The majority of U.S. workers aren’t compensated anywhere near the value that they actually create for society, while the few who make the most money often work the least and contribute very little. Decades of neoliberal thinking has twisted one of the foundational American beliefs—the idea that hard work eventually reaps great rewards—into a celebration of greed and a dismissal of those of us who work the hardest. Returning guest Elizabeth Anderson explains how we can reclaim the American work ethic in order to once again center workers as the true heroes of the American economy.
Professor Elizabeth Anderson specializes in moral, social and political philosophy, feminist theory, social epistemology, and the philosophy of economics and the social sciences. She is the author of several books including Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives and, most recently, Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back.
Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/hijacked/E7E4A7D850C1E7289BA7AAF910455136#fndtn-information
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Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer. As someone who’s been in and around corporate boardrooms my entire career, there’s nothing I know better than the extent to which many of my business colleagues will go to lie to protect their power and profits. And in my new book, Corporate Bullshit, co-authored with Joan Walsh and Don Cohen, we make this manipulative duplicity plain as day by placing egregious past quotes from corporate executives next to the equally outrageous contemporary quotes, all of which justify outcomes that lie in pockets while harming society. Again, the book is called Corporate Bullshit, and you can pre-order the book now, wherever books are sold.
David Goldstein:
What people call the Protestant work ethic is so ingrained in American minds.
Elizabeth Anderson:
The work ethic is very much alive in the lives of many, many Americans. We work more hours than our counterparts in Europe.
Nick Hanauer:
One of the reasons that the country is so upside down and polarized is that the majority of citizens aren’t compensated anywhere near the value that they create in society.
Speaker 4:
From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
Nick Hanauer:
I am Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
David Goldstein:
I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures. Nick, one of the things that I miss during the pandemic is that since it came on, you’ve delegated our annual reviews. So I don’t really get your feedback. And I know you love my work. The quality of my work, else you wouldn’t be putting up with me, but I’m curious what you think of my work ethic?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, it’s medium. Medium.
David Goldstein:
You can see my nose? It’s not to the grindstone?
Nick Hanauer:
No, it’s not to the grindstone.
David Goldstein:
I’m not earning you enough money enough.
Nick Hanauer:
Enough. No. Too slow and not enough.
David Goldstein:
I should be working harder?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
David Goldstein:
Right. Which we joke, but the work ethic is this, what people call the Protestant work ethic, is so ingrained in American minds. It gets to when we write about politics, when we’re trying to instruct politicians on how to talk about the economy, one of the things that always strikes me, Nick, is we have to use that phrase, “Hardworking Americans.” Like Americans are proud of how hard they work. And if you don’t use that phrase, it’s dishonoring them. And this is true. We see it in the focus groups that that is a positive to say, to honor hard work when really, personally, I think that hard work is overrated.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Well, and you’re right. I mean, certainly in this country, people derive a lot of their, oh, social value, dignity, and status from work. And one of the reasons that the country is so upside down and polarized is that the majority of citizens, I think that’s fair to say, aren’t compensated anywhere near the value that they create in society. And the people who make the most money in our society often contribute very little or nothing obvious.
David Goldstein:
Or in some cases they-
Nick Hanauer:
Create huge amounts of harm.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. They detract from social welfare. They’re engaged in activities that are not just unproductive, but are counterproductive.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, absolutely. And apropos of all of this, today we get to talk to, well, she may be the world’s expert now in work ethic. Our old friend, Professor Elizabeth Anderson, who specializes in moral, social and political philosophy, and who appeared on the podcast a couple of three years ago talking about her last book, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives and Why We Don’t Talk About It. And she has a new book out called Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned The Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back. And on this day when we’re doing this podcast, which was effectively the day that President Biden joined the picket lines in the UAW strike, this is such a great day to talk to Elizabeth about this very important issue, how we think about work and who we’re working for and so on and so forth.
Elizabeth Anderson:
So I am Elizabeth Anderson. I am Max Shea, Professor of Public Philosophy at University of Michigan, and my new book just released a few days ago is called Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned The Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back. And it’s a romp through the history of the Protestant work ethic from the 17th century to the present.
