139 | Elizabeth Anderson on Equality, Work, and Ideology

Imagine two people with exactly the same innate abilities, but one is born into a wealthy family and the other is born into poverty. Or two people born into similar circumstances, but one is paralyzed in a freak accident in childhood while the other grows up in perfect health. Is this fair? We live in a society that values some kind of “equality” — “All men are created equal” — without ever quite specifying what we mean. Elizabeth Anderson is a leading philosopher of equality, and we talk about what really matters about this notion. This leads to down-to-earth issues about employment and the work ethic, and how it all ties into modern capitalism. We end up agreeing that a leisure society would be great, but at the moment there’s plenty of work to be done.

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Elizabeth Anderson received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. She is currently the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. Among her honors are the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was named by Prospect magazine as one of the top 50 thinkers of the Covid-19 era.

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0:00:00.3 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And increasingly, one of the things that people are talking about in the political and economic realms in the world today is the problem of equality, or the problem of inequality, I should put it that way. We live in a world where inequality is growing in poor countries and in wealthy countries, we have a bigger and bigger gap between the ultra rich and the very poor.

0:00:23.9 SC: And some people will say, you know what, that’s just how it should be. Jeff Bezos is just that much more talented than you are, he deserves all of his money. Other people will say, well, he deserves to earn as much money as he can, but we have the right to tax him, there should be a little bit of redistribution because the flow of wealth does not exactly match on to merit in some sense, so we should be able to use the wealth of the very rich people to help out those who are less well off. Maybe it would be good, in other words, to decrease the amount of inequality in a financial sense.

0:00:58.8 SC: But all that’s just about the equality of resources, the equality of stuff, of wealth, almost nobody thinks that you should have exactly the same amount of wealth in every person. There might have been some sort of utopian thinkers or small scale communes, but it’s not a major position in modern political thought to say every person in the United States should have the same wealth. But what about something like equality of opportunity? The idea being, we come into this world with certain capacities, and some of us are just going to be better at other things than others, but we should all have equal opportunity to let our powers and capacities flourish and be rewarded for them, right? That sounds like an attractive kind of goal. Maybe even that’s not the right goal.

0:01:45.1 SC: And my guest today is Elizabeth Anderson, who is probably the leading person in the world thinking about equality from a philosophical point of view. I’m very proud to have her on the podcast. It’s not like I’ve discovered her or anything, she is a leading person, she was the subject of a New Yorker magazine profile, but she’s not nearly as well known and she could be, so I’m hoping this is a discourse, a conversation that a lot of people haven’t yet been exposed to.

0:02:13.4 SC: And Elizabeth became famous in the philosophy, politics of equality discourse with an article in 1999 called What Is The Point Of Equality, where she actually goes against the idea of equality of opportunity being the thing that we should aim for, not from a sort of conservative point of that says we shouldn’t even aim for equality, but that we should aim for a different kind of equality, and I have to read the opening of this article that she wrote, because it’s one of the best openings of a philosophy article I’ve ever read.

0:02:41.5 SC: She says: If much recent academic work defending equality had been secretly penned by conservatives, could the results be any more embarrassing for egalitarians? Her point being that the kind of equality that the purportedly progressive side of the debate is championing is actually a little bit not very progressive at all, it can really decrease the dignity and value of human existence. And so she is arguing not for equality of opportunity, but for equality of treatment, for a sort of democratic equality where we focus on the social roles that people have and the way that they relate to each other, trying to make each other flourish in this world in an equal way rather than just trying to hand out money so that everyone has the same amount.

0:03:27.3 SC: I’m probably butchering that a little bit, she’ll say it a lot better than we do in this conversation. So one of the great things about Elizabeth is that she’s a philosopher, but she’s heavily influenced by empirical work, by history, by economics, by sociology. So we’ll talk about her views on equality, but then also back up to talk about the work ethic, the protestant work ethic, the free market system, who invented the free market system, how has the meaning of how we think about the free market changed over time and what does it mean today compared to what it meant for Adam Smith and Thomas Paine and so forth?

0:04:00.4 SC: I think this is an eye-opening conversation because we need to be having this conversation, there’s a whole bunch of people on both sides of the political spectrum who are really frustrated by the differences between the haves and have-nots in society today. It would be a good idea to ameliorate them somehow, but if we can’t even agree on what that means at the philosophical level, it becomes impossible to imagine what our political or activist goals should be. So we have to have this conversation. This is the right time to have it. Let’s go.

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0:04:46.4 SC: Elizabeth Anderson, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast.

0:04:48.6 Elizabeth Anderson: It’s great to be here.

0:04:50.0 SC: So I wanted… You’re doing so many different things, and I think it’s fascinating stuff, I want to get into sort of the nitty-gritty because you engage a lot with the real world, by philosopher standards, but maybe we can start with setting the stage a little bit with some background ideas about how you go about approaching these things. One idea I wanted to ask you about was you mentioned… I only saw a brief mention of it, but maybe you talk about it at greater length elsewhere, the idea of ideology in the intro to your book on private government. And actually I’ve heard the word ideology and used it myself for many decades of my life, but I think you changed my appreciation of it, because as a physicist, as a scientist, I think a lot about the fact that people have models of the world and they have ideas about what’s going to happen next, and they update, things go wrong and stuff like that. And in some sense, am I crazy to think that you’re saying that we should think of ideology as just the social version of that, and ideology is sort of… Yeah.

0:05:54.7 EA: Absolutely. That’s exactly right. And the thing is, is that it’s used for practical purposes. We have a picture of our social world which we use to navigate our way through it. And so the ideology in this sense does not have to be pernicious.

0:06:10.3 SC: Yes, that’s right. So there’s sort of a good…

0:06:11.8 EA: It’s not a pejorative use of the term. But it can become pernicious if our picture of our social world is either missing some major elements or maybe distorted in various ways that leads us perhaps to behave badly or treat other people unjustly.

0:06:33.4 SC: Right, exactly. And I think, let’s just emphasize this non-pejorative sense of the word, because we’ll probably using it later on, that everyone has an ideology, it’s not a bad thing to be ideological in this sense, it’s sort of how you approach the world in terms of what you pay attention to, what you expect to see and what it all means to you. Is that something close?

0:06:54.9 EA: That’s quite right, although I wouldn’t necessarily say that everyone has one ideology. Often what happens is in different social contexts, we take on different ideologies, right, to navigate that part of the social world that we’re engaging at the moment. So I actually don’t think that most people have very coherent world views. Some people, right, philosophers are paid to have a coherent world view, but I wouldn’t even guarantee that I have such a coherent world view in my everyday life.

0:07:25.3 SC: No, I’ve met some philosophers and they’re no better than scientists in this regard. Good. Okay, so the ideology in that sense, it is a necessary thing because there’s an infinite amount of things we could pay attention to or care about, and we sort of filter some things out, but let’s also admit there can be a negative side to it, yes?

0:07:46.4 EA: Absolutely, yes, because we could be missing out on major parts of our social world or just profoundly misunderstanding the nature of our social world, and that can lead to major problems in how we navigate our way through it and how we treat other people.

