Work and Effort

There are a couple of specific arguments regarding my proposed labor system that I’d like to address. I’d basically like to defend my proposals against suggestions/criticisms from the radical left and the center-right, both of which concern the murky concept of "effort."

The first thing I’d like to respond to is the idea, which several readers have referred to, that we should use an effort-based reward system (and implicitly, a lack-of-effort based “punishment” system in the sense that the reward given to those who give the appropriate level of effort will be withheld from those who do not). The idea obviously has philosophical appeal. It sounds fair. Ultimately, however, it strikes me as too vague in theory and unworkable in practice.

First of all, what is effort, and does it really form a coherent moral basis for reward? Is effort the amount of subjective pain or hardship one experiences while he or she performs a productive activity? Is it the amount of concentration, focus, or consistency with which someone attends his or her task? Or is it the amount of calories someone burns in the process of doing something? Think of the problem of the talented individual for whom anything is easy – should we deny an effort-based reward to this person who, though he or she meets every reasonable expectation regarding his or her performance, finds the job relatively easy? Or should we just give the effort-based reward to anyone who meets certain minimum standards of diligence and responsibility? I personally have no idea how to answer these questions. Perhaps one of you does.

There is also the abstract problem that the willingness to expend effort, like any personal characteristic, is something that is largely inherited and/or absorbed by social influences over which the individual has little control. So in a sense, society “owns” the amount of effort that an individual is willing to put forth just as much as it “owns” their other inherited/socially acquired abilities. If this is the case, as a purely abstract matter, no individual reward is appropriate for extra effort.

But most fundamentally, the attempt to objectively measure and reward effort strikes me as a utopian undertaking. Whatever we think effort is, it is almost certainly something that is only truly known, if at all, by the specific individual concerned. Until we learn how to, and decide we are willing to, monitor people’s thoughts and feelings, this task strikes me as absolutely impossible.

Second, the use of effort as a basis for reward would totally eliminate the “market” aspect of the labor market. Some people consider this a positive thing, but I don't. My view is that some play for market forces can be a useful way to allocate resources towards making products and providing services that people actually want, and can help, to some extent and in conjunction with a whole lot of equally important factors, motivate additional effort. Perhaps some of you will see this position as “un-socialist.” But I think the philosophical basis of socialism is not the total rejection of any and all private property and market exchange, but the conviction that the “right” to private property is not a right at all. Rather, property rights are a social and economic expediency that society can and should (even “must”) modify to accomplish important social goals. This implies that some market exchange may be tolerable to the extent that it can further general welfare AND to the extent that the fruits of such exchange are equitably redistributed.

So for me, the labor market should represent a kind of revenue sharing agreement between society and the individual with respect to the surplus productivity created, where society’s cut should be generally quite large, and should get progressively larger as a percentage as the individual’s reward increases. Once again, the benefit of this arrangement is not its inherent moral superiority, but its ability to effectively allocate resources and to preserve some incentive (albeit a radically compressed one) for increased productivity, while simultaneously providing the economic means to give everyone a relatively high standard of living. So long as the means to be productive are open to all (through free higher education, etc.) and the economic surplus is redistributed to maintain a radically compressed income and wealth distribution, I think an olde-fashioned labor market can be a good thing.

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The other concern that I would like to respond to comes from the right. The question/concern is: how can a system of guaranteed employment ensure that certain minimum standards of diligence are met (like just showing up, for instance) by the people who resort to guaranteed government employment? After all, if employment is guaranteed by the government in all cases, someone who works for the government can essentially never be fired. So what do we do with the person who couldn’t find a job anywhere else, works for the government, but just doesn’t show up half the time and doesn’t try to be productive while he or she is there?

Here are the possible solutions I can think of:

a.) suspend the offender, without pay, for a period of time based on the severity of the offense
b.) continue to pay them but assign them to increasingly more distasteful tasks as punishment
c.) provide some kind of other punishment, like a fine
d.) send cops to their house and make them show up, and supervise their work closely to make sure they do it
e.) make them attend some kind of intensive community service work program in order to earn their right to work back
f.) just ignore their misbehavior and pay them anyway

Personally, I am somewhat uncomfortable with the idea that we should use the threat of withdrawing someone’s basic subsistence (in this case, a minimum income), even for a short period, as leverage to get them to be productive. So I have some trouble with a. We could also give them the lousy jobs to do, as in b., but then they really wouldn’t show up. A fine runs into the same problem as a. – it imposes an extra financial burden on someone who is probably on the lower end of our (albeit compressed) income distribution. D. and e. seem somewhat authoritarian. And f. seems kind of like it amounts to an acceptance of failure. In short, I find all of these solutions at least somewhat distasteful.

I would probably accept some judicious combination of a. - e. as necessary, but undesirable, punishments (I realize this is a very mushy answer). But it probably wouldn’t be that big of a problem, really – I think it’s actually a very, very small percentage of the population that really wants to sit at home and do nothing and/or to go to work and accomplish nothing at all. And if we are going to err in one direction I’d rather err in favor of giving everyone a minimum (i.e., higher than the poverty rate) income and letting some people by without really contributing than to run the risk of denying deserving people the necessaries of life. And, after all, all economic systems have some inefficiency. Just look at the current internet-surfing, time-wasting juggernaut that is the capitalist office. Talk about total waste.

So I guess the upshot is I think we should try as hard as possible to get everyone to do their fair share of work by using some sensible combination of a. - e., depending on what works, while taking comfort in the fact that if this system is to suffer some inefficiency because of the employment guarantee, at least that inefficiency is incurred for a good cause. And in a society as rich as ours, we can certainly afford to sacrifice some productivity in order to satisfy overriding moral imperatives.