On your definition of ‘poverty’, Disneyland makes the world poorer.
I think the comparison with Disneyland misses the point. The essay measures poverty by the level of desperation people experience. People don’t typically work extra hours out of desperation to take their kids to Disneyland; they do it out of a desire for additional enjoyment. The 60-hour work week should be understood as working far more hours than one would if they weren’t desperate for essential resources.
Poverty is about lacking crucial resources necessary for living, not just lacking luxury items. Therefore, adding more Disneylands wouldn’t make people poorer, but people who are not poor might still strive for better things—from a position of security, not desperation. Interestingly, this aligns with your argument right above that “work produces nice enough stuff that people are willing to do the work to produce it.”
Long answer: If you work 60 hours a week, buy essential items, and can’t buy luxury items, it is reasonable to say that you needed to work 60 hours a week just to afford essential items. If you work 60 hours a week, buy essential items, and also buy luxury items, it seems more reasonable to say that you worked [X] hours a week to buy essential items and [60-X] hours a week to buy luxury items, for some X<60.
If you ignore the fungibility of money, you can say things like this:
Bob works 40 hours a week. He spends half of this salary on essential items like food and clothing and shelter, and the other half on luxury items like fancy vacations, professionally prepared food, recent consumer electronics and entertainment, etc.
Now Bob has children. Oh no! He now needs to work an extra 20 hours a week to afford to send his children to a good school! This means he needs to work 60 hours a week to afford necessities!
But, even if we account a good school as a necessity, Bob’s actual situation is that he is spending 20 hours of labor on his personal necessities, 20 hours of labor on his children’s necessities, and 20 hours of labor on luxuries. He has the ability to work 40 hours a week for necessities. He is instead choosing to work 60 hours a week to afford luxuries.
That’s a reasonable choice for Bob to make! The modern world has some very nice luxuries indeed, and Bob can justifiably think it’s worth putting some extra hours in to get them, even if he doesn’t enjoy his job!
Yes, it would be better still if Bob could afford all the same luxuries with a 40-hour workweek. But don’t tell me that Bob is in the same position as a coal miner who had to work 60-hour weeks to put food on the table and heat his house in winter, and don’t try to use this to argue that there hasn’t been any improvement in poverty.
And as the world gets richer still, there are two ways this could manifest:
Bob gets richer, and uses that wealth to work less.
Bob gets richer, and uses that wealth to have more luxuries.
In the first world, we’ll see Bob working fewer hours. In the second world, we’ll see Bob working the same hours but having more nice things. Both are improvements! But which improvement we get depends on how nice the things our society can produce get. The more new nice things our society can produce, the more likely Bob is to continue working 60-hour weeks to get modern luxuries, rather than working shorter hours and accepting 1980s-era luxuries.
This argument would cease to hold water if there were a substantial number of people working 60 hours a week who genuinely weren’t spending substantial portions of their income on luxuries. I think this was true in the US even in the relatively recent past, that sizeable numbers of the people working 60 hours a week in 1945-1975 e.g. never left the state they were born in, prepared all their own food, had very limited access to entertainment, etc. I don’t think it’s true today: I think the overwhelming majority of people in the US who are ‘working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them’ are also consuming large amounts of luxuries, and I think it’s reasonable to conceptualize this as ‘they are working longer hours than they have to in order to consume lots of luxuries’.
The relation between time and money is sometimes not linear.
I would be happy to work 2⁄3 time for 2⁄3 of my current salary (doing things similar to what I am doing now), but I don’t see such option on the job market. Most employers are “40 hours, or go away”. The ones who offer part-time jobs typically pay way below the market salary, and still think they are doing you a favor.
(To generalize, this is my objection against the concept of “revealed preferences”—sometimes the options we imagine intentionally rejected by other people were never real for them in the first place.)
A large part of the family budget is “money passing through your hands”. You get a salary. You pay for the mortgage, electric power, gas, car insurance, etc. Include some humble amount of food and occasional new clothes and shoes, and… if you have an average income, it is possible that maybe 90% of your salary is already gone at that moment. The remaining 10% are yours to spend as you wish.
