, it can mean the activity that people undertake in exchange for money, in order to secure the means of continued existence. Three, it can mean what Gourevitch is talking about, an activity that requires some kind of discipline and deferred gratification in pursuit of an eventual goal.

These three meanings tend to get conflated all the time, even though they all appear seperately in reality. This is the point I've tried to make going back to my [earliest](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/02/do-they-owe-us-a-living/) writing on this topic. "Work" manifests itself in all eight possible permutations of its three meanings.

There are, most of us agree, some things that are socially necessary, that are undertaken for money, and that require discipline and self-sacrifice. Teaching is the first that comes to mind, in light of the struggles around that profession.

It is hard, at first, to think of something that's necessary and paid but that *doesn't* require some sort of self-discipline or renunciation of desire. But perhaps a pure form of rentier capitalist can be thought to engage in such activity. Simply enjoying a stream of investment income and blowing it on whatever you please is the opposite of self-sacrifice and discipline. And yet the drive to make investments profitable and to satisfy the consumption whims of those with money is the motor that drives a capitalist economy, so it is "necessary" within the context of that system.

By now, the left is pretty conscious of the huge amount of difficult and necessary work that isn't paid, whether it's women raising their children or the [labor](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/02/the-labor-of-social-media/) of social media. Hence the demand for [Wages for Housework](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/08/life-in-writing-selma-james) and, now, [Wages for Facebook](http://www.eyebeam.org/projects/wages-for-facebook).

Some things are necessary for the reproduction of society even though people often do them for free and don't perceive them as disciplined or self-sacrificing. Sex, to take the most obvious example. Of course, sex can also be a disciplined performance undertaken for money. But, as Melissa Gira Grant [explores](http://www.versobooks.com/books/1568-playing-the-whore) in her upcoming book, the existence of sex work can be very discomfiting for people who are emotionally invested in the idea of sex as a space of pure non-work. But that, I'd argue, is itself a symptom of our confused and fetishistic conception of what work is.

Meanwhile, some of the things people *do* work very hard to get paid for are of dubious social utility. The people who design high frequency trading algorithms are undoubtedly hard-working and ingenious. But it's hard to justify what they do even within the parameters of a capitalist economy, which is why calls for a [financial transactions tax](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/10/its-time-for-a-tax-to-kill-high-frequency-trading.html) are so appealing. And the things in this category aren't necessarily bad things---professional sports aren't necessary for social reproduction either, even though they're well paid and are acknowledged to be "hard work" in the third sense of work given above.

At the same time, there can and does exist lots of activity that satisfies Gourevitch's criteria of discipline and diligence, even though it's unpaid and it's hard to claim the status of social necessity for it. The world is full of amateur photographers and recreational hunters who have no particular ambition to get paid for what they do. And we can also add all those competitive endeavors that don't sustain paid professional careers, like [Scrabble](http://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Competitive-ScrabblePlayers/dp/0142002267) or video gaming outside of a handful of [esports](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_sports).

What of the work that isn't work in its first (necessary) or third (renunciation of desire) sense, but still keeps the "getting paid for it" part? Certain kinds of celebrities who are "famous for being famous" come to mind. This is tricky, however, since often the appearance of effortlessness conceals a disciplined and carefully managed performance. But the difficulty of conceiving of this kind of work indicates the problem with certain work-obsessed solutions to economic deprivation, such as the so-called "job guarantee". Proponents of such schemes seem to think that people should only get paid if they have "jobs", and yet they are indifferent to what the content of those jobs is, leading some of us to [wonder](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/01/16/jobs_guarantee_more_trouble_than_it_s_worth.html) if it wouldn't be better to just give out the money without the jobs.

Finally, we come to the triple negative, things that aren't considered work in *any* of the three senses I've given. The paradigmatic example of something that is useless, unpaid, and completely hedonistic would, of course, be masturbation. And it's not surprising that, in a culture suffused with the work ethic, "masturbatory" is a common term of denigration. But there's nothing wrong with masturbation provided you don't impose yours on others---although as Doctor Jocelyn Elders [discovered](http://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/10/us/surgeon-general-forced-to-resign-by-white-house.html), you have to be careful about saying that in public.

All of which is a long-winded way of making the point that if we're going to debate the meaning, importance, dignity, and existence of work, we should be a lot more careful what we mean by the concept. When I talk about reducing or eliminating work, I almost always mean work in my second sense: wage labor. Getting rid of the necessary work of social reproduction---say, by automating it---*may* be desirable, but maybe not, depending on the situation; I know not everyone is down with Shulamith Firestone's proposal to [grow babies in tanks](http://io9.com/5939856/rip-futurist-shulamith-firestone-who-promoted-artificial-wombs-and-cybernetics-as-tools-of-liberation). And I certainly agree with Gourevitch that disciplined commitment to seeing a project through is an important aspect of, as he puts it, the "full expression of human creativity and productive powers".

