Creating Freedom. Raoul Martinez
our own passions and be led by our own curiosity, work can be a privilege rather than a burden. Even when it places great demands on us, it can have a positive effect on our well-being. If it is meaningful to us, we can enjoy working on the most challenging of tasks. Part of the problem with so much of the work in today’s economy is that it is not very meaningful or useful. According to a YouGov poll in 2015, 37 per cent of British workers said their job makes ‘no meaningful contribution to the world’ (and another 13 per cent said they didn’t know).69 Most jobs are created to enable companies to increase profits, often in ethically questionable ways. High salaries can be viewed as a form of compensation for the absence of real purpose in these jobs. The choice facing many graduates is to work for free as interns in roles they find meaningful or start climbing a ladder they don’t really want to be on for a salary. Many others are forced into dull, tiring work for just enough income to survive.
We are all motivated to survive and provide for our loved ones, but other fundamental drives shape our behaviour. Contributing to the lives of others is very rewarding, completing a difficult task can be deeply satisfying, and helping those in need can be profoundly edifying. People give their money, even their blood, to help strangers. Teachers, nurses, artists, scientists, inventors, volunteers and activists do hard and valuable work with modest financial reward or none at all. Every day, people leave highly paid yet unfulfilling jobs to seek work in which they can take pride and pleasure. We forsake higher pay for greater freedom. Developing our minds and bodies, and feeling that we are contributing meaningfully to the world around us, is central to our sense of self-worth and well-being.
A growing body of research suggests that we have evolved to take pleasure from helping others. This pleasure ties communities together in mutually advantageous cooperative relationships. One study found that spending money on others makes us happier than spending money on ourselves.70 Another study, by psychologists at the University of British Columbia, showed that before the age of two, toddlers ‘exhibit greater happiness when giving treats to others than receiving treats themselves’.71 What’s more, ‘children are happier after engaging in costly giving – forfeiting their own resources – than when giving the same treat at no cost’. Of course, culture can channel and mould these instincts in various ways but the evidence suggests that the desire to work together and help each other is part of what makes us human.
Some degree of inequality may be necessary to motivate people to behave in certain socially valuable ways, but the idea that people do not want to work, that they need to be driven by threats and promises to get anything done, is a misconception.72 If work enhances our autonomy, if it can be done under dignified conditions, and if we believe it is valuable, most of us welcome it. The Russian scientist and political philosopher Peter Kropotkin held that ‘Overwork is repulsive to human nature – not work . . . Work is a physiological necessity, a necessity of spending accumulated bodily energy, a necessity which is health and life itself.’73
Of course, not all jobs are equally rewarding. Some tasks carry little or no intrinsic reward and are risky and unpleasant. Today, the most undesirable – though essential – work is largely done by those who are paid the least. A subordinate class of people is obliged to accept these jobs or go hungry. This is a coercive form of motivation based on fear and desperation. Kropotkin writes ‘If there is . . . work which is really disagreeable in itself, it is only because our scientific men have never cared to consider the means of rendering it less so. They have always known that there were plenty of starving men who would do it for a few cents a day.’74 Given our current technological knowledge (and expanding the point to include women), this is truer today than ever before. As Bertrand Russell observed, if we ‘had to be tempted to work instead of driven to it, the obvious interest of the community would be to make work pleasant’.75
What of the unpleasant work left over? It should either be shared out fairly or carry financial incentives to compensate proportionately for the sacrifice entailed by doing it. Other strategies are coercive and incompatible with a free society. The American historian Howard Zinn writes: ‘I worked hard as a college professor, but it was pleasant work compared to the man who came around to clean my office. By what criterion (except that created artificially by our culture) do I need more incentive than he does?’76
Incentive-based arguments are often little more than ad hoc justifications for inequality. When examined, they betray a double standard. Cuts to social welfare programmes are justified by the claim they incentivise people out of the ‘poverty trap’ – as though poverty weren’t incentive enough. The reasoning is that if we make poor people poorer by removing their social safety net, they will be forced to go out and find a job or, since many benefit claimants are already in work, a second job. On the other hand, when it comes to discussing incentives for the rich, the opposite reasoning is employed. High salaries for corporate executives are justified as incentivising higher performance, which ends up benefiting the whole of society. The double standard is glaring and ugly. As economist Ha-Joon Chang asks, ‘why do we need to make the rich richer to make them work harder but make the poor poorer for the same purpose?’.77
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Plato believed that myths to justify inequalities of wealth and power were essential to preserve order in society. He offered the following story: that each citizen was born with a certain kind of metal mixed in with his or her soul. Natural rulers had gold mixed with their soul, their soldiers and assistants had silver, and natural workers had either bronze or iron. According to a divine oracle, if the city were to be ruled by those who lacked gold in their soul, all would be ruined. Later myths, designed to serve a similar purpose, include the divine right of kings, hereditary nobility and the discredited theory of ‘trickle down economics’.78 For millennia, those with power and privilege have used convenient myths to justify their position. Arguably, these myths arise as much to reassure those with wealth as those without it – it’s harder to enjoy privileges if you don’t believe you deserve them. A sense of entitlement to wealth is nearly as valuable as wealth itself.
In his history of economics, John Kenneth Galbraith writes: ‘The explanations and rationalizations of . . . inequality over the centuries have commanded some of the greatest . . . talent of the economics profession. In nearly all of economic history, most people have been poor and a comparative few have been very rich. Accordingly, there has been a compelling need to explain why this is so – and, alas, on frequent occasion, to tell why it should be so.’79 Like their earlier elitist, racist and sexist counterparts, today’s justifications of inequality are baseless – yet they provide a veneer of legitimacy to the poverty and oppression around us. They are embedded deeply in the fabric of society, just out of sight, beyond the light of critical scrutiny.
The nineteenth-century English philosopher and father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, based his moral philosophy on the idea that ‘it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong’. According to Bentham, the best allocation of resources is one that maximises human well-being. A key assumption he made was that the well-being a person experiences from an additional dollar decreases as that person becomes richer. That is to say, ten additional dollars produce more well-being in someone extremely poor than in someone very rich. The radical implication is that society as a whole becomes better off as material equality increases. We don’t have to be utilitarians to see the value of this common-sense insight.
Subjective states like ‘well-being’ and ‘happiness’ may be difficult to define and measure, but, as long as large inequalities exist, there is every reason to believe that transferring money from the rich to the poor increases the overall welfare of society. The evidence, in fact, is overwhelming. Many researchers today believe it is possible to collect meaningful data on subjective feelings. Individual self-assessments of well-being are now regarded as an important addition to government statistics, correlating strongly with more objective indicators such as rates of depression and suicide. What the data suggest is that, beyond a certain level of affluence, more money makes no difference to a person’s happiness. One analysis of more than 450,000 responses to a daily survey of Americans in 2010 revealed that ‘The satiation level beyond which experienced well-being no longer increases was a household