0:08:03.5 SC: I wish I had this word or concept available when I was talking to Paul Bloom, the psychologist at Yale, he’s written this wonderful book on being against empathy, he thinks that empathy is a bad idea because we tend to empathize with people like ourselves, and I was trying to say that, well, but the response to that should be to empathize with people not like ourselves, because otherwise we get trapped in this ideology where we think about the world in terms of what’s happening to people like us, and it would be nicer if we could make more of an effort to think about what’s happening to people very much unlike ourselves.

0:08:37.6 EA: You know, I think what you just said is really beautiful, and I’ve written about this, a paper I wrote last year called The Epistemology Of Justice. And what I argue there is that the core way that one of the main ways we have to cut through pernicious unjust ideology is because our emotion like empathy, have natural objects, and empathy just… We can react just to the fact that somebody’s suffering, and in fact, if we look at the empathetic imagination we see in children, they have empathy towards stuffed animals, real animals and stuffed animals. There’s no boundaries, because the natural object of empathy is any being who is able to have suffering or joy, or even, you can even project that on to an inanimate object like a stuffed animal. But our hearts go out, right, or in movies, you know it’s fiction, but your heart goes out to the characters if they are really compelling, and that can break… Those emotional reactions can break through ideology.

0:09:57.0 SC: That’s interesting. I feel a little bit bad for Paul Bloom because he did a great podcast interview with me, and ever since then, I’ve been having other people on the podcast where I recall our conversation and go, don’t you think I was right? So should have them back on to defend himself from these, but good. So there’s ideologies, good and bad aspects. One of the other things I wanted to get on the stage before we dig into the nitty-gritties of work and equality and things like that, is this whole idea of doing historically, economically informed philosophy. You’re not just working from your armchair, has that… How conscious is that choice, how weird is it within the profession?

0:10:36.5 EA: You know, it’s absolutely conscious. And let me tell you where I got it from. I was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College studying philosophy, and I was an economics minor, but the most transformative course I ever took in my entire life was a course on the history and philosophy of science. And so we studied the history of… Basically, the history of astronomy and physics from the ancient Greeks to like Newton, and it was an absolutely fascinating course, and then we could see how the arguments developed in the context of philosophical ideas and metaphysics and epistemology, and it made me think, why don’t we… Ethics that way, and political philosophy, that is that the philosophy of science is undertaken with engagement to metaphysical and epistemological problems that arise in those other disciplines.

0:11:38.8 EA: And then right, there are all these puzzles about how could you know, or do atoms really exist, or something like this, right? But these are questions that are suggested by or arising from domains of inquiry and practice outside of philosophy. And it was really… That was the thing that really excited me, because we could do this in moral and political philosophy too, where you take your problems from practice from the problems that people actually encounter in their lives and then start theorizing from that rather than thinking, no, I’ll just… I’m just going to think in my head and figure out first principles of morality and politics just by sticking to ideas in my head, and I think that’s just wrong, just as it was wrong in… If you look in the history of modern philosophy, metaphysics and epistemology were fundamentally engaged, deep questions of how to make sense of the scientific revolution and discoveries that didn’t make sense in the old [0:12:44.1] ____.

0:12:45.0 SC: Well, it’s interesting, because I do think that philosophy has a much stronger engagement with its own history, with the history of philosophy, than, let’s say, science does. Like physicists don’t care about the history of physics, but philosophers of physics do care about it. So you’re saying that philosophers of ethics or society should care about not just the history of the philosophy of ethics, but the history of society and economics, and that sounds great, but it also sounds like a lot more work.

0:13:12.1 EA: It is a lot more work, but it’s a total blast. It does mean that you have to be a very, very heavy consumer of history and social science.

0:13:24.5 SC: I think I remember a quote from you about… You wanted to go back in your… Some work that you were doing to the 1700s, but then you had to go back to the Reformation, but then that was based on the Bible, and you have to read the New Testament, and there is no beginning, unless you go back to the Big Bang, ultimately.

0:13:42.3 EA: Yeah, yeah, so I am working on a history of egalitarianism and I decided… I actually have to go back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

0:13:51.7 SC: Yeah, fair enough, at least you don’t have to go worry about the single cell organisms, so you’re drawing the line somewhere, I think that’s pretty good. And this actually… That’s good, because you mentioned something which was the final point I wanted to get on the table, which is this role of ideal theory, the idea that whether as philosophers or anybody else, one way of thinking about how to make society better is to say, well, what would the perfect society be, and then how close are we to that and can we move in that direction? And I think that you push back a little bit on that common philosophical [0:14:24.1] ____.

0:14:25.9 EA: Yeah, because how are we supposed to know what the ideal is going to be? We don’t even know what the normative categories are going to be like a century from now, maybe we’ll think that other things are critically…

0:14:37.5 SC: So is this… Go ahead.

0:14:41.2 EA: If you look at, say, the emergence of environmental philosophy as a thing, that’s relatively new. But we do have to think about what are our ecosystems going to look like and how should we live with nature. It’s going to have to be an important question for how we organize ourselves.

0:15:00.2 SC: So that’s interesting, because I would have thought that one of the biggest objections to being ideal theory-focused is that it’s a way to paper over some of the real world structural inequities or barriers in society, but you’re…

0:15:16.4 EA: Well, that’s also true.

0:15:17.5 SC: That’s also true, right.

0:15:18.7 EA: Right. I mean, that is that ideal theory can often fail to address the problems before us, and the usefulness of non-ideal theory of starting with the problems that we’re facing, is that then we develop categories, concepts and tools that are appropriate for inquiry in our very non-ideal world.

0:15:42.3 SC: Right. But you brought up a different reason to object to, which is more like a fallible-ism kind of claim that maybe the ideal theory is so far away that we should be more locally centered because we might discover whole new things we need to worry about as we approach the ideal theory.

0:16:01.3 EA: Or maybe moral inquiry and political inquiry just goes on forever and never stabilizes or converges on something because we keep on coming up with new ideas.

0:16:12.6 SC: I’ve been a… Actually, a very recent convert to exactly that idea, the idea that there is no perfect morality or political system out there to be found like there is a theory of everything in physics, it’s more a reaction to our present circumstances and trying to make things better. We should think about the moment in our current journey rather than this ultimate imaginary destination.

0:16:33.7 EA: That’s quite right, and I want to add that because I’m not doing ideal theory, it doesn’t follow that I don’t believe in ideals. I think ideals are really important, but we should treat them as error-prone. But the way we find out whether our ideals are wrong is by living in accordance with them and seeing whether we like the results, and it’s that constant learning that we have… Learning to live through our ideals, that we are constantly changing them and coming up with new ideals all the time.

0:17:14.5 SC: Good, good, and that’s a perfect segue into the sort of nitty-gritty about what you’ve been talking about, of what you’ve been working on for a number of years now. By the way, I wonder if we overlapped on the main line, I was an undergraduate of Villanova, you just said you were undergraduate at Swarthmore, so we were probably nearby each other.

