We Must Challenge the Job Ethic

I recently co-authored an essay arguing that a Universal Basic Income (UBI) might attain the goals of Guaranteed Income advocates better than a targeted Guaranteed Income would. I stand by the points we made in that piece, but in this one I want to do something different. I have been a UBI supporter for more than two decades. The main reason I support UBI isn’t that it could outperform targeted cash; it’s something else. I want to spend this piece explaining what that something else is.

Economic systems or economies are social arrangements for utilizing resources to produce and allocate goods and services. Introductory textbooks state this by saying that economies are social arrangements for determining what’s produced, how stuff is produced, and for whom stuff is produced. Most economic systems in the world today address the how stuff is produced question by utilizing wage labor and the for whom stuff is produced one by allocating goods and services using the price mechanism.

Wage labor means that most adults in our society must find someone willing to buy their ability to do something in return for money in the form of a wage or salary. The price mechanism means that to receive many of the goods and services that are output by our economy, we need to give the owners of those goods and services certain amounts of money that we call prices. Putting these two things together, most adults need to sell their ability to do something so they can receive a wage or salary they can use to purchase the goods and services they want or need.

What I’ve just gone over are the basic economics of things. Yet something else I call the job ethic has developed alongside the economics. The job ethic states that those who’re able have a moral obligation to obtain the money they use to buy stuff by selling their ability to do something. We colloquially call this sale of ability work. Also, I use the term moral obligation deliberately. If something is viewed as a moral obligation, those who don’t fulfill it warrant being punished, shunned, ridiculed, ostracized, stigmatized, etc. These are exactly the ways our society tends to treat non-working adults.

Job ethic comes from the idea that society is better off when everyone works. But there are reasons to think this is wrong.

First, as I said above, economies rely on resources to produce goods and services. As physicist Erald Kolasi says in his new book The Physics of Capitalism, our current economic systems (most of which are examples of some form of capitalism) consume, as they draw on resources, incredible amounts of energy. As these resources and forms of energy are mixed with people selling their labor, this may lead to several environmental catastrophes, global climate change being a particularly challenging one. Instead of the current level or an increased level of work being the optimum, it may be better for the environment, as well as us humans who depend on it, if people work less than they currently do.

Second, people are interested in doing or feel obligated to do many things other than selling their labor in return for a wage. They may want to pursue education, take care of children or other relatives and friends, take on artistic or other hobbies, etc. It isn’t at all clear to me that from a societal well-being perspective selling one’s labor is more ethical than staying home and playing with one’s kids or painting a picture (even if it’s a bad painting). Is selling one’s labor to an employer who builds landmines obviously better than staying home and watching movies with one’s kids?

Third, there’s increasing attention these days to the possibility that AI is coming for work that is currently being done by humans. This can easily lead to dueling predictions about whether AI really is coming for our jobs, if so, when, etc. But I want to make a different point about the AI discussion.

Worrying about AI taking humans’ jobs is a job ethic worry. If we’ve decided that adults are only morally worthy if they meet their obligation to work, then the idea of AI taking away our ability to do one of the key things that make us moral is understandably regarded as a serious threat. But the way to solve this isn’t to fear or fret about AI; it’s to move away from the job ethic. There may be reasons to oppose or try to better regulate AI, reasons having to do with copyright violations, environmental consequences, higher education dilemmas, and a host of others. But fear that it will take our jobs doesn’t need to be one of them. If, all else equal, AI is better at doing some of the things humans currently do, perhaps we should welcome it and free humans up to do other things that work currently gets in the way of our doing. But in a society infected with the job ethic, this welcoming attitude toward AI can’t get off the ground.

I can now state the main reason I support UBI—to challenge the job ethic. What UBI does is break the work ⇒ wage/money ⇒ purchase goods/services chain that I mentioned above. Instead of requiring people to work to get money to buy stuff, we could just give them money directly. Now let me address some possible objections.

One, if we just gave people money, wouldn’t they stop working, and isn’t that bad? Remember, for reasons I stated above, getting people to work less may be exactly what we want. However, this objection does contain a key insight. Until AI (assuming it eventually will, which is debatable) comes for all our jobs, we’ll still need some people to work.

This is obviously true, but an everyone-must-work job ethic is overkill. We want the UBI to be high enough to disincentivize some, but not all, from working. This is tricky business. I don’t claim to know what this UBI level is and suspect no one else does either. The only way to proceed is to enact a low-level UBI and keep increasing it, carefully monitoring what happens to the labor market.

A second objection might go something like the following: if we just gave everyone free money, that would cause rampant inflation. If we set the amount too high, it undoubtedly would. The approach I suggested regarding UBI’s impact on work also applies to the inflation case. Start with a low UBI and increase it to its highest sustainable level.

Going back to where I started, UBI might meet the goals of those who advocate targeting better than Guaranteed Income would. But this isn’t the main reason to support UBI. Right now, our society promotes the job ethic. We shouldn’t promote this ethic but should challenge it; UBI would allow us to launch that challenge.