David Goldstein:
Well, thanks for coming back. I re-listened to our last conversation with you and oh my God, I hadn’t realized it was three years ago. You lose track of time in the world of COVID. And just to show how ethical we are, where we left it with you was that we would have you back on when your book came out. So here you are. We’ve lived up to our end of the bargain. And I have to tell you, you hit a sweet spot for me, which is like you said, “A romp through history.” It’s a combination of intellectual history and moral philosophy and economics. If you could just start off by explaining the main thesis of the book.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yeah. So we’re all familiar with a version of the work ethic, which came to us from England and under which most workers today are toiling. And that’s the theory that says that workers have to be dredges, toiling away for the maximum profit of their employer, and aren’t entitled to any say in the conditions of their work because it’s just nose to the grindstone for them. And that’s basically what neoliberalism conscience workers to. But what I show in my book is that there’s a whole other tradition of the work ethic that’s been more or less repressed in the United States. And if you go back to the 17th century Puritans in England who created the work ethic, these are mostly ministers. They said, “Look, the worst violators of the work ethic are the idol and the predatory rich.”
These are the people who make money without helping anybody else, they’re the landlords who charge insane rents that make the yeoman farmers lives impossible. They’re the exploitative employers who tyrannize over their workers. They’re the users who are basically predatory creditors who are charging exploitative interest rates. There’s a whole list of people, but basically they were attacking anybody who made money without contributing to society, but are just extracting wealth from it.
I think we can all recognize some of those business models today. And so they said instead that workers should be honored for the work they do when it contributes to human welfare. And that means they’re entitled to fair and living wages, that they shouldn’t be abused at work by their bosses, and that we can trust them to internalize the work ethics so you don’t have to punish and extort work out of them, because people actually find meaning in serving one another, in helping people out. As long as they get recognition from that, you can be confident that they will work hard.
David Goldstein:
Interesting. So Elizabeth, how do we distinguish between the work ethic and a social contract?
Elizabeth Anderson:
There’s kind of a connection between the social contract and the work ethic, which we can trace to John Locke. So Locke is often portrayed in contemporary political philosophy as a kind of libertarian who thinks, “Well, once you acquire property legitimately, you have total rights over it. You can accumulate as much as you want.” And what I argue is that actually Locke was an advocate of what I call the progressive work ethic or the pro worker work ethic, that second version of the work ethic that I just described, and that the social contract actually involves… So the social contract in general is just the idea that government is established by the consent of the people and the content of our constitution has to be the kind of thing that everyone could consent to because it helps each and every individual person in society. And what Locke argues is contrary to the libertarian view that in fact, once we join a social contract and establish a state, the state goes around and changes property rights, the configuration of property rights to make sure that everyone really is taken care of. So he advocates a welfare state.
David Goldstein:
It’s interesting in the book you mentioned not just Locke, but also Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, that today they’re like heroes of libertarianism. But you say that that’s a misinterpretation. How is it that the right managed to hijack these philosophers to serve their end?
Elizabeth Anderson:
So you interviewed me last time about Private Government, and in a way, Hijacked is a sequel to that earlier book. Because what I’m arguing is that at the time of the Industrial Revolution, we see a split in the work ethic between these two different versions. One which is very demanding of workers, and the other which actually honors workers and calls for those rewards that they should get. But the reason for that is that the Industrial Revolution itself divided people into a capitalist class and worker class who were completely distinct groups of people. Whereas, the model workers for the Puritans of the 17th century were yeomen farmers and craftsmen.
And these were people who owned their own capital. They were small business people. If the yeomen didn’t literally own the farm that they labored on, they had a 99 year lease. Very long run lease so they could afford to invest in the productivity of the soil and in farming implements and so forth. So both of them, they got the rewards in virtue of working hard because they also owned their own productive capital. And so at the Industrial Revolution, because these two classes of people, the owners and the workers split apart, you also get an ideological fight where the work ethic is split apart, where the capitalists say, “Well, we’re the ones who should get all the benefits of that hard work.” And the workers say, “What are you talking about? The work ethic says we’re the ones who should be getting the benefits.” And so that’s where we got that split between the two work ethics. One, basically articulating the interests of capitalists, and the other articulating the interests of workers.
So what I argue in Hijacked is that the workers were right, that’s a more authentic version of the work ethic, given that the Puritans railed against extractive and predatory business models by which capitalists can just use their monopoly power and so forth to extract wealth from other parties without giving anything back. Now of course, it does mean that, say small business people who are actually actively involved in running their firm, they count as workers under the work ethic. So it’s not a pure split between capitalists and workers. But the Industrial Revolution, you had an awful lot of people who really were engaged in extraction, and of course, you can say the same about private equity today and predatory banking and so forth.