0:17:31.5 EA: Yeah, yeah. So when did you graduate?

0:17:33.3 SC: I graduated in ’88 from Villanova.

0:17:36.0 EA: Oh, no, no, no I’m older than you. I graduated in ’81 from Swarthmore College.

0:17:40.7 SC: Alright, okay, well, still near-by. I visited Swarthmore while I was there. Let’s think about equality. You talked a lot about equality, and I think that you’re at a slightly higher level than many of us here, because I think as soon as the word equality comes up, the immediate dichotomy that comes to many people’s minds is sort of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome, right, like do you want a society where everyone has the same amount of stuff, or do you want a society where everyone has the same opportunities to get stuff. And you don’t want either one of those, but maybe you could say a little bit about whether those are two sensible prevailing notions that we should be thinking in the back of our minds.

0:18:22.5 EA: Yeah, I’m not keen on either. Both of them have their flaws. It’s not that distributive justice is not important, I do think it is very important, but I want to embed it in a broader understanding of what egalitarianism is about, and in my view it’s about how we relate to each other. It’s about human relationships. So just a sort of a quick note, against a purely distributive understanding of equality, separate but equal. Suppose it had literally been the case that in the Jim Crow era, blacks really got exactly the same material goods that whites did. Nevertheless, the very fact of segregation, inherently an insult and a form of stigmatization of black people, because what it was doing was white people saying blacks are untouchable, they’re not fit for social engagement with white people. That’s what Jim Crow was saying.

0:19:27.2 EA: And so that’s why I think you can’t just look at distribution, you have to look at what the meanings of various practices are, and these relationships of stigmatization and exclusion and marginalization, right, these are the way people relate to each other, and that’s why I find that fundamental.

0:19:44.0 SC: It’s not just a distinction between economic goods and social goods, it goes a little bit deeper than that. Is that fair to say?

0:19:51.1 EA: Well, I would say that concerns about distributive justice are going to follow from the demands of relating to each other as equals, and in fact, they could be quite stringent demands, although they wouldn’t entail exact material… And the reason for that is that if you try to achieve exact material equality at all times, you’re going to have to have basically a totalitarian system. But but still, you can put parameters on how big the distance is between the top and the bottom, and those could be pretty stringent. You don’t want the inequalities to be so extreme that you have desperate people who are begging mercy from people who have all the wealth.

0:20:40.1 SC: I mean, maybe you don’t want that, but we have it, so maybe somebody wants it.

0:20:43.9 EA: Yes, in our plutocracy today, where Mark Zuckerberg decides what we’re going to see in our… What information we get, tight, that is a problem, I think.

0:20:56.6 SC: Well, good, but there is… I just want to sort of be very crude about it to start, because there is this cartoonish straw man that says, oh, you want equality, that means that you want just what you said, would be a totalitarian, terrible thing where literally everyone has the same amount of stuff, right, so just to get on the table, nobody’s really in favor of that, that’s not exactly what any equality theorist has in mind.

0:21:21.9 EA: Not today. I mean, back in the day, if you look at a famous French revolutionary, Gracchus Babeuf. He tried to overthrow the French directory, the ruling clique at the time. And he actually did advocate absolutely strict material equality, but his way to getting at it was a totalitarian communist state, where not only did everyone wear identical clothing, but they were all directed by these cadres and assigned to their jobs, and their thought was controlled. It’s a pretty repressive regime. And he understood that if you let people think for themselves, they’re not necessarily going to be thinking thoughts congenial to strict material equality.

0:22:17.4 EA: But I think that the difficulty here is that he’s pursuing material equality, but the only way he sees to achieve this is by some people dominating other people and ordering them what to think and what to do, and I’m thinking, well, that’s an inequality right there, an inequality of relationships where some people get to issue orders and other people just have to follow them. So he didn’t actually achieve equality in this broader, relational sense.

0:22:44.6 SC: And it does sound like that kind of system would be hard to sell in the modern era outside of maybe a tiny commune here or there, but this other idea of equality of opportunity might be considered popular, that’s an easier sell in our modern era. How can you argue against the idea that everyone should have equal opportunity. How can you argue against that, Elizabeth Anderson?

0:23:10.5 EA: Well, I’m not exactly going to argue against it so much as question some of its premises. So how do we even determine when opportunities are equal? And one formulation which is very popular in philosophy is take people of equal underlying potential, genetic potential, and structure opportunities in such a way that they have exactly equal chances of achieving, say, certain positions in society or gaining access to certain careers. I do have something of a problem with that because in its background, it assumes that we should all be happy with a natural aristocracy sort of promoting itself genetically through time. And I really don’t want to buy into that picture.

0:24:02.3 EA: So I do think it’s very important to have open opportunity, and by that, I mean many, many pathways, a choice of occupation, but we shouldn’t at all be confident that we have s to idea whatsoever how to measure inner merit or inner potential or inner merits or something like that. I don’t think we can, and education and society should be seen as the place where people develop capabilities, and we should be focused on developing everybody’s capabilities and cultivating multiple pathway success.

0:24:45.2 SC: So just as a non-expert, I want to make sure I understand the most charitable interpretation of the equality of opportunity position here. I mean, is the idea that, look, some people are going to be born better basketball players than others. That’s okay. The good basketball players, the taller and more athletic people, will become better basketball players, but as long as they get the same chance to try out, is that basically the sort of equality of opportunity idea?

0:25:15.1 EA: Well, you do want to make sure that children as they grow up have ample opportunities to develop their talents, whatever they might be, but you can’t say at birth, who’s going to be like the best basketball player. So much of that is a product of development and also of the cultivation of interests depending on who they’re around. So that’s why I say it’s very important to have open opportunity, but we can’t really define equality of our opportunity, at least not in the conventional sense, as relativized to some background, innate talent or something like that.

0:25:53.8 SC: And this is also sometimes called luck egalitarianism because it. Why is it called luck egalitarianism? I was never able to quite suss that out, is it we’re supposed to correct for being lucky and unlucky in the…

0:26:06.7 EA: Right, so the idea is that of luck egalitarianism is that people should have exactly equal opportunity and the only inequalities that arise should be things that they either deserve or are responsible for, but differences in luck, sheer luck, any inequalities arising from pure luck should…

0:26:30.5 SC: Okay. Does being born into a very wealthy family count as luck?

0:26:34.7 EA: Absolutely, it does, yes, from a luck egalitarian point of view. And I’m definitely not in favor of a self-reproducing plutocracy either, so I would share with a luck egalitarian an interest in not giving such advantages to people who have been supposedly well-born in this way. So I have a different way of understanding that, in that any society that creates a self-reproducing insulated elite going to be fundamentally unjust. It’ll be oppressive, and you’re going to have this elite that can’t even… Why do we even have an elite anyways, in the sense of people who are occupying positions of high responsibility and power? It’s because they’re supposed to be serving everybody else, but they can’t do that if they’re a self-segregated, self-perpetuating group.

