Peter Frase

In the course of preparing some brief comments on the [Universal Basic Income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income) for another site, I decided to write up my attempt to clarify some of the politics behind the current debates about UBI as a demand and as a policy. This is adapted from remarks I gave [earlier this year](https://business.leeds.ac.uk/about-us/article/universal-basic-income-and-the-future-of-work/) at the University of Leeds, for a symposium on the topic.

One of the major obstacles to clear discussion of UBI is the tendency to pose the issue as a simple dichotomy: one is either for or against basic income. In fact, however, it must be recognized that both the advocates and opponents of UBI contain right and left flanks. The political orientation one takes toward basic income--and in particular, whether one is considering it primarily from the perspective of labor, or of capital--has profound implications both for how one thinks a UBI should be fought for and implemented, and what one thinks it is meant to achieve.

The multiple poles of the UBI debate are represented in the following diagram:

The Left-wing version of Basic Income is associated with thinkers like Kathi Weeks and André Gorz. Their hope is that with a basic income, as Weeks [puts it](http://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/08/22/feminist-case-basic-income-interview-kathi-weeks/), "the link between work and income would be loosened, allowing more room for different ways of engaging in work." Moreover, Weeks argues, drawing on the legacy of the Wages for Housework movement:

> Demanding a basic income, as I see it, is also a process of making the problems with the wage system of income allocation visible, articulating a critical vocabulary that can help us to understand these problems, opening up a path that might eventually lead us to demand even more changes, and challenging us to imagine a world wherein we had more choices about waged work, nonwork, and their relationship to the rest of our lives.

Left UBI advocates like Weeks tend to see basic income as part of a broader set of demands and proposals, rather than a single-shot solution to every social problem (though this monomaniacal focus does have its adherents on the Left.) They thus support what Los Angeles collective The Undercommons [refers to](https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-race/undercommons-no-racial-justice-without-basic-income) as "UBI+," in which a baseline guaranteed income supplements other forms of support, which they contrast with "UBI-," "a basic income advanced as a replacement for labor regulations and other security-enhancing government programs."

The danger of Right-wing basic income, or UBI-, was identified by Gorz in his 1989 [*Critique of Economic Reason*](https://www.versobooks.com/books/509-critique-of-economic-reason):

> The guaranteed minimum is an income granted by the state, financed by direct taxation. It starts out from the idea that there are people who work and earn a good living and others who do not work because there is no room for them on the job market or because they are (considered) incapable of working. Between these two groups, no lived relation of solidarity emerges. This absence of solidarity (this society deficit) is corrected by a fiscal transfer. The state takes from the one group and gives to the other. . .

> . . . The guaranteed minimum or universal grant thus form part of a palliative policy which promises to protect individuals from the decomposition of wage-based society without developing a social dynamic that would open up emancipatory perspectives for them for the future.

Something like this vision animates much of the advocacy for UBI in capitalist and conservative circles. The clearest exposition of this perspective comes from far-right writer Charles Murray, co-author of the [infamous](http://books.wwnorton.com/books/The-Mismeasure-of-Man/) *The Bell Curve*. His 2006 book [*In Our Hands*](https://www.aei.org/publication/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-american/) roots his basic income proposal in the right-wing tradition of Milton Friedman, and its subtitle makes explicit what UBI is supposed to be: "A Plan to Replace the Welfare State." He insists on "getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare."

It is something like this version of UBI that appeals to the likes of [Elon Musk](https://www.fastcompany.com/4030576/elon-musk-says-automation-will-make-a-universal-basic-income-necessary-soon). It is also the prospect that drives some on the left to vociferously oppose the idea. Sociologist Daniel Zamora, who I've [sparred](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/beyond-the-welfare-state/) [with](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/social-democracy-polanyi-great-transformation-welfare-state) on occasion, [argues](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/12/universal-basic-income-inequality-work) that "UBI isn’t an alternative to neoliberalism, but an ideological capitulation to it." He argues that a political and economically feasible basic income could only be something like Murray's proposal: too little to live on (thus promoting the spread of precarious low wage jobs) and paid for with drastic cuts to the rest of the welfare state. Moreover, he argues that even a relatively generous UBI would only intensify the logic of neoliberal capitalism, by perpetuating a condition in which makes "market exchange the nearly exclusive means to acquire the goods necessary for our own reproduction."

Zamora calls instead for reducing the scope of the market through the struggle for [decommodification](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/06/de-commodification-in-everyday-life/). This perspective is reflected by those like [Barbara Bergmann](https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/reducing-inequality-merit-goods-vs-income-grants), who [emphasize](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0032329203261101?journalCode=pasa) the importance of directly providing "merit goods" like health care, education, and housing, rather than relying on the private market. This is important, because a Murray-style UBI- of marketized social provision would be radically inegalitarian for reasons I've [explained](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/04/health-care-and-the-communism-of-the-welfare-state/) elsewhere. Bergmann's prioritization of this substantive service provision is reflected in the advocates of ["Universal Basic Services"](https://universalbasicservices.org/) as an alternative to Universal Basic Income.

Of course, Charles Murray and Elon Musk are still somewhat anomalous within the broader pro-capitalist Right. Some, like [James Pethokoukis](https://www.aei.org/publication/universal-basic-income-uncertain-need-with-worrisome-potential-costs/), argue that UBI is an unnecessary expense, because the breathless predictions of mass technological employment are unlikely to come true (echoing some of the analysis of leftist critics like [Doug Henwood](https://lbo-news.com/2015/07/17/workers-no-longer-needed/)). Others, like [Thomas Sowell](https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/06/16/is-personal-responsibility-obsolete), are philosophically opposed to "divorcing personal rewards from personal contributions."

Having set up four different poles of attraction, it's worth thinking about what attracts and repels each position in the debate to each of the others, again with reference to the diagram above. What unites the pro-UBI forces is a willingness to think beyond a society defined by work as wage labor. Even Murray, more of a traditionalist than some of the Silicon Valley futurist types, argues that reduced labor force participation is an acceptable and even desirable consequence of UBI, because it would mean "new resources and new energy into an American civic culture," and "the restoration, on an unprecedented scale, of a great American tradition of voluntary efforts to meet human needs." This finds its left echoes in those like Gorz and Kathi Weeks, whose UBI advocacy stems from her [post-work](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/) politics.