Nick Hanauer:
So your book traces this intellectual history from the, what is it? 1600s on?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
I was just for whatever bizarre reason, rereading or reading for the first time actually, some of, you remember the historian Will Durant?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
And I took myself through Greece and Rome and so on and so forth. I was struck, and I don’t mean to imply that Will Durant is the authority on these subjects, but that he just raised the same kind of issues of the tension between workers and businesses and exploitation and stuff like that from those days too. So one of my questions is, how old is this split? Is this split in how we think about work as old as humanity? Or did something truly new happen in the last couple of hundred years?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yes. So here’s the thing, of course, throughout human history, the rich have always wanted the poor to work really hard for them. The difference is, and this is really what made the work ethic a moral revolution in the 17th century, it’s that exaltation part, it’s the idea that workers need to be honored, that our work activity is a fundamentally meaningful and important activity that we should respect and honor. You didn’t see that in ancient Rome. Right? So in fact, my argument is it’s the uplifting of workers that is the moral revolution in the Industrial Revolution, I’m sorry, in the Protestant work ethic at its origins. Because it’s saying, this is central to the meaningfulness of human life of our activities. Whereas before everyone’s aspiration was to become leisure, to have other people work for them, but not to have to lift a finger for anybody else.
David Goldstein:
And in the conservative version, it still says, “We have to work hard, but our reward is in the next world, not in this one.”
Elizabeth Anderson:
That’s one version. Or some of them just think, “Well, the rich are better than anybody else, so they should get the profits.” Right?
David Goldstein:
Right. Are you having a problem with this, Nick? Is this a…
Nick Hanauer:
I’m clearly not making you work hard enough, though. This is what’s going on my mind. Yeah.
David Goldstein:
Well, it’s funny you say that, Nick, because I think some people listening to this might think, “Oh yeah, you’re talking to a philosopher. How is this really relevant in most people’s lives?” But if I’m a little bit introspective, God, it is almost embarrassing how much this work ethic is internalized. I lead a pretty aesthetic lifestyle. I mean, maybe you as my boss might not think I have a work ethic, but certainly everything I do is about my work. I mean, that’s what I care about most, is my impact on the world. “Am I having impact? Am I making it better or worse?” I scrimp and I save, and you pay me a lot more Nick than I made before I went to work with you, and it doesn’t really show up in my spending because I have this idea that I should be frugal, which is part of this work ethic. And I didn’t get this from church, obviously or from synagogue. I’m not a religious person, and yet here I am ascribing to almost all of the American work ethic. Elizabeth, again, how does this happen? How does it capture us this way?
Elizabeth Anderson:
First of all, I do think that not every society has this. I do think that the work ethic is very much alive in the lives of many, many Americans. We work more hours than our counterparts in Europe now. Part of it is just constraint because only half of all American workers even have paid vacation, and they get that through their employer. We’re the only rich country in the world that has exactly zero days of state guaranteed paid vacation. But it’s also the case that I think Americans tend to be a bit driven by their work. They find that a center of meaning during their work lives. And a lot of it is because people don’t want to feel useless. There’s been discussion lately about the crisis of men. Men I think suffer more from a crisis of uselessness, a feeling of uselessness if they’re unemployed, if they’ve been fired or laid off and can’t find work.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that’s because we’re more status conscious.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Partly that, but also I do think that women who have dependent care responsibilities, it’s not paid labor, but boy are they need it. They feel very needed by that.
Nick Hanauer:
Correct.
Elizabeth Anderson:
But that’s a very gendered kind of activity in America. Men find it hard to get a sense of who they are through dependent care work.
Nick Hanauer:
But you are not arguing that we should, or are you, that we should work less or less hard?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Well, I do think Americans really need paid vacation.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Okay, let’s level set. Let’s just level set and say that it is a crime against humanity, that Americans are not guaranteed four weeks of paid vacation a year like everyone else in the developed world.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
And it is nuts, and by the way, terrible for the economy in addition to everything else.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Oh, yes, it’s awful.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. That we don’t have that. But just stipulate for a moment that we got there, that you could snap your fingers and all of a sudden Americans would be operating sort of at the global average of reasonable work hours and adequate vacation and so on and so forth. Look, I don’t mean to oversimplify or stereotype too harshly, but the difference between a hard driving American and an Italian who takes more time and enjoys their life and so on and so forth, these are very different ways of approaching life, right?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
Are you arguing that the Italian way is better than the American way?
