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.

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.*

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."

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.

With employees of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system [on strike](http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Outlook-bleak-for-quick-end-to-BART-strike-4910113.php), the Sillicon Valley tech elite has reminded us all that despite their enlightened Bay Area lifestyles, they are still, at root, a bunch of rich dudes. Corey Robin ably [documents](http://jacobinmag.com/2013/10/dont-disrupt-the-disruptors/) the reactionary politics and moral degeneracy of people who see themselves as heroic entrepreneurs and the people who get them to work as greedy parasites.

The combination of the strike and the government shutdown has shined a welcome light on the more [delusional parts](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/silicon-valleys-secessionists.html) of the tech bro intellegentisa, who [revel](http://valleywag.gawker.com/this-asshole-misses-the-shutdown-1447331354) in government dysfunction and [dream](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57608320-93/a-radical-dream-for-making-techno-utopias-a-reality/) of stateless techno-utopias. It's all the more amusing to see these would-be John Galts dismissing the need for government one moment, and bemoaning the shutdown of a public transit agency the next.

But the most revealing of the tech industry commentaries on the strike is [this one](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/14/bay-area-subway-strike-re-ignites-the-feud-between-unions-and-silicon-valley.html), in which Gregory Ferenstein attempts to sort out what he sees as a difference of opinion about the virtues of technology and innovation. He asserts that "the very existence of unions threatens the kind of unpredictable disruption that fuels the knowledge economy", and that what is at stake in the BART strike is not class struggle but rather the tech elite's "legitimate philosophical differences that assume the benefits to innovation outweigh the short-term gains of protecting workers".

In a way, this attempt to change the subject from class to technology is the mirror image of Gavin Mueller's [essay](http://jacobinmag.com/2013/04/the-rise-of-the-machines/) in a recent *Jacobin*, in which he takes me to task as a techno-utopian and suggests that "instead of depending on capitalism to give us all the machines we need for a socialism without scarcity or drudgery, we put the installation of technology on hold until 'after the revolution'". Rather than fight over how different kinds of technologies are implemented and how the losers from change are compensated, he suggests that we concentrate on "the disempowering effects of automation". Thus manual control over the production process takes precedence over control over the workplace or the economy. But by portraying technical change under capitalism as always and only a nefarious plot to intensify exploitation and disorganize workers, Mueller affirms the gambit of those like Ferenstein who would prefer to debate the merits of innovation rather than the social relations of class and power. He thus makes an ideal foil from the perspective of the libertarian tech bro.

I have no intention of playing that part, however. I'm more interested in examining what the "innovation vs. worker rights" framing presupposes, and what it cedes.

Ferenstein insists that that there's no need for unions for either the "lucky elite class of tech workers" who have "all the benefits and influence they could ever hope for," or for the "army of freelance engineers that thrive on unpredictability." As Scott Kilpatrick [observed](http://storify.com/pefrase/tech-workers-and-unions) on Twitter, the "lucky elite" rests on top of a mass of precarious contractors and service employees who have little voice in companies like Google. But Ferenstein's view is a telling indicator of the wordview of the tech elite, who breathlessly tout "disruption" and glamorize unpredictability and uncertainty. For this elite, losing your job only means moving on to the next startup, or retiring on a pile of stock options. It doesn't mean prolonged unemployment, homelessness, or being cut off from health care.

For transit workers, of course, disruption and unpredictability have much more dire implications, but Ferenstein would prefer to distract us from that reality by portraying their concerns as the consequence of a philosophical objection to innovation. But instead of playing the straight man to this routine by extolling the virtues of stable employment, let's ask instead what it would mean to make unstable labor relations the bearable and even pleasant experience that they can be for the elite. It would mean something like what the Danish Social Democrats call ["flexicurity"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity): a system that protects workers rather than jobs, by providing a robust system of unemployment benefits and training programs to ease the burden of joblessness and the transition between jobs.

For the true believers in libertarian secession, such policy would no doubt amount to an intolerable state incursion on the freedom of the entrepreneur. But I'm more interested in the comment of UserVoice CEO Richard White, quoted by [Andrew Leonard](http://www.salon.com/2013/07/08/silicon_valley_is_stoking_the_wrong_kind_of_revolution/) (and then re-quoted by Ferenstein): "Get 'em back to work, pay them whatever they want, and then figure out how to automate their jobs so this doesn’t happen again."

This doesn't quite get at the real substance of the dispute, which is more about [work rules](http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/BART-workers-go-on-strike-4904918.php) than about pay. In particular, the union wants to preserve a provision that requires mutual agreement between management and the union before an existing labor practice can be altered.

