Work Work Work

Democrats and Republicans are arguing about the CBO report that notes Obamacare will lead to less work.  Republicans figure they can capitalize on this, while Democrats state the GOP misrepresents what's going on--that Obamacare frees people up to work less and follow other goals.  But all this fighting misses the bigger question, asked by professor of leisure studies at Iowa, Benjamin Kline Hunnicut: why shouldn't we want people to work less? (Or as the headline to his piece has it: "Why do Republicans want us to work all the time?"  A poor title since both parties fall all over themselves claiming the most important thing they do is provide the public with jobs.)

For the first century or so of the Industrial Revolution, the general trend was people working fewer and fewer hours while getting paid more and more. (I won't go into the Marxist claim about how wonderful life was before the Industrial Revolution--which amounted to greedy capitalists enslaving previously happy laborers--though you still see this sort of thought infecting some historians.) It's understandable that quite a few experts in the past predicted with productivity going up and labor-saving devices sprouting everywhere, we'd soon be working very little and enjoying massive amounts of leisure time devoted to personal fulfillment--the "pursuit of happiness" that's our birthright.

Instead, the 40-hour week has become the norm, and has been for decades, while many work considerably more.  Why?  Here's Hunnicut's suggestion:

I have spent years trying to answer this question, one of the great mysteries of the modern age. Economists and historians have offered various explanations, from the rise of consumerism to changing technology to globalization to our fixation with economic growth above all else. I have argued that a new ideology, a new set of beliefs about work’s everlasting centrality, emerged with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Work is now viewed as an economic end in itself rather than a means to better purposes. Work for more work has become the organizing principle of society, embodied in public policy and in the politician’s mantra: JOBS, JOBS, JOBS.

The best explanation for the advent of work without end, I now believe, is a failure of imagination. We’ve forgotten that the purpose of life is to be happy, and to pass that happiness on to future generations—not simply to keep acquiring more stuff. Our forebears understood that.

There may be something to this, though I think he may be leaving something out of the equation. Starting with the New Deal, government has played an ever-larger role in taking care of us.  To pick some obvious examples: education is free K-12 (and soon pre-school?).  If you are out of work or become disabled, the government will help you out. If you don't make much money, the government will spring for some of your food bills. Once you retire, you get a regular check and significant help with your medical expenses.  Then there's the costs of keeping up a large military.  And now, with Obamacare, the less you make the more your health insurance will be subsidized.

Now some or all of these things may be good programs, but they cost a lot.  To afford (or even to attempt to afford) this you need a solid tax base--a large portion of the population needs to be working an awful lot to make sure everything is paid for.  If people start dropping out of the economy because they figure the government will subsidize them, then you have an unstable system.  Perhaps it figures when you're building such a system that part of it is the understanding that there has to be a fair amount of full-time employment to keep it going.  Why would such a society not treat work as a necessity?