Arrayed against the post-work vision of Basic Income are those who treat work as something to be realized and celebrated, rather than transcended or dispensed with. On the Left, this takes the form of various "dignity of labor" arguments which, to use Weeks' framing of the issue, insist that our main goal should be ensuring *better* work, not less work. Often this is tied to a defense of the inherent importance of meaningful work, as when the [head of the German Federation of Trade Unions](https://www.dw.com/en/german-trade-unions-strictly-against-basic-income-concept/a-43589741) argued recently that "pursuing a job was crucial to structure people's everyday lives and ensure social cohesion."

In his new book [*Radical Technologies*](https://www.versobooks.com/books/2742-radical-technologies), Adam Greenfield concludes his chapter on automation with a defense of jobs, which "offered us a context in which we might organize our skills and talents," or at least "filled the hours of our days on Earth." A recurrent reference point for the job-defenders, like [Ha-Joon Chang](https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5329/why-sci-fi-and-economics-have-more-in-common-than-you-think), is Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 novel *Player Piano*, which imagines a highly automated future in which people are made miserable because the end of jobs has made them feel useless. (I cite the novel myself in [*Four Futures*](https://www.versobooks.com/books/1847-four-futures), although I attempt to mount something of a post-work critique of the story.)

This has certain commonalities with the anti-UBI Right, which also sees waged work as inherently valuable and good, although of course only for the lower orders. This can be rooted in a [producerist](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/hipsters-food-stamps-and-the-politics-of-resentment) view that ""he who does not work, neither shall he eat." But it can also simply be a driven by a desire to cement and preserve hierarchies and class power, a fear that a working class with additional economic security and resource base of a basic income would get up to "voluntary efforts to meet human needs" that are a bit more confrontational and contentious than Charles Murray imagines.

The final point to make about my diagram of the UBI debate is the relationship between its diagonal terms, which also turn out to have certain commonalities. Put simply, the diagonals connect positions that agree on the *effect* of UBI, but disagree about its *desirability*.

Connecting pro-UBI Leftists like Weeks and Gorz with anti-UBI traditional conservatives is the belief that a basic income threatens to erode the work ethic and ultimately undermine the viability of capitalism. It's just that the left thinks that's a good thing. And the overlapping analysis extends to the relations of *reproduction* as well as those of production. Weeks explicitly presents basic income as an historical successor to the demands of the Wages for Housework movement, a way of breaking down patriarchy and the gendered division of labor.

Historical experience with basic income experiments lends some support to this view. Analysis of the 1970s Canadian "Mincome" program, in which a basic income was provided to residents of a Canadian town, [found that](http://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/2001-odyssee-espace/a-guaranteed-annual-income-from-mincome-to-the-millennium/) "Families that stayed together solely for economic reasons were no longer compelled to do so, since individual members could continue to receive the [Guaranteed Annual Income] separately after a marriage breakup." From a feminist pro-UBI perspective, this shows the value of basic income in providing women the wherewithal to escape from bad relationships. But to the conservative UBI critic, the lesson is the opposite, as it shows how basic income can undermine the traditional family.

On our other diagonal, we find again an agreement on consequences and a disagreement on desirability. Charles Murray views Basic Income as a way to stabilize capitalism and remove the distortions and perverse incentives of the bureaucratic welfare state. Daniel Zamora views Basic Income as a way to intensify neoliberalism and remove the hard-won gains of decommodified services of the social democratic welfare state in favor of submerging all social life in market exchange. Unions fear that basic income will undermine solidarity based on organization in the workplace, a result that would no doubt be seen as a benefit by many of basic income's tech industry boosters (as well as nominally pro-labor renegades like [Andy Stern](http://time.com/4412410/andy-stern-universal-basic-income/)).

I've been reading, thinking and writing about Universal Basic Income off and on for over a decade, and in that time my sense of its political significance has shifted considerably. I would still call myself an advocate of UBI, for similarly post-work and feminist reasons as Weeks or Gorz. But as the concept is increasingly co-opted by those with right wing and pro-capitalist motivations, I think it's increasingly important to situate the demand within a "UBI+" vision of expanded services, rather than falling victim to the shortcut thinking that elevates basic income to a "one weird trick" that will transcend political divides and resolve the contradictions of late capitalism.

*UPDATE 2*: The news is, sadly, [no longer](http://chicagojewishfunerals.com/funeral-detail-page/?case=4893F287-BFEF-445C-A361-07324D755EDA) premature. I mourn the man's passing and celebrate his contribution to an open and liberatory version of Marxism.

*UPDATE*: I appear to have fallen prey to misinformation, and written a premature obituary. Apologies to Moishe Postone and his loved ones. The remainder of my appreciation of the man remains unchanged.

[Moishe Postone](https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/moishe-postone) was incorrectly reported as having died. This will perhaps be of only peripheral interest, to all but a handful of Marxist theory nerds. But it's of great interest, and great sadness, to me.

Postone emerged from the Marxism of the German new left, and spent much of his life teaching at the University of Chicago. He was teaching there when I was an undergraduate, but I never took his classes. It was only years later that I read his landmark work, *Time, Labor, and Social Domination*.

That book was the great work of Postone's life. In a few hundred pages, it elucidated (a word Postone loved) what he called Marx's "mature critical theory". His central insight was that Marx's critique of capitalism was not about glorifying labor, or about promoting some kind of non-exploitative society in which workers could get the full value of what they produced. The point, rather, was to abolish labor as we know it, and with it a society in which labor, and the value placed on it, regulate our lives.

It was a thorough and relentless explication of one of Marx's famous [asides](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch16.htm). "To be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune."

He wasn't the only one to grasp this point. Others like Georg Lukacs, Diane Elson--and recently even [David Harvey](http://davidharvey.org/2018/03/marxs-refusal-of-the-labour-theory-of-value-by-david-harvey/)--have made similar points. But my gateway to a post-work, post-laborist understanding of Marx went through Postone, on a winter vacation over a decade ago when I trudged through and broke my head against his work.

And what resulted was the most wondrous kind of experience I know of in social theory. It wasn't that Moishe Postone told me something I didn't know. He did something much more significant: he explained something I *already* knew, but didn't yet understand.

Rarely will you find me explicitly [citing](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/reanimated-marxism/) Postone. But to borrow a phrase from [Joan Robinson](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/07/joan-robinsons-open-letter-from-a-keynesian-to-a-marxist-2): I may not always have Postone in my mouth, but I have him in my bones.

Moishe Postone, ¡Presente!

