In the past few weeks, I've had a number of conversations with colleagues, friends, and others about why they work and how work is situated in their lives. I've received some great input - and developed some lines of research for the larger book project - but I've also realized that I need to come up with some better, more targeted questions to stimulate reflection. The big question - why do you work - is, well, too big. So here are 5 more narrowly tailored questions that could provoke discussion:
1. What do you like about your current work?
2. What do you dislike?
3. What would someone have to offer you to leave your current work/job and take up another position or kind of work?
4. Do you have any hobbies and would you want to turn your hobby into a job? (Some follow up questions: What's stopping you? If it's a question of money, how much would you give up to pursue your passion?)
5. What kind of work do you do?
If readers of this blog would post their answers, I'd appreciate the help. You can post anonymously, but I'd like to know what kind of work you do. I'm also open to suggestions about other questions that should be asked in thinking about work and its place and function in life.
Just copy and paste the questions into your comment and respond away.
(Not to worry, these aren't my only questions. Just a few starters) .
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Work, Health and Control
A few weeks ago the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health released its long-awaited report on the ways in which social, economic and political factors affect population health outcomes across the globe. The report’s punchline certainly has punch: “Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale.”
http://www.who.int/social_determinants/final_report/en/index.html
Despite its length, the report offers a compelling read with contributions from some extraordinary researchers and writers including Michael Marmot and Amartya Sen.
Chapter 7 makes the case that employment arrangements and workplace conditions can have both positive and negative effects on health. Not unexpectedly, working in unsafe conditions can have negative consequences for health. Less obvious, but no less significant, are the ways by which the nature of the employment contract and the organization of work themselves can have negative consequences for health outcomes. The authors found that health outcomes (e.g., mortality and mental health) are significantly worse for the precariously employed (e.g., those with informal work, non-fixed term temporary contracts, and part-time work) than permanent, full-time workers. At the same time, the authors found evidence that “high job demand, low control, and effort-reward imbalance are risk factors for mental and physical health problems” (72-3).
While accepting all of those findings, I think there may be reason to give special emphasis to the element of control. (And control in two senses). Many of us know individuals whose work in the knowledge economy consists of precisely those informal, non-fixed temporary contracts and part-time work arrangements that WHO associates with poor health outcomes. But these individuals do not face the adverse health outcomes that we would expect of people on lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.
My sense is that the health effects of these types of arrangements depend as much, if not more, on the forces which drive people into those kinds of employment than the contract types themselves. An individual who takes on any contract position due to economic need has less control over her fate than someone who takes on contract work because, for example, she finds the nature of that particular contract intellectually stimulating. This is the first sense of control: Control over the conditions which constrain and motivate work-related choices. The less one needs any particular position, the less likely there will be adverse health consequences of temporary work.
The second sense of control involves the organization of work itself. The more control one has over how and when to fulfill the obligations of any temporary position, the less likely one is to suffer negative health outcomes by being employed in that way. In short, if you can always walk out the door, you're less likely to tolerate work conditions and employers who should not be tolerated. These hypotheses would require testing (and I don't think I've made the distinction as clear as I'd like), but I suspect that something like this is the case.
But this brings us back to the question of why we work and why the question matters: Those of us who have the luxury of working (at least in part) for some non-financial purpose, rather than just for money, are likely to lead healthier lives than those who don’t have that opportunity. And in that case, maybe H.L. Mencken – whom the Commission quotes sympathetically – captures a part, but only a part, of our moral intuitions about work:
It is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuable and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
In addition to sustainable and fairly paid work, we might also need secure conditions from which to make genuinely free choices and a set of options which have or could facilitate meaningful activity.
http://www.who.int/social_determinants/final_report/en/index.html
Despite its length, the report offers a compelling read with contributions from some extraordinary researchers and writers including Michael Marmot and Amartya Sen.
Chapter 7 makes the case that employment arrangements and workplace conditions can have both positive and negative effects on health. Not unexpectedly, working in unsafe conditions can have negative consequences for health. Less obvious, but no less significant, are the ways by which the nature of the employment contract and the organization of work themselves can have negative consequences for health outcomes. The authors found that health outcomes (e.g., mortality and mental health) are significantly worse for the precariously employed (e.g., those with informal work, non-fixed term temporary contracts, and part-time work) than permanent, full-time workers. At the same time, the authors found evidence that “high job demand, low control, and effort-reward imbalance are risk factors for mental and physical health problems” (72-3).
While accepting all of those findings, I think there may be reason to give special emphasis to the element of control. (And control in two senses). Many of us know individuals whose work in the knowledge economy consists of precisely those informal, non-fixed temporary contracts and part-time work arrangements that WHO associates with poor health outcomes. But these individuals do not face the adverse health outcomes that we would expect of people on lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.
