Diabasis

People who count as middle class and above in advanced industrial societies enjoy a level of material prosperity and comfort far exceeding human historical norms and should have really good lives, right?  Well…

Let’s face an unpleasant fact to begin with.  For most people work ranges between pretty unpleasant to very unpleasant.   For some of the most privileged people in the professional middle class, it is shockingly unpleasant.  People often say they like their jobs, and there are senses in which this is true.  They like having incomes and the social status (or which more anon) attached to their jobs, and they might like some aspects of their work, like being able to interact with people on a day-to-day basis.  But I’m pretty sure they don’t like what goes on from minute to minute in a workplace, much of which is an unpalatable combination of tedium and fear, rather like being an infantry grunt only much more slowly fatal. If you think people really like their jobs, ask yourself how many of them would keep doing them were it not for pay. And yet they spend shockingly large amounts of time on them.  Even if directly only 40 hours a week they spend large amounts of time commuting to and from them, lying exhausted in front of the TV after them, spending time getting credentials to obtain them, and so forth.  Kind of a nasty existence, if you look at with an appraising eye.  Why?

We certainly can’t appeal to brute physical necessity.  We’re way beyond that.  I remember quite well that during the last part of my life in which I enjoyed extended happiness I had an income more than an order of magnitude less (yes, I did control for inflation!) than what I have now, and I don’t recall any sense of significant physical discomfort or deprivation back then.  Many older readers of this blog might recall something similar in their own lives. 

Given my huge rise in productive possibilities, shouldn’t I be working an order of magnitude fewer hours?  After all, George Jetson worked only nine hours a week.  Why isn’t the future as good as it used to be?

I’m pretty sure the answer has to do with status.  It’s a complicated concept, but I hope not too hard to grasp.  It clearly has a first order component of being admirable somehow:  smart, beautiful, capable, talented, rich, etc.  It also has a second-order component of affiliation.  Be friends, allies, associates, or even just hangers-on to those high in status and your own status goes up.  The dreaded converse also applies.

It’s just awful of us (and I am afraid I can’t exempt myself) to care about status, but we do.  A lot.  Even people on the very brink of subsistence will make sacrifices in their material well-being and those of their nearest and dearest to maintain status.  Sister Y links to an account of how even people suffering severe malnutrition will still spend parts of the meager budgets on things like alcohol and tobacco of the purposes of maintaining status and social affiliation.  Perhaps even more astonishingly, Katja Grace points to an example of how in rural Bolivia, people refuse to use a cheap method of disinfecting water, even when it means more of their children will die of diarrhea, because doing so means signaling comparative poverty to their neighbors.

But even in a rich society like ours, status matters.  Pretty much all the time.

You know the drill. You can add your own examples. To be low in status, or to lose status, is to bleed from a thousand tiny cuts.

What has this to do with work?  As the Bolivia example above shows, people put a lot of effort into signalling their status to others.  If you want people to treat you as higher in status, and if you want people to affiliate with you on the basis of your status, you’d better be able to show people that you have a higher status.  These signals are often pretty costly.  Consider an example that a lot of ordinary middle-class people in my neighborhood face:  live in a forty year-old split-level or a new McMansion.  The McMansions are costlier and thus a more reliable signal to the world of your ability to pay for something more costly, and thereby indirectly a signal of your ability to earn more, and thus a signal of some desirable attribute on your part — you’re smart or hard-working or good at office politics or have a fancy degree from a fancy school or something.

Now if you happen to live in one of the older split-levels (which are perfectly comfortable houses, by the way), you could try to convince people that you just prefer living more modestly.  But doing so invites invidious inferences.  Maybe you just can’t afford enough to buy the McMansion.  Maybe you’re just not smart enough to get a higher-paying job.  Maybe you’re just unsociable and just weird. So if you don’t want to bleed from those thousand little cuts, you end up trying to buy the McMansion.  Better put in those hours at the office!  Hope you enjoy them…

And so people engage in their consumer status arms races against each other while slaving away.  A good book to read in some ways on this is Geoffrey Miller’s Spent:  Sex, Evolution, and Human Behavior. His diagnosis, at least at the level of individual human psychology, is good. 

His proposed policy solution won’t come even close to working. The race for status — and the corresponding misery it generates — is one which very few if any can escape.