Elizabeth Bruenig has [written](https://medium.com/@ebruenig/understanding-liberals-versus-the-left-5cff7ea41fd8) about the distinction between "liberals" and "the left." She proposes that everyone in the broad tent of what she calls "non-Republicanism" is actually a liberal, in the following sense:

> The second sense in which almost every non-Republican is a liberal is that they all agree with the tenets of liberalism as a philosophy: that is, the worldview that champions radical, rational free inquiry; egalitarianism; individualism; subjective rights; and freedom as primary political ends. (Republicans are, for the most part, liberals in this sense too; libertarians even more so.)

This is an easy statement for me to agree with--but I also think it brushes past some political distinctions that are important.

Am I a partisan of "radical, rational free inquiry"? I suppose I am, in that, like Marx, I endorse a ["ruthless criticism of the existing order,"](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm) one which "will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with the powers that be."

Do I believe in "egalitarianism"? Naturally--one of the basic structural features of my [book](https://www.versobooks.com/books/1847-four-futures) is the distinction between a hierarchical society, like our own, and one where everyone shares in both the benefits and the sacrifices that are possible or necessary given our level of technological development and ecological constraint.

Individualism? Also uncontroversial, although it's not entirely clear what the term is supposed to mean. I side with Oscar Wilde, who [said](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/) that "With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism." That instead of the false freedom of those condemned to work for others for a paycheck--free in Marx's "double sense" of being free to sell our labour power and free of anything else to sell--we can have what Philippe Van Parijs calls "real freedom", the freedom that comes from having the time and the resources to pursue self-actualization.

As for "subjective rights," I'm not completely sure what that's supposed to mean. Rights that are politically stipulated and democratically assigned, I guess, rather than arising from some divine concept of natural law? In that case, again, I'm on board, and I think the "social rights" arguments of people like [T.H. Marshall](http://delong.typepad.com/marshall-citizenship-and-social-class.pdf) can be usefully synthesized with the politics of opposing oppression and exploitation.

And then, of course, there is freedom. A word lodged deeply in the liberal tradition, and in the American tradition. And one, I think, that should be at the center of socialist politics as well. But freedom *from* what, and freedom *to* do what?

Here is Bruenig's gloss on the meaning of socialism: "the economic aspects of liberalism (free or freeish market capitalism) create material conditions that actually make people less free."

I like this, yet again I find it vague. In describing my own political trajectory, I often talk about my parents' liberal politics, and my own journey of discovery, through which I concluded that their liberal ideals couldn't be achieved by liberal means, but required something more radical, and more Marxist.

But what would it mean to escape "the economic aspects of liberalism"? Would it mean merely high wages; universal health care and education; a right to housing; strong labor unions?

To be clear, I am in favor of all of those things.

But we've seen this movie before. It's the high tide of the welfare state, which is nowadays sometimes held up as an idyllic model of class peace and human contentment: everyone has a good job, and good benefits, and a comfortable retirement. (Although of course, this Eden never existed for much of the working class.) Who could want more?

The historical reality of welfare capitalism's postwar high tide, though, is that *everyone* wanted more. Capitalists, as they always do, wanted more profits, and they felt the squeeze from powerful unions and social democratic parties that were impinging on this prerogative. More than that, they faced the problem of a working class that was becoming too *politically* powerful. This is what Michal Kalecki [called](https://mronline.org/2010/06/08/kalecki-again/) the "political aspects of full employment," the danger that a sufficiently empowered working class might call into question the basic structure of an economy based on concentrated property rights and capital accumulation.

Sometimes socialists will emphasize *economic democracy* as the core of our politics. Because as the [Democratic Socialists of America's](http://www.dsausa.org/where_we_stand) statement of political principles puts it, "In the workplace, capitalism eschews democracy." According to this line of argument, socialism means taking the liberal ideal of democracy into places where most people experience no democratic control at all, most especially the workplace.

But when you talk about introducing democracy, you're talking about giving people control over their lives that they didn't have before. And once you do that, you open up the possibility of much more radical and disruptive kinds of change.

For it is not just capitalists who always want more, but workers too. A good job is better than a bad job, is better than no job. Higher wages are better than low. But a strong working class isn't inclined to sit back and be content with its lot--it's inclined to demand more. Or less, when it comes to the drudgery of most jobs. After all, how many people dream of punching clocks and cashing paychecks at the behest of a boss, no matter what the size of the check or the security of the job? The song "Take This Job and Shove It" appeared in the aftermath of a period when many workers could make good on that threat, and did. In the peak year, 1969, there had been 766 unauthorized wildcat strikes in the United States, but by 1975 there were only 238.

All of this goes to the point that even if we could get back the postwar welfare state, that simply isn't a permanently viable end point, and we need a politics that acknowledges that fact and prepares for it. And that has to be connected to some larger vision of what lies beyond the immediate demands of social democracy. That's what I'd call socialism, or even *communism*, which for me is the ultimate horizon. The socialist project, for me, is about something more than just immediate demands for more jobs, or higher wages, or universal social programs, or shorter hours. It's about those things. But it's also about transcending, and abolishing, much of what we think defines our identities and our way of life.

It is about the abolition of class as such. This means the abolition of capitalist wage labor, and therefore the abolition of ["the working class"](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life) as an identity and a social phenomenon. Which isn't the same as the abolition of work in its [other senses](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/02/work-it/), as socially necessary or personally fulfilling labor.

It is about the abolition of "race", that biologically fictitious, and yet socially overpowering idea. A task that is inseparable from the abolition of class, however much contemporary liberals might like to distract us from that reality. As David Roediger details in his recent essay collection on [*Class, Race, and Marxism*](https://www.versobooks.com/books/2467-class-race-and-marxism), much of the forgotten history of terms like "white privilege" originated with communists, who wrestled with the problem of racism not to avoid class politics but to facilitate it. People like [Claudia Jones](http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Claudia-Jones-Unknown-Pan-Africanist-Feminist-and-Communist--20160210-0020.html), or Theodore Allen, whose masterwork *The Invention of the White Race*, was, as Roediger observes, borne of "a half century of radical organizing, much of it specifically in industry."

And so too, no socialism worth the name can shrink from questioning patriarchy, gender, heterosexuality, the nuclear family. Marx and Engels themselves had some presentiment of this, some understanding that the control of the means of reproduction and the means of production were intimately and dialectically linked at [The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/). But they could follow their own logic only so far, and so it fell to the likes of [Shulamith Firestone](https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/on-shulamith-firestone-preface/) to suggest radical alternatives to our current ways of organizing the bearing and raising of children. It took communists the likes of [Leslie Feinberg](http://www.lesliefeinberg.net/) and [Sylvia Federici](http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/permanent-reproductive-crisis-interview-silvia-federici) to complicate our simplistic assumptions about the existence of binary "gender." And the more we win reforms that allow people to define their sexualities and gender identities, to give women control of their bodies, to lessen their economic dependence on men, the more this kind of radical questioning will spill into the open.