0:27:36.6 SC: This does get into philosophical issues of another dimension, in some sense. I recently talked to Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist who traces all the reasons why you do what you do and behave the way you do and the capacities you have, and all of them can be given these reductionistic explanations in terms of biology and genetics and heritage, so does it even make… Is it even logically coherent to separate out, as a luck egalitarian would want us to do, the luck of our situation that we’re born into, but then say, let our natural capacities flourish as they will, if our natural capacities are also a matter of luck just as much?

0:28:17.3 EA: Yeah, I think in the end, the distinction that luck egalitarians draw between outcomes that are due to luck and outcomes that are due to our choices for which we’re responsible, that is a distinction that’s being asked to bear far too much weight.

0:28:31.9 SC: Right, okay, good. So the idea, it’s a free will question in some sense. Like at some point, the idea would be that we need to assign blame or responsibility to choices people make, and the anti-free will people would say, well, you can never do that, so that doesn’t help us very much. I’m not actually advocating any position here, I’m just trying to sort of understand all the burdens that the luck egalitarians are placing themselves under.

0:28:56.6 EA: I mean, I think that’s one question that could be asked, but I think there’s even a more fundamental question about justice and that has to do with the structure of opportunities. So think about it this way. Suppose you’re structuring an athletic competition and will award prizes at the end, okay. Now, should the first place winner gets twice as much money as the second place winner or a million times as much? Okay, that’s a question about how you structure the stakes in the competition, and that’s a question that arises prior to any question of who is more meritorious, who ran the fastest or whatever. You’ve already decided it, and it’s necessary, that society… That the infrastructure of opportunities is determined prior to and independently of any particular individual’s performance. You see what I mean?

0:29:54.7 EA: And so the question arises, how should you structure those opportunities and the rewards that are attached to different end play, and that’s completely independent of what people deserve. It exists prior to that. And that’s really where… That’s where I really think questions of justice and equality, they’re at the structural level, not at the level of individual performance or choice, that’s like a secondary consideration of who gets what in particular, but prior to that, you have to know what’s the structure of opportunities.

0:30:31.2 SC: Right, and your alternative is you call it democratic equality and it’s more focused on, just like what you just said, the social conditions and the relationships between people, putting equality on those terms, I guess.

0:30:45.4 EA: That’s right, and that’s going to affect the structure of opportunities. So here’s just another metaphor. You could think about inequality like a ladder, right? There are rungs on the ladder and there are top rungs and bottom rungs, and you can imagine different rungs are going to have different width, depending on how many people are going to be on that rung. You can imagine the whole distribution of opportunities along this ladder metaphor. And my point is that how you structure, say the distance between the top rung and the bottom rung, it’s going to be independent of anybody’s choice or merit, or how wide the rungs are going to be, or whether, say, if we look over time within the United States. Since the 1970s, the structure has been ripping out the middle rungs of the ladder and fattening the top and the bottom, but that makes it much more difficult for people at the bottom to ascend to the top because there’s no middle rungs to hang onto anymore. That seems pretty problematic.

0:31:52.3 SC: Well, but I have this question about the sort of boots on the ground implementation of your version of equality. If I’m just sort of a cold-blooded redistributionist, I can imagine sending out money to everybody, but you sort of have a more warm-hearted version of equality where we give people equal dignity, and I’m not quite sure how to implement that in practice as much.

0:32:18.6 EA: So dignity is one aspect of equality, but it’s not the whole thing, so one way to think about this is just in terms of social theory. So sociologists think in terms of three dimensions of equality or inequality, so you have relationships of domination and subordination, like who gets to order who around. And there has to be some something of that in the sense that, say, within any large organization, there’s going to be a hierarchy where managers are going to be setting some priorities and then telling subordinates what to do, right.

0:33:02.8 EA: And then you have hierarchies of honor and stigmatization, and that’s a second dimension, and then you have hierarchies of what I call standing, which has to do with how much your interests count in the deliberation of third parties, and especially the state. So you know, what people in Congress are deliberating about legislation, whose interests do they really have in mind and whose interests to they give weight to. An egalitarian says, we want equality on all three dimensions, not absolutely strict equality, but we’d like to flatten these hierarchies and make sure that they don’t interact in such a way that they’re… All three of them are all constantly aligned and rewarding the exact same people.

0:33:52.6 EA: Right, so if you think, say, of stigma and honor as one dimension, one useful egalitarian strategy is to proliferate a dimension of things that are admired, and that’s what you get in a pluralistic society. Different people value different things, and there’s nobody who’s a winner on all dimensions, who’s both the most beautiful and the smartest and the most athletic and the most pious. You have different communities that value different things, right? And that’s good.

0:34:31.4 SC: Good, good. That makes a lot of sense, and it does resonate with, especially this standing dimension, which maybe I have not really known about before, but that does resonate with complaints on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum with the current system where people just don’t feel like they do have a voice, people just don’t feel like their needs are being heard in Washington or in Brussels or wherever it is, and it leads to this kind of populist backlash in various manifestations and various different circumstances.

0:35:03.0 EA: Oh, you’re totally right about that. Populism is always a reaction to the feeling that one is not being effectively represented in the political system.

0:35:14.9 SC: But again, maybe you said this, maybe I missed it. How do we bring this about, what laws do we pass to make people more equal along all these dimensions at once?

0:35:26.8 EA: So there’s no simple formulas. Instead, what one has to do is examine particular ways in which problematic inequalities are manifesting, is drill down and figure out how is that working, and that requires some causal analysis. So in my book, The Imperative Of Integration, I’m looking in particular at racial inequality and specific inequality between blacks and whites, although I think it does generalize to a certain degree for other racial groups in the United States. And what I argue is that racial segregation, by which I mean the South’s segregation of white people, where they’re hoarding recording opportunities to themselves, is really a critical and central feature of all three dimensions of racial hierarchy.

0:36:27.4 EA: So you have the hoarding of economic opportunity, which generates inequality of standing, but then when blacks are put into much less advantageous, say, educational settings, neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, twice as much unemployment rates as white for as long as we’ve measured it, because there’s no job opportunities in the neighborhoods where they live, then people develop stereotypes about them, which hook into all rationales for slavery. Well, they must not be working hard, right?

0:37:11.7 SC: So there’s a feedback loop, yeah.

0:37:13.3 EA: And those stereotypes are stigmatizing, right, so then you get stigma, and also blacks have worse opportunities, and so they’re going to be at the bottom of the job hierarchy and taking orders from everybody else, and also politically too. And so all these things are interacting, but segregation really lies at the core. But if you look at other kinds of inequality in society, you might find other factors at work.

0:37:45.4 SC: And this brings us to this other dimension that you mentioned about the who gets to order who around, the domination and submission, because you’ve written this whole book about private government where you… Well, I’ll let you tell the story, but I guess the story begins with the idea of the free market and Adam Smith and his friends, and it changes from then?