As is typical in disputes like this, the employer tries to portray the work rule under discussion as an absurd impediment to rational management, while the union raises its valid uses. So BART claims that this rule "makes it difficult to make technological changes like having station agents file reports by e-mail instead of writing them out longhand, using e-mail instead of fax machines to send documents and sending paycheck stubs to each work location electronically instead of hand-delivering them." But it's hard to see just why the union would object to this. More plausible is the union's contention that the past practices rule is useful for things like "preventing BART management from making punitive work assignments to employees who have filed workplace complaints."

This strike thus turns out to be an excellent example of the dynamic I wrote about [some while back](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/02/the-dialectic-of-technology/), the dialectical interplay between class struggle and technological development. I noted there that technology is two sided under capitalism: it can increase material abundance, and it can also oppress and fragment workers, and often it does both at the same time. In that earlier post I posited that "the form that technological change takes is shaped by the strength and organization of workers." This is what we see played out in the BART strike.

The transit workers' union, SEIU local 1021, has an interesting [post](http://www.seiu1021.org/2013/10/20/bart-unions-offer-new-proposal-to-get-trains-running-monday-and-end-the-strike/) describing their most recent settlement offer. Their proposal, they say, "allows for the continued use of new technology in the workplace but protects workers from changes in work rules that would lead to unsafe conditions." The post goes on to note the recent fatal accident that occurred recently when two workers [were killed](http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Train-kills-2-track-workers-amid-SF-Bay-strike-4909051.php) by trains under the operation of BART managers. The union strategically positions itself not as an opponent of technology, but as an advocate for innovations that truly improve the transit system, rather than just providing ways for management to degrade the power of labor---whether by imposing unsafe working conditions or by using computer scheduling to disrupt the predictability of the workday, which is the example of anti-worker technology I cited in my earlier post.

In another post, the union [notes](http://www.seiu1021.org/2013/10/17/bart-unions-shocked-about-the-collapse-of-negotiations-reluctantly-prepare-for-strike-at-midnight/) that "the system is carrying more passengers than ever with fewer frontline workers than ever." So it seems that the union is not even attempting to preserve all jobs for their own sake, which would be an understandable position but also one that could genuinely impede the introduction of productivity-enhancing changes. Instead, they are trying to shape the development of the labor process in a way that is less dehumanizing to the worker.

But if CEO White got his wish, and we truly did "figure out how to automate their jobs" entirely, the union leadership and the members would probably have some understandable objections eventually. Which is why, as I note in a [different post](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/09/conservative-leftists-and-radical-dockworkers/), a viable compromise between labor-saving technology and the working class has to be worked out an economy-wide scale rather than in a single workplace or industry. The Danish model, in other words, or something even [more audacious](http://jacobinmag.com/2013/05/curious-utopias/).

Still, the BART strike is a useful starting point for moving away from the technobabble and talking about class and politics. And the approach of "give the workers what they want, then figure out how to automate" is far preferable to the more common "hyper-exploit the workers, while hand-waving about some great innovation that's going to come along in the future." What the BART workers are doing can be considered part of the utopian strategy of [making labor expensive](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/cheap-labor-and-the-great-stagnation/). And if the tech industry could take on the challenge of transforming economic processes while accepting the rights and dignity of existing workers, that would be some truly disruptive innovation.

The Universal Basic Income hit the Washington Post again this weekend, [courtesy of Mike Konczal](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/11/thinking-utopian-how-about-a-universal-basic-income/). He focuses on left objections to the UBI proposal, ranging from its effect on gender equality to its relationship with the existing welfare state to its interaction with the struggle for workplace democracy. In the end, he emphasizes the benefits of the UBI, and insists that while we're unlikely to see basic income in the United States anytime soon, it's still worth "taking a moment to think Utopian".

Matt Bruenig [objects](http://www.policyshop.net/home/2013/5/12/is-a-universal-basic-income-really-utopian.html) to Konczal's characterization of the basic income as "utopian", on the grounds that it is not something that "proposes to dramatically overhaul society into an entirely unprecedented structure that will usher in a nearly perfect world." It is only utopian in the very weak sense that it is not currently on the political agenda as something that is likely to be enacted.

It's certainly true that basic income is hardly utopian in its etymological sense of meaning "nowhere". A recent article in Le Monde Diplomatique [describes](http://mondediplo.com/2013/05/04income) an experiment with UBI in an Indian village. The experiment is run by a trade union called the Self Employed Women's Association, and it found that with just an extra $3.65 per month, "people spent more on eggs, meat and fish, and on healthcare. Children's school marks improved in 68% of families, and the time they spent at school nearly tripled. Saving also tripled, and twice as many people were able to start a new business." This is consistent with the results found in basic income experiments [in Namibia](http://www.bignam.org/) and in [1970's Canada](http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100).