So that's what it means to me to be on "the left." To imagine and anticipate and fight for a world without bosses, and beyond class, race, and gender as we understand them today. That, to me, is what it means to fight for individualism, and for freedom.

That's one reason that I make a point of arguing for a politics that fights for beneficial reforms--single payer health care, living wages, all the rest--but that doesn't stop there. A politics that fights for the ["non-reformist" reform](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/05/curious-utopias/): a demand that is not meant to lead to a permanent state of humane capitalism, but that is intentionally destabilizing and disruptive.

The other reason is that, for all the economic and political reasons noted above, we can't just get to a nicer version of capitalism and then stop there. We can only build social democracy [in order to break it](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/social-democracy-polanyi-great-transformation-welfare-state).

Is that what every liberal, or even every leftist, believes? From my experience, I don't think so. That's not meant to be a defense of sectarianism or dogmatism; I believe in building a broad united front with everyone who wants to make our society more humane, and more equal. But I have my sights on something beyond that.

Because if we do all agree that the project of the left is predicated on a vision of freedom and individualism, then we also have to regard that vision as a radically *uncertain* one. We can only look a short way into the future--to a point where the working class has had its shackles loosened a bit, as happened in the best moments of 20th Century social democracy. At that moment we again reach the point where a social democratic class compromise becomes untenable, and the system must either fall back into a reactionary form of capitalist retrenchment, or forward into something else entirely. What our future selves do in those circumstances, and what kinds of people we become, is unknowable and unpredictable--and for our politics to be genuinely democratic, it could not be any other way.

How high is too high, for the minimum wage?

Dylan Matthews, in his [wrap-up](http://www.vox.com/2016/4/15/11436488/hillary-bernie-winners-losers-cnn) of the Democratic primary debate, says that his "off-the-record conversations with left-leaning Democratic economists" indicate that many of them "express grave concern about the $15-an-hour figure, about the danger that this time we might be going too far." His Vox colleague Timothy Lee is tagged in to make the [same argument](http://www.vox.com/2016/4/15/11436868/hillary-clinton-fights-for-15) in another post.

This despite the fact that Hillary Clinton has now apparently joined Bernie Sanders in endorsing the $15 minimum, going back on her previous unwillingness to go above $12.

And you know what? I think they might be right. It might be the case that a $15 an hour minimum wage is, as Matthews put in a (https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/720786520509165568), "dangerous". To which my response is: that's awesome!

The reason that bourgeois economists tend to think a high minimum wage is "dangerous" is because they think it will lead to reduced employment. This is for two reasons.

First, because if it becomes economically infeasible to hire people at $15 per hour for certain jobs, the employers may just go out of business, reducing the demand for labor. There is a large body of literature suggesting that this objection is overblown, dating back to [Card and Krueger](https://www.nber.org/papers/w4509) in the early 1990's. But it's hard to dispute that there is *some* level at which higher minimum wages will lead to reduced employment.

The second thing that could reduce employment, even if the minimum wage doesn't force any businesses to go under, is automation. If it costs $15 an hour to pay a burger-flipper at McDonalds, perhaps it will become more appealing to turn to a burger-flipping robot, of the sort offered by [Momentum Machines](http://www.businessinsider.com/momentum-machines-burger-robot-2014-8). This is a retort often thrown at living wage advocates by conservative critics: joke's on you suckers, raise your wage and we'll just automate your job!

Together, these arguments amount to a radical case *for* high minimum wages, not against them. Because they both get at the underlying political principle that should motivate any argument for higher wages: people need more money. That's completely separate from the question of whether things like low-wage fast food jobs should exist at all, which they probably shouldn't.

In other words, if $15 an hour makes it a little easier for a McDonalds worker to survive, that's great. But if it leads to some of those jobs disappearing entirely, then that forces us to confront an even bigger and more important question. Namely, how do we separate the idea of providing everyone with a decent standard of living from the idea of getting everyone a "job"? I've argued before that job-creation is a hole that we should [stop digging](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs/).

The fight for 15 *should* be dangerous. I hope it is! I hope it leads to [shorter hours](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/05/eight-hours-for-what-they-will/), and a [universal basic income](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/05/curious-utopias/). That's what I'd call some real [disruptive innovation](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine).

Many of us have found ourselves in jobs where there just wasn't much work to do. We spent days sitting at desks surfing the Internet, while using innovations like the [boss key](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key), in case we needed to show our boss some pretense of being "busy." This is ultimately a demoralizing and demeaning existence of pseudo-leisure, time which is not our own but is not being used for any purpose.

Anyone who has had that experience no doubt smiled at the story of Spanish civil servant Joaquín Garcia, employee of a municipal water company. When he was considered for an award for 20 years of service, it was [discovered](http://www.thelocal.es/20160212/spanish-civil-servant-takes-6-years-off-work-no-one-notices) that he had not in fact shown up for work in 6 years, while continuing to draw his paycheck.

Garcia insisted that there was simply no work for him to do, and that he had been put in the job in the first place as political retaliation. Other sources [contested](http://metro.co.uk/2016/02/13/this-guy-didnt-show-up-to-work-for-six-years-and-no-one-noticed-5680048/) the original report, claiming that he did show up to work but merely spent his time reading philosophy---becoming an expert on Spinoza, according to Mr. Garcia---which would make him just another case of dreary workplace pseudo-leisure.

But it was the original vision, of a man simply walking away from the pointlessness of his work, that gave the story its viral appeal. It punctured the mystification of "work," that oppressive abstraction that I've tried to break down many times [before](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/02/work-it/). Garcia rejected the "work" of dutifully showing up for a job that had no reason to exist, in favor of the self-fulfilling "work" of reading philosophy. What might we all do if we could do the same?

The "work to rule" action is a popular labor tactic, an alternative to going on strike. It involves carefully and literally following every rule in the contract, which in most workplaces has the practical effect of slowing work down to a crawl. But perhaps we need something like the opposite: "work to need." If everyone with a pointless, wasteful, or destructive job simply refused to show up to it, we would learn a lot about how much of our time is taken up with "work" that has everything to do with our dependence on wage labor, and nothing at all to do with the things we need to run a decent society.

It never fails that when I get around to writing something, I'm immediately inundated by directly related news, making me think that I should have just waited a few days. The moment I commit bits to web servers about the [robot future](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/new-yorker-lingerie-automation-frase/), I see the following things.