My point is that the budget of average people has much less slack than it may seem—at one moment you have a little discretionary spending, the next moment your expenses somehow increase by 15% (your car breaks, you get sick and need some expensive treatment, etc.) and suddenly your salary is not enough even for the necessities. Maybe the people who work 60 hours a day would actually only need to work 50 hours a day to make ends meet, but such option may not be available on the job market.
Anecdotal evidence about the life of people working 60 hours a day: Nickel and Dimed
I read Nickel and Dimed (2001) several years ago and I thought it was very good. A couple of things I remember that are relevant to the discussion.
Ehrenreich did not find a shortage of part-time work. My recollection is that the problem was the opposite: employers would only offer up to 30 hours of work a day, for regulatory reasons. So Ehrenreich often had to pick up two such jobs to attempt to earn enough money, which increased her costs. I agree that non-linear compensation is common at higher income levels, especially in knowledge work where there are increasing returns to marginal labor.
Ehrenreich discussed with her fellow employees how they were making ends meet. A common answer was that they lived with relatives, friends, or partners, allowing them to save money on housing, food, and transit, relative to Ehrenreich and also giving them a small safety net. From the perspective of Ehrenreich’s co-workers, she was paying extra to live by herself. She failed to make ends meet largely for that reason.
I think the crux here is the “relative” poverty aspect. Comparison with others is actually really important, it turns out. Going to Disneyland isn’t just a net positive; not going to Disneyland can be a negative if your kids expect you to and all their friends are. A lot of human activities are aimed at winning status games with other humans, and in that sense, in our society of abundance, marketing has vastly offset those gains by making sure it’s painfully clear which things make you rich and which aren’t worth all that much. So basically the Poverty Restoring force is “other people”. No matter the actual material conditions there’s always going to be by definition a bottom something percentile in status, and they’ll be frustrated by this condition and trying to get out of it to earn some respect by the rest of society.
I think the comparison with Disneyland misses the point. The essay measures poverty by the level of desperation people experience. People don’t typically work extra hours out of desperation to take their kids to Disneyland; they do it out of a desire for additional enjoyment. The 60-hour work week should be understood as working far more hours than one would if they weren’t desperate for essential resources.
Poverty is about lacking crucial resources necessary for living, not just lacking luxury items. Therefore, adding more Disneylands wouldn’t make people poorer, but people who are not poor might still strive for better things—from a position of security, not desperation. Interestingly, this aligns with your argument right above that “work produces nice enough stuff that people are willing to do the work to produce it.”
Short answer: Money is fungible.
Long answer: If you work 60 hours a week, buy essential items, and can’t buy luxury items, it is reasonable to say that you needed to work 60 hours a week just to afford essential items. If you work 60 hours a week, buy essential items, and also buy luxury items, it seems more reasonable to say that you worked [X] hours a week to buy essential items and [60-X] hours a week to buy luxury items, for some X<60.
If you ignore the fungibility of money, you can say things like this:
Bob works 40 hours a week. He spends half of this salary on essential items like food and clothing and shelter, and the other half on luxury items like fancy vacations, professionally prepared food, recent consumer electronics and entertainment, etc.
Now Bob has children. Oh no! He now needs to work an extra 20 hours a week to afford to send his children to a good school! This means he needs to work 60 hours a week to afford necessities!
But, even if we account a good school as a necessity, Bob’s actual situation is that he is spending 20 hours of labor on his personal necessities, 20 hours of labor on his children’s necessities, and 20 hours of labor on luxuries. He has the ability to work 40 hours a week for necessities. He is instead choosing to work 60 hours a week to afford luxuries.
That’s a reasonable choice for Bob to make! The modern world has some very nice luxuries indeed, and Bob can justifiably think it’s worth putting some extra hours in to get them, even if he doesn’t enjoy his job!