0:38:06.5 EA: Yeah, so I’m trying to explain why it is that stories about the free market are so appealing, especially in American discourse, and this gets us back to the question of ideology and the social map we have of the American institutional landscape. And so we see in political discourse talk about markets all the time, but not really very much talk about the internal organization of firms or businesses where we work. And my argument is that this goes back to the original free market ideology at the founding of the American Republic, where the ideal put forth that was eagerly taken up by Americans was universal self-employment, everybody stakes out their own homestead or their farm, why do I have to answer to a boss at all, right, isn’t that kind of the ideal?

0:39:06.8 EA: And even today, if you ask Americans, what would be ideal, many of them say, I don’t want to have to answer to a boss, I want to be self-employed. And now that people are putting, holding out, being an Uber driver or a independent contractor…

0:39:21.7 SC: Side hustle, yeah.

0:39:22.5 EA: Or a gig worker, or maybe getting involved in some multi-level marketing scheme where they’re selling vitamins or something, because they’re chasing this dream of self-employment.

0:39:33.6 SC: Having a podcast…

0:39:34.7 EA: Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, or having your own YouTube channel.

0:39:39.0 SC: Yeah, there you go.

0:39:42.4 EA: And Americans have always chased the dream of self-employment, and in that picture, if everybody were self-employed and just working in their own capital, whatever it might be, like the Uber driver owns their own car, you can easily see that that could be a plausible picture of how we could also have a society, so a free society and a society of equals would be the same, because nobody… One individual cannot work a huge capital stock, an Uber driver cannot be personally driving a million cars, right. Only one car at a time. So everyone’s basically equal, roughly seen, and back in the day it was farming, but one person can’t farm that much without another, right, so you’d have broad equality, and we’d all be in competitive markets trading our goods and services, everybody perfectly competitive.

0:40:39.1 EA: And so you could see everybody would get, in economic theory, in a perfectly competitive market where everybody has pretty much equal capital, we’re all going to be facing each other as equals, nobody with monopoly power, nobody able to order anybody else around, everybody enjoying the dignity of self-employment and property ownership, and you’d have a society of equals. So that is sort of the seduction of the market ideology, and what I argue is historically Americans, in a way, we have a kind of massive cultural lag, in that we can continue to talk as if this market ideal that really was forged prior to the Civil War is still a realistic prospect, when in fact we live in a world, a very complex division of labor, where we’re working in these organizations called firms or sometimes non-profits like you and I, right, but still big organizations.

0:41:40.8 EA: And we’re not… In a way, academics are the most privileged of all employees, like our life is incredible because we’re granted so much autonomy…

0:41:52.0 SC: No argument, yeah.

0:41:52.2 EA: We get to think about whatever we like. But that’s of course extraordinarily rare, and even most other professionals don’t have that kind of incredible freedom. You know, a lawyer, they have clients and they just take cases, right. It’s a very rare and privileged lawyer who can just turn down cases ’cause they don’t want to work on those problems or they don’t find them interesting.

0:42:13.3 SC: I mean, if they did have their own shingle out there then they could, but you’re saying that most lawyers work for law firms and they’re told, take this case, right?

0:42:22.9 EA: Well, and they also just have to generate enough revenue so they can stay partners, not be ejected from the partnership. And so then that’s a world of bosses and employee, it’s a very different world from the free market world, because then you’re in a hierarchy and there are people who are giving you orders, and that’s a part that I think has been largely neglected in political discourse, what happens to these workers when the boss fires them because say they don’t like who your sexual partners are?

0:42:58.9 SC: Right, and the original… What we think of as the free marketeers, Adam Smith and maybe even Thomas Paine, is a name that comes up when I read your stuff. So the free market they conceptualized as free for these individual contractors, and also they were happy with something like a social safety net, they didn’t mind it if you had the equivalent of welfare or social security, that was not something they were against, which might be different than how we think about it in our current discourse.

0:43:28.5 EA: Oh, yeah, so Tom Paine was the first person to envisage how poverty be abolished with a universal social insurance system. And he actually costed out the universal social insurance system using numbers from the British Treasury and showed it was completely feasible to do this through… And funded through an inheritance tax.

0:43:57.6 SC: Does sound very current, these debates.

0:44:03.1 EA: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, Paine was a very forward-looking thinker, and Smith too. I’ve read Smith’s works, a lot of them, most of them, I would say, I haven’t plowed through all of his correspondence, but his major works. And he only said one thing against the Poor Laws, so England was the first country in Europe to recognize care for the poor as a state responsibility, well, a responsibility at least of local governments, but all the poor had to be taken care of. And Smith only had one criticism ever of the Poor Laws, and that was a aspect of the Poor Laws known as the Law of Settlement, which meant that if you needed help, welfare or support, you had to go back to the home town of your birth.

0:44:58.2 EA: And he said, that’s really stupid, because it inhibits labor mobility. If your job opportunity is somewhere else, you might be afraid to move there because you wouldn’t get any assistance if something goes bad in your life. And he did favor labor mobility, so people could take advantage of opportunities all over the country. And so he didn’t like the Law of Settlement, but otherwise he had nothing at all against the…

0:45:28.2 SC: And that actually leads right into one of the things that you bring up in your book, which is that there’s this myth or story around the modern free market, where if the worker is being exploited, they can quit and go somewhere else, but in fact, this freedom to exit your job and just get another job in reality is much less in the modern world that we might like to pretend it is.

0:45:52.1 EA: Yeah. So here’s something that I learned by looking at labor conditions. Tipped restaurant workers are subjected to extraordinarily high rates of sexual harassment, they’re so high that if you quit one restaurant and enter another restaurant, you’re just as likely to suffer sexual harassment, it’s so pervasive. So where is a server to go? It’s kind of like you’re in Eastern Europe. Imagine Eastern Europe had its own version of the EU and you had free migration behind the Iron Curtain back in the day when Eastern Europe was all communist. Okay, so you could go from Poland to Hungary, but it’s still communist, you’re not going to be more free. So freedom of movement doesn’t necessarily help you that much.

0:46:42.5 SC: And as you point out, we cede to our employers in the modern world an enormous amount of control over our lives. Maybe academics, like you say, are a little bit privileged here, but this is why the label private government makes sense, you’re analogizing the control that employers have over their workers’ lives to the control that we think should be the provenance of the government, but the firms actually are the ones who are wielding it.

0:47:08.8 EA: And in fact, yes, and the thing is, is that bosses, employers, have extraordinary powers that even the government doesn’t have. So for instance, during the pandemic, you saw a lot of doctors and nurses complaining that their hospitals were not supplying adequate personal protective equipment, and some of them were fired for saying this. The government’s not allowed to fire you because you’re complaining. In fact, under American labor law, you actually… Workers are supposed to have rights to free speech, to complain about bad working conditions, but in practice, those laws are not really enforced and are very difficult.

0:47:52.4 SC: Well, this does bring up the analogous question to before, how are we supposed to change this? I mean, if the Industrial Revolution flipped on its head the idea of the free market to go from freedom of the workers, more freedom of the firms to set prices and things like that, what kind of system or organization would give workers back something closer to that freedom of movement and choice and living their lives without their bosses telling them what they can tweet about?