First, the blockbuster *New York Times* [story](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html) about Amazon and its corporate culture. The brutality of life among the company's low-wage [warehouse](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor) employees was already well covered, but the experience of the white collar Amazonian was less well known. The office staff, it seems, experiences a more psychological form of brutality. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of my point that "the truly dystopian prospect is that the worker herself is treated as if she were a machine, rather than being replaced by one". To wit:

> Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.

On to number two! Lydia DePillis of the *Washington Post* [reacts](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/minimum-wage-offensive-could-speed-arrival-of-robot-powered-restaurants/2015/08/16/35f284ea-3f6f-11e5-8d45-d815146f81fa_story.html?postshare=6371439925549885) to efforts to raise the minimum wage in exactly the way I mentioned in my post: by raising the threat of automation. She notes various advances in technology, while also observing that in recent times "the industry as a whole has largely been resistant to cuts in labor . . . the average number of employees at fast-food restaurants declined by fewer than two people over the past decade". But, she warns, that could all change if the minimum wage is raised to $15.

Liberal economist (and one-time adviser to the Vice President) Jared Bernstein responds [here](http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/minimum-wages-and-capitallabor-substitution/). He makes, in a slightly different way, the same point I did: "one implication of this argument is that we should make sure to keep wages low enough so employers won’t want to bother swapping out workers for machines . . . a great way to whack productivity growth." (Not to mention, a great way to make life miserable for the workers in question.) He then goes on to argue that higher wages won't really lead to decreased employment anyway, which sort of undercuts the point. But oh well.

Finally, we have the *Economist* [weighing in](http://www.economist.com/node/21661017). This little squib on "Automation angst" manages to combine all the bourgeois arguments into one, in a single paragraph:

> [Economist David] Autor argues that many jobs still require a mixture of skills, flexibility and judgment; they draw upon “tacit” knowledge that is a very long way from being codified or performed by robots. Moreover, automation is likely to be circumscribed, he argues, as politicians fret about wider social consequences. Most important of all, even if they do destroy as many jobs as pessimists imagine, many other as yet unimagined ones that cannot be done by robots are likely to be created.

So, to summarize. The robots won't take your job, because they can't. Or, actually, the robots *can* take your job but they won't, because we will make a political decision to disallow it. Or no, never mind, the robots *will* take your job, but it's fine because we will create lots of other new jobs for you.

This summarizes the popular approach to this problem well, from a variety of vantage points that all miss the main point. Namely, that if it *is* possible to reduce the need for human labor, the question becomes: who benefits from that. The owners, of the robots, or the rest of the working masses?

The current issue of the *New Yorker* has a story about the odd phenomenon of Chinese [lingerie merchants](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/learning-to-speak-lingerie) in Egypt. These immigrant entrepreneurs are apparently ubiquitous throughout the poor, conservative districts of upper Egypt, where they dispense sexy garments to the region's pious Muslim women. The cultural and geopolitical details of the story are interesting for a number of reasons, but I was struck in particular by a resonance with some debates that have recently flared up again about labor and automation, for reasons I'll get back to below.

"Robots will take all our jobs" is a hardy perennial of popular political economy. Typical of the latest crop is Derek Thompson of the Atlantic, who wrote an article (in which he quotes me), speculating about a ["World Without Work"](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/) in the wake of mass adoption of robotization and computerization. Paul Mason gives a more leftist and political rendition of [similar themes](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun).

As I note in my recent Jacobin [editorial](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/), this kind of thing is not new, and is in fact an anxiety that recurs throughout the history of capitalism. Two decades ago, we had the likes of [Jeremy Rifkin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work) and [Stanley Aronowitz](https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-jobless-future) musing about the "end of work" and the "jobless future".

And these repeating waves of robo-futurism call into existence the same repeated insistence that robots are not, in fact, taking all the jobs. Doug Henwood was [on this beat](http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Jobless_future.html) twenty years ago and remains [on it](http://lbo-news.com/2015/07/17/workers-no-longer-needed/) today. Matt Yglesias, [likewise](http://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9038829/automation-myth), calls fear of automation a "myth".

One of the specific things that people like Henwood and Yglesias always cite is the productivity statistics. If we were seeing a wave of unprecedented automation, then we should be seeing rapid rises in measured labor productivity---that is, the amount of output that can be produced per hour of human labor. Instead, however, what we've seen is historically low productivity growth, compared to what happened in the middle and late 20th Century.

All of which leads commentators like Yglesias and [Tyler Cowen](http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-Eventually-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS) to fret that the robots aren't coming fast *enough*. Typical of most writers on this subject, Yglesias just worries vaguely that increases in productivity won't happen for some unspecified reason.

I've argued a number of times for an (http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/03/technological-grotesques/) that connects the question of automation and productivity growth directly to wages and the general condition of labor. The basic idea is very simple. From the perspective of the boss, replacing a worker with a machine will be more appealing to the degree that the machine is:

* Cheaper than the human worker
* More convenient and easier to control than the human worker

This implies that if workers win higher wages and more control over their working conditions, their jobs are more likely to be automated. Indeed, arguments like this frequently crop up among critics of things like the [Fight for 15](http://fightfor15.org/) campaign, which demands higher wages for fast food workers and other low wage employees. Prototypes for automatic [burger-making](http://momentummachines.com/) machines are cited in order to warn workers that their jobs are at risk of being automated away.

I regard such warnings not as arguments against higher wages, but arguments for them. Workers, in the course of fighting for their interests, drive the [dialectic](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/02/the-dialectic-of-technology/) that forces capitalists to find less labor-intensive ways of producing. The next political task, then, is to make sure that the benefits of such innovation accrue to the masses, and not to a small class of robot owners.

What I fear most is not that all of our labor will be replaced with machines. Rather, like Matt Yglesias, I worry that it *won't*---but for a slightly different reason. Again, bosses prefer workers to machines when they are cheaper and easier to control. Hence the truly dystopian prospect is that the worker herself is treated as if she *were* a machine, rather than being replaced by one.

Which brings us back, finally, to the Chinese lingerie merchants. The article's author, Peter Hessler, speaks to one such merchant, and asks him to comment on the biggest problem facing Egypt. To his surprise, his subject, Lin Xianfei, has a quick answer: gender inequality.

But the point turns out not to be that Lin is some sort of secret passionate feminist. Rather, his perspective turns on the exigencies of capital accumulation. For it turns out that while one kind of patriarchy is an impediment to business, another kind can be quite valuable to the shrewd businessman.