Yes, it would be better still if Bob could afford all the same luxuries with a 40-hour workweek. But don’t tell me that Bob is in the same position as a coal miner who had to work 60-hour weeks to put food on the table and heat his house in winter, and don’t try to use this to argue that there hasn’t been any improvement in poverty.
And as the world gets richer still, there are two ways this could manifest:
Bob gets richer, and uses that wealth to work less.
Bob gets richer, and uses that wealth to have more luxuries.
In the first world, we’ll see Bob working fewer hours. In the second world, we’ll see Bob working the same hours but having more nice things. Both are improvements! But which improvement we get depends on how nice the things our society can produce get. The more new nice things our society can produce, the more likely Bob is to continue working 60-hour weeks to get modern luxuries, rather than working shorter hours and accepting 1980s-era luxuries.
This argument would cease to hold water if there were a substantial number of people working 60 hours a week who genuinely weren’t spending substantial portions of their income on luxuries. I think this was true in the US even in the relatively recent past, that sizeable numbers of the people working 60 hours a week in 1945-1975 e.g. never left the state they were born in, prepared all their own food, had very limited access to entertainment, etc. I don’t think it’s true today: I think the overwhelming majority of people in the US who are ‘working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them’ are also consuming large amounts of luxuries, and I think it’s reasonable to conceptualize this as ‘they are working longer hours than they have to in order to consume lots of luxuries’.
The relation between time and money is sometimes not linear.
I would be happy to work 2⁄3 time for 2⁄3 of my current salary (doing things similar to what I am doing now), but I don’t see such option on the job market. Most employers are “40 hours, or go away”. The ones who offer part-time jobs typically pay way below the market salary, and still think they are doing you a favor.
(To generalize, this is my objection against the concept of “revealed preferences”—sometimes the options we imagine intentionally rejected by other people were never real for them in the first place.)
A large part of the family budget is “money passing through your hands”. You get a salary. You pay for the mortgage, electric power, gas, car insurance, etc. Include some humble amount of food and occasional new clothes and shoes, and… if you have an average income, it is possible that maybe 90% of your salary is already gone at that moment. The remaining 10% are yours to spend as you wish.
My point is that the budget of average people has much less slack than it may seem—at one moment you have a little discretionary spending, the next moment your expenses somehow increase by 15% (your car breaks, you get sick and need some expensive treatment, etc.) and suddenly your salary is not enough even for the necessities. Maybe the people who work 60 hours a day would actually only need to work 50 hours a day to make ends meet, but such option may not be available on the job market.
Anecdotal evidence about the life of people working 60 hours a day: Nickel and Dimed
I read Nickel and Dimed (2001) several years ago and I thought it was very good. A couple of things I remember that are relevant to the discussion.
Ehrenreich did not find a shortage of part-time work. My recollection is that the problem was the opposite: employers would only offer up to 30 hours of work a day, for regulatory reasons. So Ehrenreich often had to pick up two such jobs to attempt to earn enough money, which increased her costs. I agree that non-linear compensation is common at higher income levels, especially in knowledge work where there are increasing returns to marginal labor.
Ehrenreich discussed with her fellow employees how they were making ends meet. A common answer was that they lived with relatives, friends, or partners, allowing them to save money on housing, food, and transit, relative to Ehrenreich and also giving them a small safety net. From the perspective of Ehrenreich’s co-workers, she was paying extra to live by herself. She failed to make ends meet largely for that reason.
I think the crux here is the “relative” poverty aspect. Comparison with others is actually really important, it turns out. Going to Disneyland isn’t just a net positive; not going to Disneyland can be a negative if your kids expect you to and all their friends are. A lot of human activities are aimed at winning status games with other humans, and in that sense, in our society of abundance, marketing has vastly offset those gains by making sure it’s painfully clear which things make you rich and which aren’t worth all that much. So basically the Poverty Restoring force is “other people”. No matter the actual material conditions there’s always going to be by definition a bottom something percentile in status, and they’ll be frustrated by this condition and trying to get out of it to earn some respect by the rest of society.