Meanwhile, there have long been critics on the Left who criticize basic income proposals precisely for their perceived lack of utopianism. As Konczal notes, Barbara Bergmann [argues](http://www.usbig.net/papers/010-bergmann.pdf) that it is more important to secure broader access to specific goods like child care, health care, and education: "The fully developed welfare state deserves priority over Basic Income because it accomplishes what Basic Income does not: it guarantees that certain specific human needs will be met." In a [New Left Review essay](http://newleftreview.org/II/43/goran-therborn-after-dialectics), Göran Therborn strikes a similar tone, referring to the basic income as a "curious utopia of resignation" arising in response to welfare state retrenchment and diminished prospects for working class control over the workplace or the means of production.

From the perspective of the basic income's leftist advocates, however, there is another way in which it can be considered a deeply utopian project. Fredric Jameson discusses two different meanings of utopia in his study of utopian politics and science fiction, [*Archaeologies of the Future*](http://books.google.com/books/about/Archaeologies_of_the_future.html?id=sPBad_aN0i0C). The first is utopia as a fully-elaborated *program* for the future society, which is close to Bruenig's sense of the proposal to dramatically overhaul society. But the second is the utopian *impulse*, which appears across much broader domains of everyday life and politics, including even "piecemeal social democratic and 'liberal' reforms". Such impulses may not themselves be the program for a utopian society, but they can point in the direction of future programmatic realizations.

The French writer André Gorz was a longtime proponent of the basic income, and is also responsible for a well-known theorization of its utopian transformative potential. In one of his early works, *Strategy for Labor*, he attempted to do away with the tired Left debate over "reform or revolution" and replace it with a new distinction:

> Is it possible *from within*---that is to say, without having previously destroyed capitalism---to impose anti-capitalist solutions which will not immediately be incorporated into and subordinated to the system? This is the old question of "reform or revolution." This was (or is) a paramount question when the movement had (or has) the choice between a struggle for reforms and armed insurrection. Such is no longer the case in Western Europe; here there is no longer an alternative. The question here revolves around the possibility of "revolutionary reforms," that is to say, of reforms which advance toward a radical transformation of society. Is this possible?

Gorz goes on to distinguish "reformist reforms", which subordinate themselves to the need to preserve the functioning of the existing system, from the radical alternative:

> A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be. And finally, it bases the possibility of attaining its objective on the implementation of fundamental political and economic changes. These changes can be sudden, just as they can be gradual. But in any case they assume a modification of the relations of power; they assume that the workers will take over powers or assert a force (that is to say, a non-institutionalized force) strong enough to establish, maintain, and expand those tendencies within the system which serve to weaken capitalism and to shake its joints. They assume structural reforms.

One criticism of the basic income is that it will not be systemically viable over the long run, as people increasingly drop out of paid labor and undermine the tax base that funds the basic income in the first place. But from another point of view, this prospect is precisely what makes basic income a non-reformist reform. Thus one can sketch out a more programmatic kind of utopianism that uses the basic income as its point of departure. One of my favorite gestures in this direction is Robert van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs' 1986 essay, ["A Capitalist Road to Communism"](http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/ERU_files/PVP-cap-road.pdf).

The essay begins from the proposition that Marxism's ultimate end is not socialism, but rather a communist society that abolishes not merely exploitation (the unjust distribution of the social product relative to work performed) but also alienation: "productive activities need no longer be prompted by external rewards".

They then go on to sketch out a scenario in which a reform instituted under capitalism leads to communism without the intermediary stage of socialist construction. This thought experiment revolves around the achievement of an unconditional, universal basic income. Suppose, they say, "that it is possible to provide everyone with a universal grant sufficient to cover his or her 'fundamental needs' without this involving the economy in a downward spiral. How does the economy evolve once such a universal grant is introduced?"

Their answer is that the basic income would "twist" the capitalist drive to increase productivity, such that:

> Entitlement to a substantial universal grant will simultaneously push up the wage rate for unattractive, unrewarding work (which no one is now forced to accept in order to survive) and bring down the average wage rate for attractive, intrinsically rewarding work (because fundamental needs are covered anyway, people can now accept a high-quality job paid far below the guaranteed income level). Consequently, the capitalist logic of profit will, much more than previously, foster technical innovation and organizational change that improve the quality of work and thereby reduce the drudgery required per unit of product.

If you extrapolate this trend forward, you reach a situation where all wage labor is gradually eliminated. Undesirable work is fully automated, as employers feel increasing pressure to automate because labor is no longer [too cheap](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/cheap-labor-and-the-great-stagnation/). Meanwhile, the wage for desirable work eventually falls to zero, because people are both willing to do it for free, and able to do so due to the existence of a basic income to supply their essential needs. As Gorz puts it in a later work, the [*Critique of Economic Reason*](http://www.amazon.com/Critique-Economic-Reason-Radical-Thinkers/dp/1844676676), certain activities "may be partially repatriated into the sphere of autonomous activities and reduce the demand for these things to be provided by external services, whether public or commercial."