David Goldstein:
Are you arguing that the Scandinavian way is better than the American way?
Elizabeth Anderson:
I think that’s closer, yes. So one of the things I argue is that social democracy is actually the culmination of this pro worker work ethic that we can see actually existing in the Scandinavian countries primarily, but other social democracies too. The Netherlands, for instance.
Nick Hanauer:
I mean, one of the things that I think is so important and interesting about your argument is that, one of the good things about a more advanced civilization like the one that we have in a highly advanced technological capitalist economy, is that it has made a greater and greater proportion of jobs pretty easy to attribute meaning to. So one of the reasons that Goldie lives for work is that our work is so interesting and fun, right? It just-
Elizabeth Anderson:
Oh, I can relate, totally.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, I mean, it just is an incredible blessing to get to do what we do every day. And in particular, if you care about having impact to do what we do. And 200 years ago, there might’ve been 1% of humans on earth that could make a claim like that, that they had work that felt meaningful in that way.
Elizabeth Anderson:
I’m not so sure. I think more, but-
Nick Hanauer:
You think more?-
Elizabeth Anderson:
… you know that-
Nick Hanauer:
Well, here’s the thing, is that when people were yeoman farmers and craftspeople, that’s a different situation. But I’m thinking about the Industrial Revolution, right?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Oh yeah. That’s right.
Nick Hanauer:
Where huge numbers of people are either starving in the fields or slaving in the factories, and there are some rich landowners and-
Elizabeth Anderson:
Absolute drudgery.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Boring, stultifying,
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Horrible.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yes. Dangerous.
Nick Hanauer:
Dangerous.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yeah. Right.
Nick Hanauer:
Right. Okay. That’s in my head. Is that in that world, 1% of people are feeling like life is great and interesting and dignified and meaningful, and everybody else is like, “Oh, kill me now.” So certainly, there are lots and lots and lots of people in the advanced societies who still have crappy jobs, but everyone, you know, Elizabeth has a great one. Right?
Elizabeth Anderson:
It’s a really interesting thing.
Nick Hanauer:
Right?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Well, let’s put it this way. There’s the content of the labor. So if you’re broadly in the professional managerial class or doing things like acting, performance arts, those kind of stuff, yes, your job is endlessly interesting, and it’s also fulfilling in the sense that it enables you to exercise pretty sophisticated talents, and most people really enjoy that.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Elizabeth Anderson:
It’s fulfilling, it’s meaningful and you also get recognition back if you do your job well, and that’s also huge. So yeah, these kinds of jobs are really great. But here’s the thing. You might’ve noticed a while ago, the Washington Post published a survey that gathered from data from the Department of Labor on the happiest and most miserable workers. The happiest workers were lumberjacks. Do you remember that?
Nick Hanauer:
I didn’t see that.
Elizabeth Anderson:
No. You have to give credit to lumberjacks, though. That’s actually pretty sophisticated labor. I mean, it’s really hard to down a tree safely.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, it is.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. So mommy python had some insight there as usual.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Correct. But not just lumberjacks. It was like farmers are on top, fishers, but again, these are actually quite highly skilled jobs. And you’re outdoors, it’s refreshing, you’re with nature. There’s a lot of nice things about that. Whereas, believe it or not, one of the lowest ranked in terms of work satisfaction was the professional class, professionals and scientists. What’s going on there?
Nick Hanauer:
Scientists, really?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yeah. And I think I actually have a section in my book on the proletarian of the professional classes. And I know this from my husband he’s in internal medicine, but he works for one of these giant sprawling healthcare organizations with dozens of clinics and hospitals and so forth. And he loves the content of his work, that is his core duties of taking care of patients. He would do this endlessly. He loves every minute of it. But he’s locked into a system that drives him absolutely insane. I’ll just give you an example. He’ll open up his electronic patient records, which are optimized not for giving you precisely the information you need to take care of patients.
Nick Hanauer:
Let me guess.
Elizabeth Anderson:
The information… Yeah, why don’t you guess.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s insurance coding?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Well, there’s coding. It’s all about maximizing billing.
Nick Hanauer:
And profit
Elizabeth Anderson:
Used to be, he’d open up the records, he’d get red flags about some lab result or something. Now, he gets red flags because some AI is alerting to him to the possibility that maybe he has undercoded, and if he revised the entry, they could make more money. Bill more for his services. It drives him crazy, he hates it. He has mandatory seminars he has to attend on how to upcode.