The problem, from Lin's perspective, is that Egyptian women in his region don't work in wage labor at all, or if they do they only do so for short periods of time, before marrying and retreating into the home. Even worse, local norms about proper female behavior preclude taking women out of their homes to live on site in massive dormitories, as might be done in China. Thus it becomes unfeasible to run factories on 24-hour production cycles.

Hiring men, meanwhile, is out of the question---another man, Xu Xin, tells Hessler that Egyptian men are too lazy and undisciplined for manufacturing work. Hessler goes on to note that "at the start of the economic boom in China, bosses hired young women because they could be paid less and controlled more easily than men".

He proceeds to comment that female Chinese workers turned out to be "more motivated", as though he is identifying something distinct from their weaker power position relative to men. But it is really the same thing. "More motivated", here, refers to the motivation to work hard for the boss, for someone else's profits and someone else's riches. To behave, in other words, like obedient machines. The Chinese capitalist objects to the patriarchal structure of rural Egyptian society not because it is patriarchy, then, but because it is a form of patriarchy that is inconvenient to capital accumulation.

And sure enough, faced with recalcitrant humans, the textile magnates of Egypt turn to the same solution that the Chinese electronics firm Foxconn [adopted](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/05/05/foxconns-robot-army-yet-to-prove-match-for-humans/) in the wake of worker uprisings there. Wang Weiqiang echoes the other industrialists' complaints about Egyptian labor: the men are lazy, the women "will work only during the daytime". As a result, "he intends to introduce greater mechanization in hopes of maximizing the short workday".

Greater mechanization and the maximization of a short work day might seem tragic to the capitalist, but it summarizes the short term goal of the post-work socialist left. Ornery, demanding workers work to drive technological developments that further this goal. And the socialist-feminist rendition of this project insists that we can prevent workers from being treated as machines not by shielding them with patriarchal and paternalistic morals, but rather by insisting that men and women alike can recognize their paid and unpaid labor in order to better [refuse it](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/).

Jacobin has published Seth Ackerman's translation of an [interesting interview](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/foucault-interview/) with French sociologist Daniel Zamora, discussing his recent book about Michel Foucault's affinities with neoliberalism. Zamora rightly points out that the "image of Foucault as being in total opposition to neoliberalism at the end of his life" is a very strained reading of a thinker whose relationship to the crisis of the 1970's welfare state is at the very least much more ambiguous than that.

At the same time, Zamora's argument demonstrates the limitations imposed by the displacement of "capitalism" by "neoliberalism" as a central category of left analysis. For his tacit premise seems to be that, if it can be shown that Foucault showed an "indulgence" toward neoliberalism, we must therefore put down his influence as a reactionary one. But what Foucault's curious intersection with the project of the neoliberal right actually exemplifies, I would argue, is an ambiguity at the heart of the crisis of the 1970's which gave rise to the neoliberal project. That he can be picked up by the right as easily as the left says much about the environment that produced him. Meanwhile, Zamora's own reaction says something important about a distinction within the social democratic left that is worth spending some time on, which I'll return to below.

Zamora makes much of the neoliberal move away from the attempt to reduce inequality, in the direction of targeted efforts to alleviate poverty and provide a minimum standard of living. (In a juicy bit bound to delight those of us immersed in the wonky details of empirical measures of inequality, he even quotes one of Foucault's right-wing contemporaries positing that "the distinction between absolute poverty and relative poverty is in fact the distinction between capitalism and socialism".) But in doing so, he elides the force of the Foucauldian critique of the welfare state. It is true that the move away from universal social provision and toward targeted aid is a hallmark of social policy in the era of welfare state retrenchment. But this is not the main point of Foucault's argument, even by Zamora's own telling.

Foucault, he argues, "was highly attracted to economic liberalism" because "he saw in it the possibility of a form of governmentality that was much less normative and authoritarian than the socialist and communist left." It is possible to see this as nothing more than either reaction or naïveté, as Zamora seems to when he warns of Foucault's mistake in putting "the mechanisms of social assistance and social insurance . . . on the same plane as the prison, the barracks, or the school." But it's possible to extract a different lesson about the nature of the system that Foucault was analyzing.

At the heart of Zamora's own project, he says, is a disagreement with Geoffroy de Lagasnerie's argument that Foucault represents "a desire to use neoliberalism to reinvent the left." Rather, he argues "that he uses it as more than just a tool: he adopts the neoliberal view to critique the Left."

Here we have the crux of the problem. For Zamora, the key political opposition is between "neoliberalism" and "the Left." But neoliberalism is only a historically specific phase of capitalist class strategy, one which itself developed in the context of the particular form of welfare capitalism and class compromise that arose in the mid-20th Century. So if "the Left" is conceived primarily as a project against neoliberalism, its aims will be limited to the restoration of the pre-neoliberal order, which Zamora defines as "social security and the institutions of the working class."

But the value of Foucault, and others like him, is in highlighting the limits of any such strategy. Postwar welfare capitalism was, to be sure, a substantive achievement of the working class and the socialist movement. And it represented an equlibrium---call it the Fordist compromise---in which workers shared in the benefits of rising productivity.

But it was also an inherently contradictory and self-subverting order. This was true both from the perspective of capital and of labor. For the capitalist, long periods of full employment and strong labor movements meant a [profit squeeze](http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/1109reuss.html) and escalating [political instability](http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/maisano080610.html) as workers lost their fear of unemployment and poverty. The Fordist compromise was no more satisfactory for workers, as the historian Jefferson Cowie documents in [his writing on the 1970's](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/opinion/06Cowie.html). What was called the "blue collar blues" represented the desire of workers for more than just higher paychecks: for more free time, for control over the labor process, for [liberation from wage labor](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/).

The welfare state institutions that arose in that context were marked by the same contradiction: they were at once sources of security and freedom, and instruments of social control. As Beatriz Preciado says, in a quote Zamora produces as evidence of the bad new libertarian left: "the welfare state is also the psychiatric hospital, the disability office, the prison, the patriarchal-colonial-heteronormative school." One aspect of the welfare state made it dangerous to the employing class, while another chafed on the employed (and unemployed). Welfare capitalism has always been characterized by this tension between universalistic benefits tied to a universal notion of social citizenship, and carefully targeted systems of qualification and incentive designed to prop up specific social relations, from the workplace to the street to the home. This is a key insight of the school of comparative [welfare state study](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/06/de-commodification-in-everyday-life/) that distinguishes the decommodifying from the stratifying elements of the welfare state.