The long-run trajectory, therefore, is one in which people come to depend less and less on the basic income, because the things they want and need do not have to be purchased for money. Some things can be produced costlessly and automatically, as 3-D printing and digital copying technologies evolve into something like Star Trek's replicator. Other things have become the product of voluntary co-operative activity, rather than waged work. It therefore comes to pass that the tax base for the basic income is undermined---but rather than a crisis, as in the hands of basic income critics, this becomes the path to utopia.

Consider, for example, a basic income that was linked to the size of Gross Domestic Product. We are used to a capitalist world in which the increase in material prosperity corresponds to a rise in GDP, the measured value of economic activity in money. But as wage labor comes to be replaced either by automation or voluntary activity, GDP would begin to fall, and the basic income with it. This would not lead to lowered standards of living, because the falling GDP here also denotes a decline in the *cost* of living. Just like the socialist state in certain versions of traditional Marxism, the basic income withers away. As van der Veen and van Parijs put it, "capitalist societies will smoothly move toward full communism."

The capitalist road to communism is truly a utopia. Not only in the colloquial sense of a total transformation of a society, but also in its overly simplified and rationalistic picture of social evolution. As Jameson notes, utopias are defined as much by their closures and exclusions as their positive programs, as much by what they cannot say as what they can. A utopia often says more about the present in which it was written than it does about the future it depicts.

In the case of the capitalist road to communism, the things left out include the political struggles that would ensue if social development threatened to evolve the capitalist class out of existence, gradually sapping their profits and their social power. This began to manifest itself even under the meager basic income in the Namibian experiment: white landlords were deeply hostile to the basic income and denied the evidence of its benefits, [perhaps because](http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-new-approach-to-aid-how-a-basic-income-program-saved-a-namibian-village-a-642310-3.html) they are "afraid that the poor will gain some influence and deprive the rich, white 20 percent of the population of some of their power." Also brushed aside are the ecological limits that might make true abundance elusive. Both of these are themes I attempted to flesh out in ["Four Futures"](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/). A third issue, which I've discussed a bit [elsewhere](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/08/working-time-and-feminism/), is the ingrained gender norms that may be reinforced by expanding the domain of "voluntary" labor, which often amounts the imposition of unpaid work on women. But the conceptual clarity of van der Veen and van Parijs' rendition is enlightening in its very implausibility and incompleteness, a demonstration of the utopian impulse contained in an apparently timid policy proposal.

In my periodic discussions of contemporary capitalism and its potential transition into a rentier-dominated economy, I have emphasized the point that an economy based on private property depends upon the state to define and enforce just what counts as property, and what rights come with owning that property. (The point is perhaps made most directly in [this essay](http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/phantom-tollbooths/) for *The New Inquiry*.) Just as capitalism required that the commons in land be enclosed and transformed into the property of individuals, so what I've called ["rentism"](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/) requires the extension of intellectual property: the right to control the copying and modification of *patterns*, and not just of physical objects.

But the development of rentism entails not just a change in the laws, but in the way the economy itself is measured and defined. Since capitalism is rooted in the quantitative reduction of human action to the accumulation of money, the way in which it quantifies itself has great economic and political significance. To relate this back to my [last post](http://www.peterfrase.com/2013/04/the-perils-of-wonkery/): much was made of the empirical and conceptual worthiness of Reinhart and Rogoff's link between government debt and economic growth, but all such [disputations](http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/guest-post-reinhartrogoff-and-growth-time-debt) presume agreement about the measurement of economic growth itself.

Which brings us to the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis, and its surprisingly fascinating ["Preview of the 2013 Comprehensive Revision of the National Income and Product Accounts"](http://www.bea.gov/scb/pdf/2013/03%20March/0313_nipa_comprehensive_revision_preview.pdf). The paper describes a change in the way the government represents the size of various parts of the economy, and therefore economic growth. The most significant changes are these:

> Recognize expenditures by business, government, and nonprofit institutions serving households (NPISH) on research and development as fixed investment.

> Recognize expenditures by business and NPISH on entertainment, literary, and other artistic originals as fixed investment.

The essential issue is whether spending on Research and Development, and on the production of creative works, should be regarded merely as an input to other production processes, or instead as an investment in the creation of a distinct value-bearing asset. The BEA report observes that "expenditures for R&D have long been recognized as having the characteristics of fixed assets---defined ownership rights, long-lasting, and repeated use and benefit in the production process", and that therefore the BEA "recogniz[es] that the asset boundary should be expanded to include innovative activities." Likewise, "some entertainment, literary, and other artistic originals are designed to generate mass reproductions for sale to the general public and to have a useful lifespan of more than one year." Thus the need for "a new asset category entitled 'intellectual property products'," which will encompass both types of property.

What the BEA calls "expanding the asset boundary" is precisely the redefinition of the property form that I've written about---only now it is a statistical rather than a legal redefinition. And that change in measurement will be written backwards into the past as well as forwards into the future: national accounts going back to 1929 will be revised to account for the newly expansive view of assets.