Nick Hanauer:
Jesus.
David Goldstein:
So Elizabeth, I think I have an example that might be even closer to home for you, and that is as fulfilling as your job is, imagine if instead of being a tenured professor, you were an adjunct.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Absolutely. That’s part of-
David Goldstein:
Teaching.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yes.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. You’re teaching the exact same material, but poorly paid with no job security whatsoever.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Correct. And also what that means, as we’ve seen more and more frequently is that without job security, and let’s keep in mind these adjunct professors, they are teaching more than half, I think might even be around 70% of all student credit hours, something like that.
David Goldstein:
Yeah, that’s the number.
Elizabeth Anderson:
And they’re actually paid, if you actually count up the hours, they’re paid well below minimum wage. Because it’s not just the hours of the classroom, there’s also all the hours in preparation and grading papers and all kinds of other things.
David Goldstein:
Right. So this is a way neoliberalism with its distorted version of the work ethic has turned a great job into a terrible job.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Absolute drudgery, because you basically have to teach so many courses, you’re run ragged in order to survive.
David Goldstein:
And you see this increasingly throughout the economy. So I’m just trying to get back to the current day practical-
Elizabeth Anderson:
Absolutely.
David Goldstein:
… impact of how neoliberalism has used the conservative work ethic to really make this a terrible economy for the vast majority of workers.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yeah. It’s about proletarianizing everybody, turning everyone into a drudge like they managed to do during the industrial revolution.
David Goldstein:
And at the same time, because it rewards extractive work, which is something that the Puritan theologians wouldn’t have approved of, because essentially it values your worth in the money you earn, we actually have a less productive and less innovative economy than we otherwise would have with a more progressive work ethic.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Absolutely. And in academics in particular, one of the key things that is taken away from adjunct instructors is autonomy over their teaching. Because now you say something that the higher administration doesn’t like or that provokes controversy, and suddenly your contract isn’t renewed, you’re effectively fired. Because adjuncts often live on a semester by semester contract.
Nick Hanauer:
Wow. So given all this, A, did you think it was pretty awesome that President Biden went and did the picket lines with the UAW workers?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Absolutely historical in high time. It’s great.
Nick Hanauer:
God, no I’m kidding. Isn’t that just the greatest damn thing ever?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Absolutely.
Nick Hanauer:
That is so cool.
David Goldstein:
What I thought was hysterical, Nick, where the headlines, the pundits, whatever, just the critics who are just, “Oh, how could he do this? This is unprecedented for a president to take sides in a labor dispute.” As if we’ve never had a president that violates norms. This is the norm. This is the norm that you’re upset about. You’re taking sides in a labor dispute.
Nick Hanauer:
Can we turn to what we should do? What’s your prescription for the future? How do we get out from under this problem?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yeah. So look, I do think that job number one is empowering workers. And that means in the American context, I actually think we need to reform the law of labor unions in this country. Because right now, the law has been rigged to make it almost impossible to organize. Whereas, if you look over in Europe, you have things like sectoral bargaining where union workers could bargain on behalf of all workers, whether they belong to a union or not, across whole sectors of industry. That’s an ambitious reach for us. But I do think reforming labor law would be a critical way to expand the power of unions.
David Goldstein:
You point out that the private sector union membership isn’t much higher in France, but the French unions are negotiating on behalf of non-union workers.
Elizabeth Anderson:
That’s correct, yes. And you see this across the Scandinavian countries as well, very broad union power.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. But what’s the idea that we should hold in our head when we think about work?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Workers need to be honored for the job they do, but also we need to focus on making that work more meaningful, actually useful, and not just extractive or assisting capitalists in extracting wealth from everybody else.
Nick Hanauer:
The quickest way to do that, of course, is to pay people more. Which forces you to make the work meaningful.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Well, it’s complicated though, because I have to say, I’m pretty skeptical. If you look at say where elite universities are sending their graduates-
Nick Hanauer:
To the worst places.
Elizabeth Anderson:
… it’s disproportionately, it’s in consulting and finance. I’m talking about the really elite places. If they’re not going into the professions, they’re going into consulting and finance, and both of those are kind of problematic industries.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes, totally extractive.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. No, it’s really true. And they’re very highly compensated, obviously. So yeah, if there’s one thing we know, it’s that the amount of money you earn does not reflect your social value.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Right. But in fact, that’s part of our, I think, perverted work ethic ideology in America, is to think that how much you make is a sign of… How much you are paid is a sign of how much you’ve contributed to society. It’s just wrong.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that’s not true.