One way to think of this is as the permeation of the contradictions of bourgeois democracy into the economic sphere. Just as capitalist democracies exist in an uneasy tension between the principles of "one person one vote" and "one dollar one vote", so does the system of economic regulation simultaneously work to support the power of the working class and to control it.

In contrast, Zamora seems unwilling to countenance this two-sided quality to class compromises in capitalism. As he puts it, the choice is either "that social security is ultimately nothing more than a tool of social control by big capital" (a view held by unnamed persons on "the radical left"), or that the bourgeoisie "was totally hostile" to institutions that "were invented by the workers' movement itself."

Zamora appears to view social insurance as representing the creation of "social rights" that cushion workers from the vagaries of the market, while leaving the basic institutions of private property and wage labor in place. This is a non-Marxist form of social democracy with deep theoretical roots going back to [Karl Polanyi and T.H. Marshall](https://www.academia.edu/1397127/Three_pillars_of_welfare_state_theory), and it was arguably the main way in which the European social democratic parties saw themselves in their heyday. This kind of social democracy is the protagonist in Shari Berman's recent [book](http://www.amazon.com/The-Primacy-Politics-Democracy-Twentieth/dp/0521521106) on the history of European social democracy, in which the Polanyian pragmatists are pitted against Marxists who, in her view, ignored the exigencies of social reform altogether in favor of an apocalyptic insistence that the capitalist system would inevitably collapse and usher in revolution. The endpoint of this kind of Polanyian socialism is a welfare state that protects the working class from the workings of an unfettered market.

There is, however, another way to think about the welfare state from a Marxist perspective. It is possible to believe that fighting for a robust and universal welfare state is a necessary and desirable project, while at the same time believing that the socialist imagination cannot *end* there, because the task of humanizing capitalism generates its own contradictions. On this view, the system Foucault analyzed was a system that could not simply continue on in static equilibrium; it had to be either transcended in a socialist direction, or, as happened, dismantled in a project of capitalist retrenchment. From this perspective, the importance of figures like Foucault is not just as misleaders or budding reactionaries, but as indicators of social democracy's limits, and of the inability of the mainstream left at the time to reckon with the crisis that its own victories had produced. By the same token, neoliberalism can be seen not just as a tool to smash the institutions of the working class, but *also* as a mystified and dishonest representation of the workers' own frustrated desires for freedom and autonomy.

Zamora speaks of Foucault imagining "a neoliberalism that wouldn't project its anthropological models on the individual, that would offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state." Other than the name, this does not sound much at all like the really existing neoliberal turn, which has only [reconfigured](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/the-left-and-the-state/) the densely connected relationship between state and market rather than freeing the latter from the former. This vision of autonomy sounds more like the radical move beyond welfare capitalism, toward Wilde's vision of [socialist individualism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_Man_under_Socialism). (Provided, that is, that we accord autonomy from [bosses](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/01/let-it-bleed-libertarianism-and-the-workplace/) equal place with autonomy from the state.) Postmodernism as premature post-capitalism, as Moishe Postone once [put it](http://www.scribd.com/doc/144630116/Postone-History-and-Heteronomy-Critical-Essays).

None of this is to say that the fight for universal social provision is unimportant; nor is it to dispute Zamora's point that the fight for universal economic rights has tended, in recent times to be eclipsed by "a centering of the victim who is denied justice" as he quotes Isabelle Garo.

The point is only that it is worth thinking about what happens on the other side of such battles. Whether one finds it useful to think along these lines depends, ultimately, on what one sees as the horizon of left politics. Zamora speaks mournfully of the disappearance of exploitation and wealth inequality as touchstones of argument and organizing, and of the dismantling of systems of social insurance. Yet he himself seems unwilling to go beyond the creation and maintenance of humanized forms of exploitation, a perhaps more egalitarian (but not equal) distribution of wealth. He speaks favorably of Polanyi's principle of "withdrawing the individual out of the laws of the market and thus reconfiguring relations of power between capital and labor"; meanwhile, André Gorz's elevation of the "right to be lazy" is dismissed and equated with Thatcherism.

This Polanyian social democracy as a harmonious "reconfiguring" of the capital-labor relation is a far cry from the Marxist insistence on abolishing that relation altogether. But its inadequacy as either an inspiring utopia or a sustainable social order is the real lesson of the crisis that gave rise to neoliberalism. And while Foucault may not have come to all the right conclusions about addressing that crisis, he at least asked some of the right questions.

[Context](http://rap.genius.com/The-coup-the-coup-lyrics).

Solidarity to the people of Ferguson, Missouri, and a hearty fuck you to the cops, their bosses, and to anyone who wants to blather about "rioters" and otherwise engage in bogus "both sides" [equivalency](http://www.businessinsider.com/here-comes-obamas-statement-on-ferguson-2014-8) instead of keeping the focus on the extrajudicial executions of these state-sanctioned death squads. See also Robert Stephens II for an excellent [analysis](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/in-defense-of-the-ferguson-riots/) of the actions of the people in Ferguson as part of a process of political mobilization rather than simply undirected vandalism.

What is happening in Missouri is horrifying, yet unusual only in the attention it's receiving. I hope it at least wakes people up to the nature of our heavily militarized police forces---Ferguson is in no way unusual. The other day I sent my editors a draft manuscript for the longer-form adaptation of [Four Futures](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/). In discussing the fourth of those futures, Exterminism, I describe the widespread militarization of the police in the United States, which has its roots in the 1960's but has intensified in the post-9/11 period.

This is a literal case of "bringing the war home." Many of the tanks and other equipment that can be found even in small towns are surplus military equipment, given away to police departments when no longer needed in Iraq or Afghanistan. And of course many cops are veterans, who had a chance to learn from the American government's callous approach to civilian life abroad. I struggled to finish that chapter, because it seemed every day brought a new and more horrifying example of what I was writing about.

It all leads here:

This isn't a movie scene #reality RT @FOX2now: Officers stand in a mist of tear gas. Protected by masks. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/afsqru8rwg

— Trinna Leong (@trinnaleong) August 12, 2014

But I'm only repeating what many are now saying. As some kind of substantive contribution, I figured I'd refute a specific canard that arises from defenders of the [warrior cops](http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americas/dp/1610392116) in situations like this. That is, that all of these trappings of military occupation are necessary because of the oh so dangerous environment the police supposedly face.