Here the statisticians are only following a long legal trend, in which the state treats immaterial patterns as a sort of physical asset. It may be a coincidence, but the BEA's decision to start its revisionist statistical account in the 1920's matches the point at which U.S. copyright law became fully disconnected from its original emphasis on limited and temporary protections subordinated to social benefits. Under the [Copyright Term Extension Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act), creative works made in 1923 and afterwards have remained out of the public domain, perpetually maintaining them as private assets rather than public goods.

A careful reading of the BEA report shows the way in which the very statistical definitions employed in the new accounts rely upon the prior efforts of the state to promote the profitability of the intellectual property form. In its discussion of creative works, the report notes that "entertainment originals are rarely sold in an open market, so it is difficult to observe market prices . . . a common problem with measuring the value of intangible assets." As libertarian critics [like to point out](http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html), an economy based on intellectual property must be organized around monopoly rather than direct competition.

In order to measure the value of intangible assets, therefore, the BEA takes a different approach. For R&D, "BEA analyzed the relationship between investment in R&D and future profits . . . in which each period's R&D investment contributes to the profits in later periods." Likewise for creative works, BEA will "estimate the value of these as­sets based on the NPV [Net Present Value] of expected future royalties or other revenue obtained from these assets".

Here we see the reciprocal operation of state power and statistical measurement. Insofar as the state collaborates with copyright holders to stamp out unauthorized copying ("piracy"), and insofar as the courts uphold stringent patent rights, the potential revenue stream that can be derived from owning IP will grow. And now that the system of national accounts has validated such revenues as a part of the value of intangible assets, the copyright and patent cartels can justly claim to be important contributors to the growth of the Gross Domestic Product.

The BEA also has interesting things to say about how their new definitions will impact different components of the overall national accounts aggregate. They note that the categories of "corporate profits" and "proprietors' income" will increase---an accounting convention perhaps, but one that accurately reflects the constituencies that stand to benefit from the control of intellectual property. Thus the new economic order being mapped by the BEA fits in neatly with Steve Waldman's excellent [recent post](http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4340.html) about late capitalism's "technologically-driven resource curse, coalescing into groups of insiders and outsiders and people fighting at the margins not to be left behind."

The changes related to R&D and artistic works may be the most significant, but the other three revisions in the report are worth noting as well. One has to do with the costs associated with transferring residential fixed assets (e.g., the closing costs related to buying a house), while another has to do with the accounting applied to pension plans. Only the final one, a technical harmonization, has to do directly with wages and salaries. This is perhaps an accurate reflection of an economic elite more preoccupied with asset values than with the direct returns to wage labor.

Finally, the reception of the BEA report provides another "peril of wonkery", related to the one I described in my [last post](http://www.peterfrase.com/2013/04/the-perils-of-wonkery/). The Wonkblog [post](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/22/huzzah-the-u-s-economy-is-3-percent-bigger-than-we-thought-thanks-george-lucas/) about the report makes some effort to acknowledge the socially constructed nature of economic statistics: "the assumptions you make in creating your benchmark economic statistics can create big swings in the reality you see." And yet the post then moves directly on to claim that in light of the statistical revisions, "the U.S. economy is even more heavily driven by the iPad designers and George Lucases of the world---and proportionally less by the guys who assemble washing machines---than we thought." This is no doubt how the matter will be described going forward. But the new measurement strategies are only manifestations of a choice to *attribute* a greater share of
our material wealth to designers and directors, and that choice has more to do with class struggle than with statistics.

In Sunday's *New York Times*, conservative columnist Ross Douthat [invokes](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/opinion/sunday/douthat-a-world-without-work.html) the utopian dream of "a society rich enough that fewer and fewer people need to work---a society where leisure becomes universally accessible, where part-time jobs replace the regimented workweek, and where living standards keep rising even though more people have left the work force altogether." This "post-work" politics [may be unfamiliar](https://twitter.com/JHWeissmann/status/305681756441427969) to many readers of the *Times*, but it won't be new to readers of *Jacobin*.

Post-work socialism has a proud, if dissident tradition, from [Paul Lafargue](http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/) to [Oscar Wilde](http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/index.htm) to [Bertrand Russell](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html) to [André Gorz](http://books.google.com/books/about/Paths_to_paradise.html?id=5wTsAAAAMAAJ). It's a vision that animates my writing on topics ranging across [the contradictions of the work ethic](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/01/hipsters-food-stamps-and-the-politics-of-resentment/), [the possibilities of a post-scarcity society](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/), [the politics of sex work](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/03/the-problem-with-sex-work/), and [the connection between post-work politics and feminism](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/). Others have addressed related themes, like Chris Maisano on [shorter working hours](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/01/take-this-job-and-share-it/) as both a response to unemployment and a step forward for human freedom, and Sarah Leonard on the [pro-work corporate feminism](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/she-cant-sleep-no-more/) of Marissa Mayer.