David Goldstein:
You use a term in the book, which I loved, “The economy of esteem.” You argue that that needs to change.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Absolutely. That means workers need to be honored. And you just had Michael Sandel on, right? And he’s saying the same thing. It’s very important.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. This is a central argument in his last book, which is that we have turned all this stuff upside down in a really pernicious way.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay, so a couple of final questions. Our benevolent dictator question. If you were in charge and had no political constraints, what would you do?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Well, I’m actually a pragmatist in the Dewey tradition, and so I’m a deep believer in experimentation, social experimentation. But Dewey always connected that to deepening democracy. This is collective experimentation where ordinary people take stage front and center, and that requires democratizing work. So I would want to have workers have much greater say in how work is organized, really perform democratic functions. There’s a way to do that through works councils, co-determination where workers sit on the board, and that active practice of collective autonomy in a kind of participatory form in the workplace can also help reinforce democracy at large in various government units, and hopefully help us overcome the temptations towards authoritarianism that we’re seeing in many of the democracies today, especially the United States.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, interesting.
Elizabeth Anderson:
And that, of course, was core to the original social democratic vision.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, absolutely.
Elizabeth Anderson:
It’s about democracy, not just about a welfare state or about passively receiving stuff from the government. That was very much about empowering people by deepening democracy across domains of life.
David Goldstein:
Is there any hope for that in the United States? Because our work ethic is so, even repeatedly, so counter to experience, to the empirical evidence. I’m thinking back to as we were coming out of the pandemic restrictions, all this angst over the great resignation and quiet quitting that somehow by giving people money to keep them from starving or becoming homeless, people would not go back to work. And of course, that all turned out not to be true, that we have a very low unemployment right now and very high levels of workforce participation, higher than we had before the pandemic, and yet it doesn’t seem to change minds. We still have this punitive attitude towards the working poor, not just the poor, but the working poor, that somehow it’s their fault. And that seems just so grounded in what we understand to be the Puritan ethic, that your lot in this world is basically a sign of your grace before God.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Oh, I agree with you that that picture is deeply embedded in many Americans consciousness, but it’s just grounded on a fundamental error. And a lot of it is that Americans don’t really think structurally and are very resistant to thinking about how outcomes are dictated far more by structures of opportunity than they are by individual effort or merit. So I think the easiest way to think about this is a ladder. So you have each rung designates an amount of pay that you might get in different occupations. And the structure of that ladder has nothing to do with your particular efforts, like the distance between the rungs or the distance between the top rung and the bottom rung, which would be a measure of inequality.
None of those things has anything to do with your individual efforts. And what we’ve seen under neoliberalism with increasing inequality, it’s kind of like making the ladder massively taller and also ripping out a lot of the middle rungs so that most people end up way at the bottom with a huge gap between them and the people at the tippy top. But that has nothing to do with their efforts or a lack of effort. It has to do with who got to build the ladder in the first place, who had the ear of the lobbyist to rig the rules. So as for instance, to dismantle the effectiveness of antitrust law so that the monopolies can just rake in more and more profits just because they’re a monopoly.
David Goldstein:
But in the same way that I have internalized the aestheticism of the work ethic, it strikes me that most Americans and the ones suffering under it the most, have internalized the rewards side of it. They think, I mean, I, that’s where you see a lot of the deaths of despair coming from. People believe it is their own fault, and I just don’t know how you get all those people masked at the bottom of the ladder to change the way they view the world and view themselves. I mean-
Elizabeth Anderson:
I think Americans are coming to see that the system is rigged against them.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. I think young people are not buying it.
Elizabeth Anderson:
But even a lot of older people are seeing something’s not right here.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Right.
Elizabeth Anderson:
I think we’ve reached peak neoliberalism in terms of ideology, and it’s on its decline.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s for sure.
David Goldstein:
I think, Elizabeth, this explains also our current neoliberal push for STEM education, is that we don’t want young people to be taking philosophy classes.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Oh, absolutely.
Nick Hanauer:
Too dangerous. Get back to the coding. Get back to the code, don’t…
David Goldstein:
That-
Elizabeth Anderson:
Well, but now we have AI who’s coding, so how many low level coders are going to keep their jobs? I’m not so sure.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, it’s true.