0:48:21.0 EA: Yeah, so I do think that we could do several things. One thing is to draw sharper lines between workers’ off-duty lives and their on-duty lives. So it does make sense that there has to be some order-giving within the organization, just to make sure that the work gets done.

0:48:41.4 SC: Sure.

0:48:41.5 EA: And there is some degree of open-endedness to the tasks which you can be assigned. So if you’re, say, scooping out ice cream cones for customers at an ice cream shop, and a little kid accidentally spills the ice cream cone on the ground, on the floor, the boss has to be able to say, Mary, go clean that up, right, and that’s fine. And I don’t think anybody has a problem with that.

0:49:10.9 SC: It’s at work, sure.

0:49:12.9 EA: Unless it’s always Mary that’s getting picked on and it’s inequitable, right. You want to make sure there’s an equitable sharing of tasks, especially unpleasant tasks, but it doesn’t mean that the boss should be able to interfere with, say, Mary’s off-duty life, like who her sexual partners are, or her recreational activities or her lifestyle. It’s really none of the boss’s business how she leads her life off-duty. If she’s not performing on-duty, then you can raise some complaints, but off-duty, really, bosses shouldn’t have that power. Under American law, though, we have a system known as employment at will, which means that bosses can fire workers for any or no reason at all, with only a few exceptions carved out, mostly having to do with discrimination, you can’t fire some [0:50:04.7] ____ gender and so forth, right, but I think there should be stronger protections for workers’ off-duty lives.

0:50:13.9 SC: Okay, that actually does make sense. That’s a pretty… When you put it that way, who could object, maybe, other than the bosses, I guess.

0:50:23.1 EA: Well, the bosses… Some of the bosses would object, but part of it is, it just means that you move closer to an employment regime where the employer would actually have to show cause to fire somebody, ’cause you always wonder, is it that they don’t like who I voted for or which candidate I…

0:50:45.4 SC: You could see why the bosses would be against that, and probably given our previous conversation, those bosses have a lot more say amongst the legislators than the workers do.

0:50:54.3 EA: To be sure. And that was something even Adam Smith noted in his day, that the legislators are always listening to what he called the masters, that is the employers.

0:51:05.8 SC: Okay, very good. That brings up the fact that part of this ideology that we have in the Western world, in the United States and elsewhere, is the idea of the work ethic, the idea that it is somehow good and valorous for a human being to want to work really, really hard. And you could clearly see why this might be something that the boss class would encourage, but I like how you dug back into it way back to the beginning of the Reformation, I suppose.

0:51:37.1 EA: That’s right, yes. So I dug back into the original texts, the founding texts of the work ethic, which was an ethic that was invented by Puritan ministers in England in the middle of the 17th century. And what I found was that there’s really two work ethics that were already there in the mid-17th century and held by the same people, that is, they actually had kind of contradictory views about work. So one view, remember these puritans, they’re all advocates of a kind of ascetic morality, of self-denial, not too much indulgence out there because that’s the way of sin, and from that perspective, they saw work as a kind of ascetic discipline. If your nose is to the grindstone then your mind will not wander off to sinful thoughts of lust and so forth.

0:52:35.8 EA: And they also thought that if you work like crazy, that would be your best evidence that you’re saved, and if you slack off, that’s a sign that you really don’t have faith in God, so you’ll be damned forever, and that would also make people, out of anxiety for their future in the next life, they would work really hard. So those ideas tend to incline to a view of work that capitalists can easily exploit.

0:53:06.9 SC: Very little surprise, yes, that’s right.

0:53:07.2 EA: But all these anxious workers, right, desperate for salvation, nose to the grindstone, but there’s another vision of work that these Puritan ministers had, which was that work is sanctified, because when you work, you are performing God’s will. And what is God’s will for humans, that we all work, promote the welfare of our fellow human, all of them without exception, everyone counts. And so, work becomes sacred and honored, and they stress that even the most menial worker who was doing socially necessary be honored and respected and treated decently and paid decently and afforded safe working conditions, and treated with dignity and respect. And both of those ideas over time get developed into two very different work ethics. One that rationalizes the subjection of workers, relentless labor at very low wages, but another that exalts workers and say, hey, you know, we’re the ones who are holding up society, we’re the ones who are taking care of people and doing all the work. We should get rewarded for that. It shouldn’t just be the lazy landlords who are collecting the rents.

0:54:27.0 SC: I have to ask, because maybe I’m just so embedded in the American culture or whatever, but did people not have an ethic to work before the Protestant Reformation? Was this something that would have been unheard of? I would think that some people just felt that dignity, whether or not their theological betters told them to.

0:54:48.7 EA: Let me illustrate this difference. I do think that the work ethic represents a major revaluation of values. The valorization of work really was a new thing in the mid-17th century, because before then people valued leisure, and that is the leisure of the independently wealthy. So before then, the dominating value system was that of the landlords, the aristocracy, the best life is the life where you don’t have to work.

0:55:20.7 SC: You want to be the idle rich. That’s your goal.

0:55:23.5 EA: Correct, yes, and have other people work for you. And the Puritans turn that around. Their favorite metaphor was of a bees’… Society, bees have their own society, and you have the worker bees who are doing all the work and making all the honey, and then you have the queen, and then you have the drones, those drones in the nest, those were the idle landlords, because what are they doing? They’re doing, they’re not doing any work and just having sex with the queen. And the Puritans said they should be cast out of the nest.

0:56:01.5 SC: Yeah, got it. Very, very good. It’s interesting because there’s this parallel, I guess, and I’m sure it’s intentional, or at least it’s explicable, between the two notions of the free market and the two notions of the work ethic, right. There’s sort of a worker-centered version of each and a boss-centered version of each.

0:56:19.6 EA: Exactly, right, yes. And so Paine, Tom Paine, who wanted everybody to be self-employed, he’s part of what I call the pro-worker work ethic, this is a way to uplift workers. Now they can have freedom and equality if everybody gets to work their own capital and has social insurance, so that if they… Some accident and disabled they’ll survive.

0:56:44.2 SC: And then goes… Yeah, so that goes hand-in-hand with some kind of social safety net, but then it goes right into modern arguments about should we give social benefits to people who aren’t working, so we just give welfare versus work there, I suppose. Are we removing the dignity of work by making it possible to live and survive without necessarily doing your job?

0:57:08.7 EA: Well, so I just want to insert a feminist observation here.

0:57:13.2 SC: Please.

0:57:14.4 EA: And that is that this obsession that people on welfare benefits have to work is downgrading the value of women’s dependent care, labor, taking care of children and ill people within their household. And in fact, if you look at the history of welfare in the United States, before the welfare reform under President Clinton in 1990, and you look at the labor force participation of very poor women, what you find is, is that they were in and out of the workforce, that is the waged labor force, and a lot of that was because they’re taking care of children or ill and disabled people within their family, and so they couldn’t devote full-time to work because they had dependent care responsibility.