Policing is not the country's safest job, to be sure. But as the Bureau of Labor Statistics' [Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries](http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfoi_rates_2012hb.pdf) shows, it's far from the most dangerous. The 2012 data reports that for "police and sheriff's patrol officers," the Fatal Injury Rate---that is, the "number of fatal occupational injuries per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers"---was 15.0. And that includes all causes of death---of the 105 dead officers recorded in the 2012 data, only 51 [died](http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cftb0272.pdf) due to "violence and other injuries by persons or animals." Nearly as many, 48, died in "transportation incidents," e.g., crashing their cars.

Here are some occupations with higher fatality rates than being a cop:

* Logging workers: 129.9
* Fishers and related fishing workers: 120.8
* Aircraft pilots and flight engineers: 54.3
* Roofers: 42.2
* Structural iron and steel workers: 37.0
* Refuse and recyclable material collectors: 32.3
* Drivers/sales workers and truck drivers: 24.3
* Electrical power-line installers and repairers: 23.9
* Farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers: 22.8
* Construction laborers: 17.8
* Taxi drivers and chauffeurs: 16.2
* Maintenance and repairs workers, general: 15.7

Of these, construction labor is the one I've done myself. [This](http://www.bgdlegal.com/clientuploads/Publications/Blog%20and%20Article%20Photos/Construction%20Helmet.png) was what our required body armor looked like.

And for good measure, some more that approach the allegedly terrifying risks of being a cop:

* First-line supervisors of landscaping, lawn service, and groundskeeping workers: 14.7
* Grounds maintenance workers: 14.2
* Athletes, coaches, umpires, and related workers: 13.0

While being a cop might not be all that dangerous, being in the presence of cops certainly is. In 2012, there were a minimum of [410 people](http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_14_justifiable_homicide_by_weapon_law_enforcement_2008-2012.xls) killed by police, and that includes only those reported to the FBI under the creepy category of "justifiable homicide." The [real number](http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/teens-shooting-highlights-need-for-tracking-people-killed-by-police) is probably closer to 1000.

Of course, nobody who knows anything about what police actually do, and isn't pushing a reactionary political agenda, thinks cops actually need to be dressed in heavier armor than the [occupiers of Iraq and Afghanistan](https://storify.com/AthertonKD/veterans-on-ferguson). And the fact that you have a better than 1-in-1000 chance of dying in any given year in certain jobs it itself scandalous. But perhaps looking at these numbers helps put the real nature of American policing in a somewhat different perspective.

When I first started to learn about the world of quantitative social science, it was approaching the high tide of what I call "identificationism". The basic argument of [this movement](http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/why-the-identification-movement/) was as follows. Lots of social scientists are crafting elaborate models that basically only show the *correlations* between variables. They then must rely on a lot of assumptions and theoretical arguments in order to claim that an association between X and Y is indicative of X *causing* Y, rather than Y causing X or both being caused by something else. This can lead to a lot of [flimsy and misleading](http://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/does-researching-casual-marijuana-use-cause-brain-abnormalities/) published findings.

Starting in the 1980's, critics of these practices [started to emphasize](http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com/2007/03/31/what-is-the-matter-with-empirical-economics-freak-freakonomics-again/) what is called, in the statistical jargon, "clean identification". Clean identification means that your analysis is set up in a way that makes it possible to convincingly determine causal effects, not just correlations.

The most time-tested and well respected identification strategy is the randomized experiment, of the kind used in medical trials. If you randomly divide people into two groups that differ only by a single treatment, you can be pretty sure that subsequent differences between the two groups are actually caused by the treatment.

But most social science questions, especially the big and important ones, aren't ones you can do experiments on. You can't randomly assign one group of countries to have austerity economics, and another group to have Keynesian policies. So as a second best solution, scholars began looking for so-called "natural experiments". These are situations where, more or less by accident, people find themselves divided into two groups arbitrarily, almost *as if* they had been randomized in an experiment. This allows the identification of causality in non-experimental situations.

A famous early paper using this approach was David Card and Alan Krueger's 1992 [study](http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/njmin-aer.pdf) of the minimum wage. In 1990, New Jersey had increased its minimum wage to be the highest in the country. Card and Krueger compared employment in the fast food industry both New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. Their logic was that these stores didn't differ systematically aside from the fact that some of them were subject to the higher New Jersey minimum wage, and some of them weren't. Thus any change in employment after the New Jersey hike could be interpreted as a consequence of the higher minimum wage. In a finding that is still cited by liberal advocates, they concluded that higher minimum wages did nothing to cause lower employment, despite the predictions of textbook neoclassical economics.

This was a useful and important paper, and the early wave of natural experiment analyses produced other useful results as well. But as time went on, the obsession with identification led to a wave of studies that were obsessed with proper methodology and unconcerned with whether they were studying interesting or important topics. Steve Levitt of "Freakonomics" fame is a product of this environment, someone who would never tackle a big hard question where an easy trivial one was available.

With the pool of natural experiments reaching exhaustion, some researchers began to turn toward running their own actual experiments. Hence the rise of the so-called ["randomistas"](http://rupertsimons.blogspot.com/2008/10/deaton-on-randomistas.html). These were people who performed randomized controlled trials, generally in poor countries, to answer small and precisely targeted questions about things like aid policy. This work includes things like Chris Blattman's [study](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2439488) in which money was randomly distributed to Ugandan women.

But now, if former World Bank lead economist [Branko Milanovic](https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/476026660781711360) is to be believed, the experimental identificationists are having their own [day of crisis](https://chronicle.com/article/Poverty-Under-the-Microscope). As with the natural experiment, the randomized trial sacrifices big questions and generalizable answers in favor of conclusions that are often trivial. With their lavishly funded operations in poor countries, there's an added aspect of liberal colonialism as well. It's the Nick Kristof or Bono approach to helping the global poor; as Milanovic [puts it](https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/476029714637656064), "you can play God in poor countries, publish papers, make money and feel good about yourself."

If there's a backlash against the obsession with causal inference, it will be a victory for people who want to use data to answer real questions. Writing about these issues [years ago](http://www.peterfrase.com/2009/10/elster-on-the-social-sciences/), I argued that:

> It is often impossible to find an analytical strategy which is both free of strong assumptions about causality and applicable beyond a narrow and artificial situation. The goal of causal inference, that is, is a noble but often futile pursuit. In place of causal inference, what we must often do instead is causal interpretation, in which essentially descriptive tools (such as regression) are interpreted causally based on prior knowledge, logical argument and empirical tests that persuasively refute alternative explanations.

I still basically stand by that, or by the pithier formulation I added later, "Causal inference where possible, causal interpretation where necessary."