It's for just this reason that I want to separate the different meanings of work. But doing so is essentially impossible in a world where everyone is forced to work for wages, because they have no other means of survival. In that world, all work is work in the first sense, "necessary" because it has been *made* necessary by the elimination of any alternative. And even the most pointless of make-work jobs will tend to demand discipline and renunciation of those who hold them--whether out the boss's desire to maintain control, or in the interest of making it seem that those who get paid are "doing something".

So while Ackerman and I completely agree about the value of reducing the length of the work week, I don't think that's sufficient. Shorter hours needs to be paired with some meaningful ability to escape paid work entirely. Indeed, the distinction he makes between labor reduction at the intensive or extensive margin is misleading, since it encompasses only waged work. To return to where I began: someone who leaves the labor force to care for a sick relative, because they can now afford health insurance, *is* reducing work hours at the intensive margin, if we take "work" in the first or third senses rather than just the third.

I like the way Drum puts it: "people want to believe that their fellow citizens are working". The word *believe* suggests that it's the ideology of what counts as work that's doing the, well, work. And I'd like to believe it's possible to [deconstruct](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/05/category-errors/) that ideology, rather than consigning ourselves to a future of endless make-work in the name of social solidarity.

Allowing people to opt out of labor is a far more uncertain, potentially destabilizing thing than simply reducing the length of the waged work week. But that is what makes it so important. What we need is not just less work--though we do need that--but a rethinking of the substantive content of work beyond the abstraction of wage labor. That will mean both surfacing invisible unpaid labor and devaluing certain kinds of destructive waged work. But merely saying that we should improve the quality of existing work and reduce its duration doesn't allow us to raise the question of whether the work needs to exist at all. To use Albert Hirschman's [terms](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty), giving workers Voice within the institution of wage labor can never fundamentally call the premises of that institution into question. For that, you need the real right of Exit, not just from particular jobs but from the labor market as a whole.

Then, perhaps, we could talk about defending the dignity of work. Or perhaps, freed of the anxious need to both feed ourselves and justify our existence through work, we would find we no longer cared.

Watching the online banter about my [last post](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/the-left-and-the-state/), I saw several people--both supporters and critics of my argument--suggesting that I was proposing some kind of ["alliance with libertarians"](https://twitter.com/mrteacup/status/426099999244435456). This is peculiar in that I never said such a thing anywhere in the post. My point was that libertarians *don't*, and shouldn't, have a monopoly on anti-statist politics, and that there are stoutly Marxist reasons to see the national security state as a key political target of the class struggle.

The main reason I didn't call for a left-libertarian alliance is that I don't know what such a thing would even mean. Are Cornel West and Rand Paul to have a grand summit and sign a [Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact) declaring a cease in hostilities in light of our common war on liberalism?

Obviously that's ridiculous, and people who criticize "alliances" with libertarians are really questioning the validity of any political issue that might find leftists and libertarians on the same side. But this applies a level of sectarian rigor that is rarely found outside of the most insular Trotskyists. Politics makes for all sorts of strange bedfellows--recall that the [Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act](http://www.brown.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/brown-vitter-unveil-legislation-that-would-end-too-big-to-fail-policies), which would raise capital standards for big banks, is co-sponsored by progressive hero Sherrod Brown and reactionary Louisiana Republican David Vitter.

Yet I don't recall a lot of handwringing about the left's "alliances" with right wing Christian fundamentalists, presumably because it's obvious that a tactical alignment on a single issue doesn't entail accepting your enemy's entire worldview. I would think it's obvious that effective politics means making common cause with people who you find distasteful in some ways. But maybe I'm just used to it because I'm a socialist, and I'm used to working with liberals who believe all sorts of lousy things--for example, that the progressive legacy of the New Deal includes the [military and prison industrial complex](https://twitter.com/TheNewDeal).

All of which is why, in the end, I lump in left critics of Glenn Greenwald or Edward Snowden's "libertarianism" with obvious partisan hacks like Sean Wilentz. Their arguments all point to the same thing: not a clarification of the Left's politics, but merely a stigmatization of anything that attacks the security state, as if that's somehow incompatible with the values of the Left. And it's dispiriting that some people are unable to see that I was never arguing that the Left needed to be more like libertarians, but rather that a position of principled opposition to the repressive functions of the state is indispensible for a consistent and emancipatory left politics.