0:58:05.5 EA: Now, if you look back at the original work ethic that the Puritans came up with, they recognized that dependent care work is socially necessary, children, they need to be cared for. And so this obsession that poor women had to be working for wages grossly under-values the importance of dependent care work within the family.

0:58:30.3 SC: This is all evidence for the point of view that moral and ethical philosophy should be not focused on finding the perfect answer, but responsive to the moment, ’cause what we’re seeing over and over again here is some kind of values are promulgated and absorbed and recognized, but then the system changes and the words that we attach to the values don’t, and so the outcomes become very different. I don’t know if it was just the Industrial Revolution or things much, much later that cause some of the problems you’re talking about, you mentioned in the ’70s, we saw this divergence between wages and productivity, for example, so the 1970s, not the 1870s or the 1770s. So something is still changing now that separates out the work we do from the… What we earn from it, right?

0:59:23.8 EA: Yeah, so in fact, there’s a remarkable parallel between the 19th century and recent history from the mid-70s on. So if you look at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, there was a period in basically the first half of the Industrial Revolution until right through the mid-19th century, where GDP per capita was just growing very, very quickly, but wages were stagnant. Workers were working harder than ever, but they weren’t getting any of the gains. Then around mid-century you enter a period of wage gains, a lot of that propelled by worker mobilization, both for democracy, get a more responsive government because you have a wider franchise, and also labor organization.

1:00:16.9 EA: There’s a lot of agitation of workers for benefits, and it worked, right, democracy works.

1:00:25.1 SC: Sometimes.

1:00:27.9 EA: Democracy, both in the sense of electoral democracy, but also worker organization, getting out on the streets and so forth and protesting, social movements were… And what we find is, starting around the mid-1970s, a similar divergence took place where GDP per capita is galloping ahead, that is labor productivity is galloping ahead, but workers’ wages stagnate. And we’re still in that era now. Well, no wonder a lot of people are really angry, especially working class people.

1:01:00.5 EA: Now, contemporary populism, and I do think has a misapprehension of causes, right, and so a lot of working class white people think that what’s getting them down is all those immigrants, and it’s actually not true, but of course, you can’t necessarily blame them in the following sense. I mean, it actually takes a lot of social scientific research to find out social causes, you can’t just look out there and see causes. Well, you know that as a physicist.

1:01:34.4 SC: I do.

1:01:34.4 EA: It takes a lot of hard data-crunching to figure out what’s going on, but I’m not blaming them for not knowing, because they’ve been told some bad stories about social causes and what are the causes of their distress. But their distress is real.

1:01:54.7 SC: I do want to get on the table. To be fair, you make one point which I thought was very interesting, and it’s sort of obvious in retrospect, that to the bosses’ credit, there’s not as many idle rich around anymore as there were. It’s not just the workers who are working really hard, but the CEOs these days tend to work really, really hard. Is this is just…

1:02:15.4 EA: It’s unbelievable how many hours they put into their labor, so you might have noticed Elon Musk, when he was called up by some journalist, who announced to him, which he wasn’t tracking, that he was now the richest man in the world, at least for a little bit. And he says, oh, how strange. Well, back to work. But I do have to say that while it is true that the richest people are working like crazy in the sense that they’re working very hard to make a lot of money, it doesn’t follow from that that they’re working in the original work ethic Puritan sense, where work means actually promoting the welfare of your fellow human beings, right?

1:03:03.0 EA: So if you look, say, at Big Pharma pushing all the OxyContin and other opioids on Americans and turning millions of Americans into addicts, yeah, they were really, really busy selling these drugs.

1:03:17.9 SC: They put in a lot of hours, yeah.

1:03:20.8 EA: Super busy, but this is not productive labor, it’s very awful, horrible labor. And so I think we have to question in many cases, not all cases, but in many cases, how this money is…

1:03:33.4 SC: The other thing that you highlight is David Graeber’s point about the bullshit jobs, which… Let’s try to get this exactly right, because a bullshit job is not just a bad job, it’s not cleaning toilets or whatever, because those obviously have good impacts, we want the toilets to be clean…

1:03:50.6 EA: They’re socially necessary labor.

1:03:52.8 SC: That’s right, right. But so the bullshit jobs…

1:03:54.6 EA: The toilets must be cleaned.

1:04:00.9 SC: But what makes a job bullshitty is that it doesn’t really do any good for society. You might not even be a CEO, there’s plenty of middle management that is not doing any good for society either.

1:04:08.5 EA: That is correct. And so David Graeber, who unfortunately died, but he wrote this fun book called Bullshit Jobs, in which he defined a bullshit job as a job that is so pointless or pernicious that even the person doing the job can’t feel that it’s justified, although they have to pretend that it is. And so I actually taught a course a couple of years ago on work, ethical issues and political issues surrounding work, in which we took a look at David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs, and in that book, Graeber estimated that 40% of jobs in rich capitalist economies are bullshit jobs. And so I decided I would just… Before we entered into a discussion in the book, I would just take a poll of my students, how many of you have worked at a bullshit job. And believe it or not, 40% of them raised their hands.

1:05:10.2 SC: It must be true.

1:05:11.8 EA: And so, I wanted examples, like, what made it a bullshit job. And here’s my favorite example of a bullshit job. A student was working at this firm, and he had to write reports about the performance of the firm or whatever, that he had to upload to a site that was accessible to all the other workers in the firm, and the site let you see how often the report was downloaded, and his report got zero downloads and he realized that his job was to write reports that nobody read. Yeah, that’s a bullshit job.

1:05:47.8 SC: Can’t argue with that one, yeah. And it’s an important thing because, exactly because of this idea that the work ethic was originally tied into, or at least in some formulations of it, the idea that you were doing work for some good purpose, for something meaningful, it wasn’t just to earn a wage, it’s not just that I work hard and I provide, it’s I work hard and I provide to society as well, right?

1:06:17.0 EA: Correct. And what is a meaning fundamentally, it has to be something that’s helping other people and not yourself.

1:06:24.3 SC: Yeah. Is this… Why is it like this? Is it an inevitable thing that happens when society becomes big and complicated and bloated and bureaucratic, or is it a matter of ideology where we just talked ourselves into it? Should we have seen this coming?

1:06:45.9 EA: You know, I think we’ve talked ourselves into a lot of things, and in a way, I do see this as a manifestation of this negative work ethic that treats workers very harshly and this internalized sense that so many Americans have that, well, I gotta be working all the time, like a lot. And that’s a a very American attitude. If you’ve go to Europe… First of all, one thing that’s very strange, and I think Americans don’t appreciate, is that we’re the only rich country in the world that does not by law guarantee paid vacations to everybody. You go to Denmark and everybody gets five weeks of paid vacation, and then a whole bunch of paid holidays on top of that, it’s almost unimaginable, right?

1:07:37.2 SC: Crazy talk, right, yeah, it’s difficult.

1:07:39.1 EA: And in France, you know, practically everyone takes all of August off and they’re paid, whereas in America, only about half of workers get paid vacation through the employment contract, right. And the other half don’t get any paid vacation, and even if you look at those who are entitled to paid vacation, most American workers do not take all of the vacations they’re entitled.