The basic vision of the post-work Left, then, is one of [fewer jobs](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/), and shorter hours at the jobs we do have. Douthat suggests, however, that this vision is already becoming a reality, and he warns that it is not a result we should welcome.

It's something of a victory that a *New York Times* columnist is even acknowledging the post-work perspective on labor politics, rather than ignoring it completely. Hopefully he's been taking [his own advice](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/opinion/sunday/douthat-how-to-read-in-2013.html), and reading about it in *Jacobin*. But Douthat's take is a rather peculiar one. To begin with, he claims that we have entered an era of "post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job". But it's not clear what he bases this claim on. It's true that labor force participation rates---the percentage of the working-age population that is employed or looking for work---has declined in recent years. From a high of around 67 percent in the late 1990's, it declined to around 66 percent before the beginning of the last recession. The recession itself then produced another sharp decline, and the rate now stands below 64 percent.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that this reflects masses of people taking advantage of our material abundance to increase their leisure time. As those numbers show, most of the decline in the participation rate was due to the recession (and some of the rest is probably due to [demographic shifts](http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2012/10/understanding-decline-in-participation.html)). If the economy returned to full employment---that is, if everyone who wanted a job could actually find one---the participation rate would probably rise again. For how else are people supposed to "find ways to live . . . without a steady job", when incomes have stayed [flat for decades](http://stateofworkingamerica.org/charts/productivity-and-real-median-family-income-growth-1947-2009/) despite great increases in productivity?

The post-work landscape that Douthat discovers is therefore very different than the one you'll find surveyed in the pages of *Jacobin*. An economy in which people must get by on some combination of scant public benefits, charity, and hustling---because they are unable to find a job---is very different from a world where people are able to make a real choice to either cut back their hours or drop out of paid work entirely for a period of time. That's why, in different ways, [Maisano](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/working-for-the-weekend-2/), [myself](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/), and [Seth Ackerman](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/05/the-work-of-anti-work-a-response-to-peter-frase/) have all emphasized that full employment is central to the project of work reduction, because tight labor markets give workers the bargaining power to demand shorter hours even without cuts in pay. And it's why I have especially emphasized the demand for a [Universal Basic Income](http://kboo.fm/node/52414), which would make it possible to survive outside of paid labor for a much larger segment of the population.

If Douthat's account of labor force participation is misleading, his account of working time is equally incomplete. "Long hours", he claims, "are increasingly the province of the rich." While this claim isn't precisely wrong, at least within certain narrow parameters, it obscures much more than it reveals. Douthat links to an economic study that [finds](http://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/w11895.html) longer average weekly hours among those at the top of the wage distribution, relative to those at the bottom. This is not a unique finding; the sociologists Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson found something similar in their study [*The Time Divide*](http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Time_Divide.html?id=3T1qJfLuohgC). And as it happens, I have some published [academic research](http://www.peterfrase.com/research/) on the topic as well. In many rich countries, including the United States, highly educated workers (e.g., those with college degrees) report longer average work weeks than the less educated (who also tend to be lower waged, of course).

This finding is often deployed to dismiss the significance of long hours, much the way Douthat does here. If the longest hours are being worked by those who presumably have the most power and leverage in the labor market, the argument goes, then long hours shouldn't be such a concern. But this is wrong for several reasons.

First, just because hours are longest at the top end of the wage distribution doesn't mean they aren't long elsewhere as well---in my research, I found that reported average hours among men were above 40 hours per week across all educational categories. And hours on the job doesn't cover all the other time people spend working: time spent commuting to work, time spent performing unpaid household and care work (which those on low wages often can't buy paid replacements for), and what the sociologist Guy Standing [calls](http://unionosity.com/precarity-2/guy-standing-discusses-the-precariat/) "work-for-labor": the work of looking for jobs, navigating state and private bureaucracies, networking, and other things that are preconditions for getting work but are themselves unpaid.

Second, working time is characterized by pervasive *mismatches* between hours and preferences, which are more complicated than just hours that are "too long". Jeremy Reynolds [has found](http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/81/4/1171.short) that a majority of workers say that they would like to work a different schedule than they do, but that these preferences are split between those who would like to work less and those who would like more hours---[overemployment](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/03/the-scourge-of-overemployment/) alongside underemployment.

The finding that many people report working fewer hours than they would like reflects an economy in which many [low-wage workers](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/mcjobs-should-pay-too-inside-fast-food-workers-historic-protest-for-living-wages/265714/) face uncertain schedules and enforced part-time hours that exclude them from benefits. These workers would clearly benefit from predictable hours, higher wages, and recourse to good health care benefits that aren't tied to employment, but it's far from clear that they would benefit from more work, as such.

