Work, Philosophy and The Meaning Tax

My approach to life and work has been to try to do interesting things and hope that happiness, and maybe money, will follow. I’ll leave reflections on happiness for later entries. On the money side, I’ve managed to land a few well-paid (and some not so well-paid) gigs that have allowed me to dig deeper into my interests in politics, philosophy and art.

My current position has me thinking about how to make organizations perform more effectively, especially through learning and the application of knowledge to action, as well as about work and the future of work, more generally. My previous position paid better and afforded me more time to read and write broadly – which was a consequence of the organization’s identity crisis and a bank account bursting with money – but it left me bored, depressed and always wondering if my redundancy would be discovered.

So I left to take up a position as a Senior Research Associate with the Conference Board of Canada – an influential non-profit think tank. The work there has challenges of a different sort – the sort that stimulate creativity rather than apathy. And the environment is conducive to open debate rather than the culture of fear and silence I had witnessed elsewhere.

So much by way of introduction…

In thinking and writing about organizations and work at the Conference Board, I have often found myself reflecting on the meaning of work and meaningful work. I’ve gone so far as to read a few articles, a book, and talk to a number of people about why they work and what, if any, meaning they find in it. My tentative plan is to write a book, or at least a long essay, about why we work.

But I’ve stumbled on a challenge that has me, for the moment, intellectually paralyzed. (Okay, not really paralyzed; but troubled enough to feel compelled to write about it).

There is a certain moral hazard in talking about the intrinsic rewards of work. For most people, whether work has some intrinsic meaning or not, it almost always has instrumental value as a means by which to earn money – that is, we work to get paid in order to afford those things we need and want. If talk about the meaning of work tends to increase the relative weight of its intrinsic value over its instrumental monetary value, however, then employers may have an argument against improving wages. This is a problem if you think that wages should reflect the fair value of labour and/or that workers should not be exploited. (For the political philosophers keeping score, you can be either a Marxist or a libertarian of the self-ownership variety to accept that premise).

If talking about the meaning of work makes people value it as much for its own sake as for the sake of the wages they earn, then employers have room to collect what we might call a meaning tax from employees. They could do this by emphasizing (and maybe even improving) the intrinsic value of work to employees in order to distract attention from the instrumental monetary value. When it comes time to talk raises, employers can simply emphasize how employees do such meaningful work that surely greater monetary rewards are unnecessary. Of course, the meaning tax wouldn’t be collected as directly as that. Rather, there would likely be a generally deflationary pressure on wages which would be inversely proportional to the increasing relative weight of the (perceived) intrinsic value of work over its instrumental (monetary) value in the broader culture. Or something to that effect. (And it wouldn’t hurt to have an army of reserve labour, but that’s a discussion for another time).

We can highlight the problem by asking a few questions: How much money would you be willing to forego in return for a more meaningful job? Would you give up, say, $10,000 per year if you knew that your work would lead to a cure for a disease that afflicts and kills the very young? Less dramatically, if you really like your job and find great meaning in it, would you be terribly put off if, this year, your employer said that there is no room for raises (despite inflation of 3-4%)?

If employers can tell a convincing story about the meaningfulness of work, they are in a position to collect a meaning tax. And if general discussion about work and its meaning assists employers in doing that, can we – can I – contribute to that discussion in good conscience? In this case, maybe we should just avoid reflecting on the meaning of work and cling as closely as we can to the idea that work is simply an exchange of labour for wages. Maybe Mill was wrong: Maybe it is better to be a pig satisfied than Socrates dissatisfied, so long as we think pigs will pay a smaller meaning tax.

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A final aside: Those with philosophical training might be troubled by my use of the term ‘moral hazard’ here. The problem as set out, you might say, would put those who talk about the meaning of work at no less risk of paying a meaning tax as those who do not talk about the meaning of work. Perhaps those who reflect on the meaning of work, you might continue, are more likely to face such a tax (because we have been intellectually primed to pay it). I maintain that this is an instance of a moral hazard because those who can and do talk about the meaning of work are likely the best prepared to recognize and reject a meaning tax ploy. But we can certainly chat about this.