David Goldstein:
What we need to do is train the AI on philosophy since they’re the ones that are going to be running the world.
Nick Hanauer:
[inaudible 00:40:06].
David Goldstein:
So Nick, do we want to get to the final question? And if so, I think it has, I don’t think we’ve ever had an interview where it is more on point. Do you want to ask it, Nick?
Nick Hanauer:
Why do you do this work?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Why do I do this work?
Nick Hanauer:
Yes, ma’am.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. Be consistent here with your book.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yeah. Well, philosophers, political philosophers want to basically enable people to understand the path in order, both to recognize the ways in which we’ve gone wrong, but also to provide resources for thinking about how to make the world better. And in uncovering this tradition of the work ethic, I think I’m doing both things. One, showing how the work ethic in part, originated from some pretty problematic ideas, which we’ve carried with us without justification. But then in another part, actually has major resources for uplifting the status of workers and for creatively thinking about how to make our work lives better. And so that’s what gives me meaning in life, is I’m supplying ideas for people that I hope can help us remake the world in better ways.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s a perfect answer to a very hard question.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. I think you may have just… That would be my answer too, Nick.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
David Goldstein:
Well, it’s not my only answer, Nick. Also, I like to win.
Nick Hanauer:
I know. Well, thank you so much for being with us again. It’s always so great to talk to you.
Elizabeth Anderson:
No, it’s such a pleasure to be on your show.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s such an interesting conversation and such an interesting book, and it really does force people like you and me who definitely have that Protestant work ethic, we’re hardcore. But it’s such an interesting issue of how to think about work and how to situate it in our lives and how to situate work in the broader economy. Even the term work ethic is complex, and I’m still thinking about it, just how it intersects with the social contract and how our relationship to work should be vis-a-vis other people and the rest of the economy, these very complicated and interesting things.
David Goldstein:
Well, I’ll tell you again, and I tried to come back to it a bit, and it’s hard, I think for people to imagine, “Oh, you’re talking to a philosopher. Good for you. You can afford the time to do that.” What does that mean for my life? And I think back, she points out in the book that the first half of the 19th century in Britain as the most horrible part of the Industrial Revolution, the most commiserating part of it, in that first half wages stagnated or fell during the first half of the 19th century. Even as productivity grew faster than at any time in human history, productivity just took off with industrialization, and workers saw none of that, that 50 year period. It wasn’t until the second half of the 19th century when workers started to organize that you started to see gains for workers. Sound familiar, Nick?
Nick Hanauer:
Yes, yeah.
David Goldstein:
A 50-year period where productivity grew and workers saw none of it, none of the gains from it, the vast majority of people, and we were told, “Oh, that’s because you’re unskilled. There’s a skills gap, there’s an education gap. Go learn STEM.” It’s a very similar period of time, and it is the result of social norms and ways of thinking about society and the economy and one’s own place within it. I think that, as I said, I express some skepticism that we can change the American mindset, because it is so deeply ingrained. But this is something we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast over the past few years, Nick, that we can’t change the economy without changing the way we think and talk about the economy.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. But I do think that there’s an opening today. I think that it’s so clear to so many people that the game is rigged, and that they’re not working for themselves, they’re working for some distant bureaucratic overlord, as you like to say. And that doesn’t make very much sense. Again, as I said in the interview, the President of the United States picketing with workers. That’s a moment. That’s a moment, and I just think it says a lot about the change in zeitgeist. And hopefully the pendulum is swinging in a different direction today.
David Goldstein:
It’s interesting how things coincide. It’s also the day that his administration has brought an antitrust suit against-
Nick Hanauer:
Amazon.com.
David Goldstein:
Yeah, your old friend, Jeff, and his monopoly, and that shows a very different way of thinking about the economy and the role of the power of capital within it to do what it pleases.
Nick Hanauer:
Yep. Absolutely. Well, always so fun to talk to Elizabeth Anderson.
David Goldstein:
We highly recommend the book. It is called Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned The Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back. It just came out this week, last week? As the time we’re recording it, a couple of weeks ago by the time you hear this. So we urge you to get a copy at your local independent bookstore or at the target of a federal antitrust suit, if that’s what works better for you.
Speaker 4:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook @civicaction and @NickHanauer, follow our writing on Medium @civicskunkworks and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram @pitchforkeconomics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.