And Douthat would almost seem to agree. In a passage I could have written myself, he says:

> There is a certain air of irresponsibility to giving up on employment altogether, of course. But while pundits who tap on keyboards for a living like to extol the inherent dignity of labor, we aren’t the ones stocking shelves at Walmart or hunting wearily, week after week, for a job that probably pays less than our last one did. One could make the case that the right to not have a boss is actually the hardest won of modern freedoms: should it really trouble us if more people in a rich society end up exercising it?

Amazingly, he follows this up by answering that last question with a resounding *yes*. And I might almost be inclined to follow him, if he based his conclusion on the argument I've just presented: that in an environment of pervasive unemployment, high costs of living, and a meager and narrowly targeted welfare state, the loss of work isn't exactly something to celebrate.

Perhaps realizing, however, that this austere vision is hardly a compelling case for the conservative worldview, Douthat tries a different tack. Having acknowledged the implausibility of the "dignity of labor" case for much actually-existing work, he neverthelsss moves right on to the claim that "even a grinding job tends to be an important source of social capital, providing everyday structure for people who live alone, a place to meet friends and kindle romances for people who lack other forms of community, a path away from crime and prison for young men, an example to children and a source of self-respect for parents." He concludes with an appeal to the importance of "human flourishing", but it's hard to see much social capital, lasting interpersonal connection, or human flourishing going on in the [Amazon warehouse](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor)---or for that matter, at [Pret a Manger](http://jacobinmag.com/2013/02/in-defense-of-soviet-waiters/).

Although it's pitched in a kindlier, *New York Times*-friendly tone, Douthat's argument is reminiscent of [Charles Murray's](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart:_The_State_of_White_America,_1960%E2%80%932010) argument that the working class needs the discipline and control provided by working for the boss, lest they come socially unglued altogether. Good moralistic scold that he is, Douthat sees the decline of work as part of "the broader turn away from community in America---from family breakdown and declining churchgoing to the retreat into the virtual forms of sport and sex and friendship." It seems more plausible that it is neoliberal economic conditions themselves---a scaled back social safety net, precarious employment, rising, debts and uncertain incomes---that has produced [whatever increase in anomie and isolation](http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/dec/20/instagame/) we experience. The answer to that is not more work but more protection from the life's unpredictable risks, more income, more equality, more democracy---and more time beyond work to take advantage of all of it.

There's been a bit of a discussion about affective labor going around. Paul Myerscough in the [*London Review of Books*](http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n01/paul-myerscough/short-cuts) describes the elaborate code with which the Pret a Manger chain enforces an ersatz cheerfulness and dedication on the part of its employees, who are expected to be "smiling, reacting to each other, happy, engaged". Echoing a remark of [Giraudoux and George Burns](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean_Giraudoux), the most important thing to fake is sincerity: "authenticity of being happy is important".

[Tim Noah](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112204/pret-manger-when-corporations-enforce-happiness) and [Josh Eidelson](http://www.thenation.com/article/172547/starbucks-tycoon-bullies-baristas) elaborate on this theme, and [Sarah Jaffe](http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14535/grin_and_abhor_it_the_truth_behind_service_with_a_smile/) makes the point that this has always been an extremely gendered aspect of labor (waged and otherwise). She notes that "women have been fighting for decades to make the point that they don't do their work for the love of it; they do it because women are expected to do it." Employers, of course, would prefer equality to be established by imposing the love of work on both genders.

Noah describes the way Pret a Manger keeps "its sales clerks in a state of enforced rapture through policies vaguely reminiscent of the old East German Stasi". I was reminded of the Soviet model too, but in a different way. I'm just old enough to remember when people talked about the Communist world as a really-existing place rather than a vaguely-defined bogeyman. And one of the mundane tropes that always came up foreign travelogues from behind the Iron Curtain concerned the notoriously surly service workers, in particular restaurant waiters. A 1977 [newspaper headline](http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2519&dat=19770720&id=C-ZdAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Gl8NAAAAIBAJ&pg=4427,2646581) reads "Soviet Union Takes Hard Look At Surly Waiters, Long Lines". In a 1984 dispatch in the *New York Times*, John Burns reports that "faced with inadequate supplies, low salaries and endless lines of customers, many Russians in customer-service jobs lapse into an indifference bordering on contempt."

One can find numerous explanations of this phenomenon, from the shortcomings of the planned economy to the institutional structure of the Soviet service industry to the vagaries of the Russian soul to the [legacy of serfdom](http://konstantin2005.blogspot.com/2005/10/russian-rudeness.html). But one factor was clearly that Soviet workers, unlike their American counterparts, were guaranteed jobs, wages, and access to essential needs like housing, education, and health care. The fear that enforces fake happiness among capitalist service workers---culminating in the grotesquery of Pret a Manger---was mostly inoperative in the Soviet Union. As an article in [the *Moscow Times*](http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/why-russians-dont-smile/436037.html) explains:

> During the perestroika era, the American smile was a common reference point when the topic of rude Soviet service was discussed. In an often-quoted exchange that took place on a late-1980s television talk show, one participant said, “In the United States, store employees smile, but everyone knows that the smiles are insincere.” Another answered, “Better to have insincere American smiles than our very sincere Soviet rudeness!”