1:08:06.2 SC: Even the ones doing bullshit jobs?

1:08:07.3 EA: Yeah, even doing bullshit jobs, yes. So I do think Americans could work less. It would be good for us.

1:08:18.3 SC: Good, and so that is maybe not so much a structural thing as an ideological thing, we’ve sort of let ourselves be talked into the fact that there is virtue in working hard and not vacationing, whatever it is the job might be.

1:08:35.2 EA: Well, but I also think that there’s a lot of fear of getting fired if we’re not…

1:08:39.4 SC: Yeah. Okay, right.

1:08:40.8 EA: Being visibly in front of our bosses.

1:08:43.8 SC: So how do we make the world a better place? I know that there’s been increasing talk about universal basic income, things like that, and I know that there’s been pushback against that, both on practical grounds, but also on surprisingly moral grounds or ethical grounds, the idea that it would remove the dignity of work, that if you’re not working, if you’re just enjoying your life, you’re less fulfilled as a person. Is that something we can talk ourselves out of, maybe?

1:09:13.8 EA: Well, I don’t… Look, I do think it’s very meaningful to contribute to the welfare of others, and wage labor is one place but not the only place to be doing that. There’s also dependent care labor within the family, but often, if you want to make a bigger impact, it’s helpful to be part of an organization that extends… That has impacts beyond the family, and there could be something that’s very fulfilling about that and very meaningful. So I’m all in favor of non-bullshit jobs, like jobs that actually help people. And I think the vast majority of people do find that meaningful. So I don’t think we’re going to be at a loss for motivation to work, even if people also at the same time get a lot of free stuff, but I don’t necessarily think that a universal basic income is the best way to package benefits. I think that requires a lot… A deep dive and looking into the details of different ways of packaging.

1:10:19.4 SC: So when you say that, it’s not that you’re necessarily against it, it’s just that this is a complicated empirical social question and we don’t know the answer yet.

1:10:26.2 EA: The devil’s in the details. There are so many different ways to package a universal basic income. We really have to see the proposal spelled out in detail and then compare it to other proposals.

1:10:38.1 SC: But you do make a point that maybe the state that the world is in is one where we’re not ready to aim for a leisure society just yet because… You didn’t put it in these words. So let me put words in your mouth and you can correct me. There’s too much work to be done, like saving the planet.

1:10:55.5 EA: I agree, yeah. I do think that that’s right. I don’t think we’re quite ready for it. Look, I mean, we’re facing global climate change at catastrophic levels, we have to roll up our sleeves to get to work on that problem. There’s plenty of work to be done, socially necessary, socially urgent work that we have to do.

1:11:17.6 SC: Yeah, there’s plenty of places in the world that don’t have good infrastructure in healthcare and things like that, I mean, there’s more than enough…

1:11:23.0 EA: Well, look, even American infrastructure is falling to pieces without adequate investment.

1:11:25.8 SC: It’s not good. I’m probably just going to… I’ve already asked this and just going to be repeating myself, but from a different angle, since you just brought up the fact that infrastructure is failing, I mean, is it that we’re entering a society, the bread and circuses stages of our advanced democracy, or have we just sort of lost our edge a little bit and…

1:11:51.5 EA: You know, I really do worry, yeah, that we’re past peak America.

1:11:55.2 SC: Right, but we’re not willing to do the work, to make the sacrifice.

1:12:00.2 EA: I do find it worrying.

1:12:03.6 SC: Any advice for making the world a better place, what is your practical… I know you’re a philosopher, that’s okay, but you’re much more practical than most of the philosophers I talk to. Just had a discussion about the philosophy of math, it was very, very different than this one. What should we be doing to make the world a better place for work and dignity and equality and things like that?

1:12:21.5 EA: I think we have to work at improving democracy, and that requires communication with our fellow [1:12:33.2] ____. I think the quality of public [1:12:35.8] ____, of political [1:12:36.8] ____, is really, really bad. There’s a lot of insults, trolling, mass shaming, it’s very unhealthy and toxic, there are better ways that we have to communicate with each other, and it’s only that that will enable us to pull together, cooperate and solve the problem of climate change, the biggest one.

1:12:55.0 SC: And if I put on my free marketeer hat a little bit for the moment, what I would respond is, but what is the incentive structure that would lead to better communication and better political outcomes? I mean, right now, we have a system where you get a lot of clicks and you get a lot of views from saying outrageous things, right? That sounds like a hard thing to change structurally.

1:13:19.5 EA: Well, you know, I think the social media companies bear a lot of responsibility for this. There was a study that was reported on the New York Times about how people are on social media like Facebook, and they’re getting almost no clicks because they’re just posting on innocuous… And then they happen to post on QAnon or some crazy thing, and they don’t even necessarily believe, but suddenly they have thousands of followers, and that’s very seductive, so they post more and more extreme views and pretty soon they’re talking about lizard people, and then suddenly they have hundreds of thousands of followers and they’re making a lot of money. I think this is a very perverse incentive structure, and similarly for people who go around trolling and insulting and [1:14:04.9] ____ people. I do think social media companies are not behaving well, and the algorithms appear to be structured to reward the worst possible behavior.

1:14:18.7 SC: So this might be a case where the case could be made for reining in the free market a little bit because we need companies… Again, I’m putting words in your mouth, correct me if I’m wrong. Companies like Facebook, Google, Apple or whatever have so much power and influence, and they got it so quickly in an almost unanticipated way that we need to… There’s at least an argument to be made for giving them incentives other than just maximizing the number of clicks to make them more responsible social actors.

1:14:49.4 EA: Yeah, and so here’s where we can come back to the issue of empowering workers within the workplace. So just getting back to that, what we do find is a lot of these companies have very socially conscious engineers, software engineers, often they don’t really like what their bosses are doing. And there’s been a lot of pushback within the tech companies on this, and I do think that introducing co-determination at the big corporations, that is where workers have a say in management, could be one way to make these companies more socially responsible. And this gets back also to the issue of meaningful work. Yes, there are some people who all they want to do make tons of money, they don’t care how socially destructive they are, but most people aren’t so keen on that, they have an ethical core, they want to be doing meaningful work and not just work that makes a ton of money, even though it’s spreading social toxicity.

1:15:54.7 EA: So most people, if you empower them within the firm, they can move it in better direction. So I do think in this case, worker empowerment will probably be one way to solve the problem, because I don’t necessarily think that the government, that is the state, I don’t want them necessarily to be imposing regulations, that has dangers of its own.

1:16:17.2 SC: There are problems there, that’s right, yes.

1:16:19.2 EA: But there are other ways to empower other forces to create better tech companies.

1:16:26.2 SC: That is good. I like if possible to end each podcast on an optimistic message, and I think we finally got there, there’s a lot of pessimistic messages we had to get through to get there. But Elizabeth Anderson, thanks so much for being on The Mindscape Podcast.

1:16:38.9 EA: It’s a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

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