My sense is that the health effects of these types of arrangements depend as much, if not more, on the forces which drive people into those kinds of employment than the contract types themselves. An individual who takes on any contract position due to economic need has less control over her fate than someone who takes on contract work because, for example, she finds the nature of that particular contract intellectually stimulating. This is the first sense of control: Control over the conditions which constrain and motivate work-related choices. The less one needs any particular position, the less likely there will be adverse health consequences of temporary work.
The second sense of control involves the organization of work itself. The more control one has over how and when to fulfill the obligations of any temporary position, the less likely one is to suffer negative health outcomes by being employed in that way. In short, if you can always walk out the door, you're less likely to tolerate work conditions and employers who should not be tolerated. These hypotheses would require testing (and I don't think I've made the distinction as clear as I'd like), but I suspect that something like this is the case.
But this brings us back to the question of why we work and why the question matters: Those of us who have the luxury of working (at least in part) for some non-financial purpose, rather than just for money, are likely to lead healthier lives than those who don’t have that opportunity. And in that case, maybe H.L. Mencken – whom the Commission quotes sympathetically – captures a part, but only a part, of our moral intuitions about work:
It is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuable and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
In addition to sustainable and fairly paid work, we might also need secure conditions from which to make genuinely free choices and a set of options which have or could facilitate meaningful activity.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
School of Everything vs. Anarchist University
Today I came across an interesting learning initiative out of the UK that reminded me of a similar phenomenon I came across in Toronto in 2003. The School of Everything (http://schoolofeverything.com/) is a peer learning network which re-launched its website and business with significant new funding on September 1, 2008. According to the site:
School of Everything connects people who want to learn with passionate teachers in their local area. The award-wining site is free to join for both people who want to learn and people who want to teach. Teachers register online and create a personal page giving information on their lessons, the qualifications offered and the format in which they teach - for example workshops or one-to-one sessions. Potential pupils find their perfect tutor simply searching by subject, learning category and location. They can then send them a message, arrange to meet and begin learning their new subject.
The model of self-organizing learning communities that the School of Everything embodies brought to mind Toronto’s Anarchist University which I first came across in 2003. At the time, I was a graduate student looking for any and every way to procrastinate while I should have been writing chapters of my dissertation. The teaching and learning opportunities promised by the AU offered just the sort of thing I was looking for, and might have even impressed the advisor who (on Mondays and Thursdays, anyway) is an analytical Marxist .
According the AU site (http://anarchistu.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Anarchistu/AnarchistU),
The Anarchist U is an open, volunteer-run, non-hierarchical collective that organizes community events, workshops and a variety of courses on arts and sciences….We offer an open, collaborative, radical way of learning built on democratic models of education, structure and process. We are working to build a vibrant and productive community free from the struggles for power, profit and prestige that are the consequences of existing social and economic structures.
Setting aside the all-too-easy jokes that can be made about anarchist models, structures, and processes, AU was, in some ways, ahead of its time. It brings teachers and pupils together voluntarily; it involves collaboration, negotiation and consensus-processes to develop mutually acceptable programs of study; and it offers learning for its own sake (i.e., there are no diplomas, degrees or credentials; only the experience of having taught and learned).
But unlike the SoE, the AU does not enlist the power of the market – indeed, market critiques are built into the school's founding ideology – which may serve to explain why it has struggled over the years to sustain its activities and community profile. Now don’t misunderstand me here: I sympathize with the anarchist eschewal of markets to the extent that they produce unequal and unjust distributions of resources and power. But where market mechanisms can be enlisted to serve democratic, peer-to-peer learning opportunities and support genuine community-building, even anarchists and their sympathizers should take notice.
With that in mind, the AU and its core faculty should think about creating an account on SoE to offer its educational services to others in the Toronto area. A quick search of offerings on the SoE site produces nothing in the area of anarchism, anarchists or anarchy which means that the AU can offer something new and would likely garner a few cheesy quips in future press coverage of the SoE. Moreover, given that AU courses are free, the market should reward them with significant enrollment (provided a high level of quality is maintained). Maybe some months or years from now we will be able to enroll in an AU course titled (with apologies to Dr. Strangelove fans), “How I learned to stop worrying and love the market.”
School of Everything connects people who want to learn with passionate teachers in their local area. The award-wining site is free to join for both people who want to learn and people who want to teach. Teachers register online and create a personal page giving information on their lessons, the qualifications offered and the format in which they teach - for example workshops or one-to-one sessions. Potential pupils find their perfect tutor simply searching by subject, learning category and location. They can then send them a message, arrange to meet and begin learning their new subject.