With the collapse of the USSR and the penetration of Western capital into Russia, employers discovered a workforce that adapted only reluctantly to the norms of capitalist work discipline. A 1990 article in *USA Today* opens with a description of the travails facing the first Pizza Hut in the Soviet Union:

> To open the first Pizza Hut restaurants in the Soviet Union, U.S. managers had to teach Soviet workers how to find the ''you'' in U.S.S.R.

> ''We taught them the concept of customer service,'' says Rita Renth, just back from the experience. ''Things that come naturally to employees here we had to teach them to do: -smiling, interacting with customers, eye contact.''

In no time, however, the managers hit on what I've [described](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/) as the third wave form of the work ethic. Rather than appealing to religious salvation or material prosperity, workers are told that they should find their drudgery intrinsically enjoyable:

> The five U.S. managers - and colleagues from Pizza Huts in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Australia and other nations - spent 12 to 14 hours a day drilling the Russians on service and food preparation, Pizza Hut style.

> As a way of ''motivating them to be excited about what they were doing, we made (tasks) like folding boxes into a contest,'' Rae says. ''When they finished, they said they couldn't believe they would ever have fun at their jobs.''

> That feeling, rare in Soviet workplaces, has been noticed. ''A comment made by a lot of customers was that as soon as they walked in, they sensed a feeling of warmth,'' Rae says.

It's the Pret a Manger approach to enforced cheerfulness (which had better be authentic!), combined with gamification, 1990-style. Along the same lines is this [blog post](http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/04/old-soviet-mentality-about-customer.html) from a business school professor, who recounts the experience of the first Russian McDonald's:

> After several days of training about customer service at McDonald's, a young Soviet teenager asked the McDonald's trainer a very serious question: "Why do we have to be so nice to the customers? After all, WE have the hamburgers, and they don't!"

True enough. But while they may have had the hamburgers, with the collapse of Communism they no longer had steady access to the [means of payment](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/05/category-errors/).

The brusqueness of customer service interactions has typically been interpreted as an indication of Communism's shortcomings, their low quality understood as a mark of capitalism's superiority. And it does indicate a contradiction of the Soviet model, which preserved the form of wage labor while removing many of the disciplinary mechanisms---the threat of unemployment, of destitution---that force workers to accept the discipline of the employer or the customers. That contradiction comes to a head in a restaurant where both employees and customers are miserable. As the old saying goes, "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work".

In his recent [essay](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/), Seth Ackerman cautions that present-day socialists shouldn't overlook the material shortcomings of the planned economies, and he notes that "the shabbiness of consumer supply was popularly felt as a betrayal of the humanistic mission of socialism itself". But service work is a bit different from the kind of material shabbiness he discusses, since the product and the worker are inseparable. To demand what we've come to think of as "good service" is ultimately to demand the kind of affective---and affected---labor that we see throughout the service industry and especially in female-gendered occupations. Paul Myerscough is clearly unsettled by a system in which, "To guard against the possibility of Pret workers allowing themselves to behave even for a moment as if they were ‘just here for the money’, the company maintains a panoptical regime of surveillance and assessment." But 30 years ago, journalists like Myerscough were the sort
of people grousing about rude Moscow waiters.

In a system based on wage labor (or its approximation), the choice between company-enforced cheerfulness or authentic resentment is unavoidable. In other words, fake American smiles or sincere Soviet rudeness. The customer service interaction under capitalism can hardly avoid the collision between fearful resentment and self-deluding condescension, of the sort Tim Noah enacts in his opening: "For a good long while, I let myself think that the slender platinum blonde behind the counter at Pret A Manger was in love with me." Perhaps it's time to look back with a bit of nostalgia on the surly Communist waiters of yore, whose orientation toward the system was at least transparent.

I have argued many times that the essence of the social democratic project---and for the time being, the socialist project as well---is the empowerment of labor. By means of full employment, the separation of income from employment, and the organization of workers, people gain the ability to resist the demands of the boss. But the case of affective labor is another example that shows why this supposedly tepid and reformist project is ultimately radical and unstable. Take away the lash of the boss, and you are suddenly forced to confront service employees as human beings with human emotions, without their company-supplied masks of enforced good cheer. Revealing the true condition of service work can be a [de-fetishizing experience](http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/garagesale/garagesale1.pdf), one just as jarring---and quite a bit closer to home---than finding out how your [iPhone was manufactured](http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/garagesale/garagesale1.pdf). In both cases, we
are made to confront unpleasant truths about the power relations that structure all of our experiences as consumers.