"Get a job".
That was a tagline on Twitter the other day.
Interestingly, people of all stripes had very similar reactions.
Even to the point of mirth.
Back in the primary campaign the idea of a Universal Basic Income was floated, principally by Andrew Yang. While, as some (i.e., me) have noted, the concept has been tried under other names, nobody seemed to notice that or the lesson that it provides.
Basically, that lesson is that most work isn't fun, and given a chance not to work, most people won't work. The Pandemic assistance funds, which suspended rent evictions and provided income for those forced out of work proved to be a giant experiment on this very topic. And we're finding that a lot of people, and frankly they can't be blamed, would rather not go back to work.
And why would they?
Indeed, this amounts to a giant societal experiment that frankly is shocking employers and "elites". The naive assumption of liberal elites is that everyone wants to work a job in the city that has "value" and contributes to their sense of well-being. The naive assumption of employers has been that all workers see value in their work and work because they want to work. There's always been a back current here and there which has been put different ways in different eras, but which basically has held that there's some people who don't work because they're lazy, but that's very few people.
In the meantime, before the Pandemic, some well regarded national surveys discovered that in the US the vast majority of people are dissatisfied with their work, as in they don't like it.
And that's because we're not designed to work the way we do, and no computer company ran by 30-year-olds with employee this or that is capable of changing that.
Basically, we're meant to have our own. Our own heard of cattle, really, but if not that, our own farms, or failing that, our own businesses. From these, we'd provide for our own, that being our own families.
That's in our DNA.
Working for Amalgamated Amalgamated is not.
Now, we've built this industrialized society and it has brought us, as capitalists will tell us, vast, vast, wealth. There's no disputing that. The wolf is further from our door than ever before. Capitalist believe that we should be, accordingly, really happy.
But societally, it doesn't seem we are.
Socialist use to blame that on the oppression of the propertied class until Socialism simply meant the oppression of the hierocratic class followed by economic stagnation, which nobody liked. And it never got the point either. If Capitalism has come to mean that everyone should work behind a computer screen in a cubicle at Amalgamated Amalgamated, Socialism envisioned everyone as either a functionary or a lathe operator.
Nobody ever imagines, for example, somebody owning a small grocery store for some reason.
And we're still not doing that.
Indeed, what this entire episode would do, to a thinking society, is to pose the question, why don't people want to go back to work? The answer wouldn't be hard to find.
And then society would do something about it.
Of course, doing something about it, in the state of society we're in, would be extremely difficult, and that's part of the problem. Right now, people need to go back to work, whatever that work is, or everything will completely collapse.
But they don't have to like it.
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