Some are referring to the School of Everything as the ‘ebay of learning’ which is apt given that the SoE creators expect to generate a profit by charging a commission on the teacher-pupil transactions facilitated through its site. Think of it as a global marketplace of ideas, with a catch – the exchange of ideas (i.e., learning) is envisioned to occur in face-to-face local interaction rather than virtually. It strikes me as an excellent idea – one that harnesses the power of peer-to-peer technology but ultimately brings teachers and pupils together in person where genuine teaching, guidance and mentoring actually takes place. And it has potentially broad appeal with expertise ranging from yoga to philosophy to cooking to driving instruction.
The model of self-organizing learning communities that the School of Everything embodies brought to mind Toronto’s Anarchist University which I first came across in 2003. At the time, I was a graduate student looking for any and every way to procrastinate while I should have been writing chapters of my dissertation. The teaching and learning opportunities promised by the AU offered just the sort of thing I was looking for, and might have even impressed the advisor who (on Mondays and Thursdays, anyway) is an analytical Marxist .
According the AU site (http://anarchistu.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Anarchistu/AnarchistU),
The Anarchist U is an open, volunteer-run, non-hierarchical collective that organizes community events, workshops and a variety of courses on arts and sciences….We offer an open, collaborative, radical way of learning built on democratic models of education, structure and process. We are working to build a vibrant and productive community free from the struggles for power, profit and prestige that are the consequences of existing social and economic structures.
Setting aside the all-too-easy jokes that can be made about anarchist models, structures, and processes, AU was, in some ways, ahead of its time. It brings teachers and pupils together voluntarily; it involves collaboration, negotiation and consensus-processes to develop mutually acceptable programs of study; and it offers learning for its own sake (i.e., there are no diplomas, degrees or credentials; only the experience of having taught and learned).
But unlike the SoE, the AU does not enlist the power of the market – indeed, market critiques are built into the school's founding ideology – which may serve to explain why it has struggled over the years to sustain its activities and community profile. Now don’t misunderstand me here: I sympathize with the anarchist eschewal of markets to the extent that they produce unequal and unjust distributions of resources and power. But where market mechanisms can be enlisted to serve democratic, peer-to-peer learning opportunities and support genuine community-building, even anarchists and their sympathizers should take notice.
With that in mind, the AU and its core faculty should think about creating an account on SoE to offer its educational services to others in the Toronto area. A quick search of offerings on the SoE site produces nothing in the area of anarchism, anarchists or anarchy which means that the AU can offer something new and would likely garner a few cheesy quips in future press coverage of the SoE. Moreover, given that AU courses are free, the market should reward them with significant enrollment (provided a high level of quality is maintained). Maybe some months or years from now we will be able to enroll in an AU course titled (with apologies to Dr. Strangelove fans), “How I learned to stop worrying and love the market.”
Thursday, September 4, 2008
The Supply Chain of Research (Part I)
A couple of years ago, a doctoral candidate at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Daniel Gruber, published a short, but excellent, interview that he conducted with Malcolm Gladwell, the author and New Yorker journalist (Journal of Management Inquiry, December 2006). In the interview, Gruber and Gladwell discuss the simplifier and synthesizer functions that Gladwell uses to pursue his goal of getting non-academics excited about the “academic study of ideas.” While many academics publish insightful, but nevertheless often technical and dry, papers, Gladwell makes the insights more accessible by finding and telling compelling stories which draw people in to listen.
Gladwell’s responses in the interview provide some reassurance to those people (like me) who find themselves in the spaces and places in-between academia and the broader popular public sphere. Think tanks and journalists are the two most prominent examples of in-between institutions and individuals that I can think of off-hand, but there are others. The work performed by these intermediaries in interpreting and making sense of the basic and applied research done in universities constitutes a critical function in what one professor at the Ross School – Andrew Hoffman – calls the supply chain of research:
(For the record, Hoffman does not think that the work of translation, interpretation or sense-making should be left to others. Academics who produce research should simply learn how to convey their findings to broader lay audiences).
Setting aside Hoffman’s call for all academics to take on the heroic task of communicating their findings to a popular audience (which would likely distract from their real strengths), there may be a need for institutional innovations which would strengthen the “links and ties” in the supply chain. Let’s face it: With few exceptions, policy-makers and business leaders simply don’t read long, complicated, jargon-laden papers for insights that they can apply to their crafts. If a message is to reach and persuade them, it has to be written in a style they’ll understand. And, for academics, the tenure incentive structure encourages a writing style which uses the technical, almost impenetrable, language of disciplinary journals. We might lament these facts (as I often do) and we might do what we can to change them, but for the time being, they are the demands of realism to which we must, at least temporarily, reconcile ourselves.
With that in mind, universities, granting institutions, governments and businesses should explore, and get serious about long-term funding for, other ways through which links and ties in the supply chain of research can be created and strengthened. In the area of business, management and organization studies, for example, there are promising models of knowledge translation and diffusion in the form of journals written in more accessible language – such as the Harvard Business Review – and a growing trend towards on-campus press offices which attempt to make academic research more understandable and widely disseminated to a lay audience.
In Canada, while the granting institutions (such as CFI and SSHRC) have adopted the language of “knowledge translation” and “knowledge transfer,” it remains to be seen how much those institutions will supplement funding for conventional academic research with funding for experiments in knowledge translation and diffusion. In addition to supporting HBR-type initiatives and press offices, granting institutions (and universities for that matter) might want to consider strengthening and expanding writer-in-residence programs where the writer-in-residence takes on the role of better understanding and then translating the research done in the institution/department for a broader audience. And recognizing my conflict of interest here, improved support for partnerships between non-profit think tanks and certain media organizations and journalists, might also lead to better diffusion of the research produced in universities across the country.
Then again, maybe James March was onto something when he asserted in (of all things) an HBR interview that there should be better support for irrelevant ideas. My own education and academic experience as a political philosopher has given me a great appreciation for the intrinsic merit and beauty of (irrelevant) ideas. But I still think my roommate at MIT was onto something when he said that you should be able to explain your research to three kinds of audiences – your advisor (in 20 minutes); a non-expert, but educated, audience (in 10 minutes); and the unfortunate guy sitting next to you at the local pub (in 5 minutes, or the time it takes him to down his pint and move on to something else).
Gladwell’s responses in the interview provide some reassurance to those people (like me) who find themselves in the spaces and places in-between academia and the broader popular public sphere. Think tanks and journalists are the two most prominent examples of in-between institutions and individuals that I can think of off-hand, but there are others. The work performed by these intermediaries in interpreting and making sense of the basic and applied research done in universities constitutes a critical function in what one professor at the Ross School – Andrew Hoffman – calls the supply chain of research:
Basic research supports applied research, which supports policy development, which supports managerial change, and so on. The links and ties in this chain are many and diverse, all of which lead to change within the world of some form of practice. (Hoffman, JMI, 2006: 411).
(For the record, Hoffman does not think that the work of translation, interpretation or sense-making should be left to others. Academics who produce research should simply learn how to convey their findings to broader lay audiences).
Setting aside Hoffman’s call for all academics to take on the heroic task of communicating their findings to a popular audience (which would likely distract from their real strengths), there may be a need for institutional innovations which would strengthen the “links and ties” in the supply chain. Let’s face it: With few exceptions, policy-makers and business leaders simply don’t read long, complicated, jargon-laden papers for insights that they can apply to their crafts. If a message is to reach and persuade them, it has to be written in a style they’ll understand. And, for academics, the tenure incentive structure encourages a writing style which uses the technical, almost impenetrable, language of disciplinary journals. We might lament these facts (as I often do) and we might do what we can to change them, but for the time being, they are the demands of realism to which we must, at least temporarily, reconcile ourselves.
With that in mind, universities, granting institutions, governments and businesses should explore, and get serious about long-term funding for, other ways through which links and ties in the supply chain of research can be created and strengthened. In the area of business, management and organization studies, for example, there are promising models of knowledge translation and diffusion in the form of journals written in more accessible language – such as the Harvard Business Review – and a growing trend towards on-campus press offices which attempt to make academic research more understandable and widely disseminated to a lay audience.
In Canada, while the granting institutions (such as CFI and SSHRC) have adopted the language of “knowledge translation” and “knowledge transfer,” it remains to be seen how much those institutions will supplement funding for conventional academic research with funding for experiments in knowledge translation and diffusion. In addition to supporting HBR-type initiatives and press offices, granting institutions (and universities for that matter) might want to consider strengthening and expanding writer-in-residence programs where the writer-in-residence takes on the role of better understanding and then translating the research done in the institution/department for a broader audience. And recognizing my conflict of interest here, improved support for partnerships between non-profit think tanks and certain media organizations and journalists, might also lead to better diffusion of the research produced in universities across the country.
Then again, maybe James March was onto something when he asserted in (of all things) an HBR interview that there should be better support for irrelevant ideas. My own education and academic experience as a political philosopher has given me a great appreciation for the intrinsic merit and beauty of (irrelevant) ideas. But I still think my roommate at MIT was onto something when he said that you should be able to explain your research to three kinds of audiences – your advisor (in 20 minutes); a non-expert, but educated, audience (in 10 minutes); and the unfortunate guy sitting next to you at the local pub (in 5 minutes, or the time it takes him to down his pint and move on to something else).
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
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.
* * *
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.
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.
* * *
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.
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