The Prevalence of Loneliness

This, from an article in the New Republic, is an indicator that things are not going well in society. How truly amazing and sad.

... even among the not-so-old, loneliness is pervasive. In a survey published by the AARP in 2010, slightly more than one out of three adults 45 and over reported being chronically lonely (meaning they’ve been lonely for a long time). A decade earlier, only one out of five said that. With baby-boomers reaching retirement age at a rate of 10,000 a day, the number of lonely Americans will surely spike.

I've talked before how we overlook the importance of connection and the experience of the texture of daily lived life, as if we need a "gross national loneliness" to set against GDP.

 

Work is a human right

A great essay by Walter Russell Mead, here. I disagree with his confidence about personal services sometimes, but this is good stuff, worth reading in full.

There is a horrible snobbery lurking beneath the idea that most people will not be able to find meaningful work when the age of scarcity ends. Once the working classes aren’t needed to dig coal anymore, in this view, there is nothing to be done for the mass of mankind than to sit them in front of the TV on a comfy couch with a big bag of chips. They are good for nothing else.

This is a premise which any serious theist or humanist must reject. If we believe that every human being has a unique real worth, we must also believe that every human being has a contribution to make. Keynes rather snidely remarks that few people have the talent to live creative lives; writing about the difficulty many will have adjusting to lives without toil he warns of the intense boredom that most will suffer. “Yet it will only be for those who have to do with the singing that life will be tolerable and how few of us can sing!”

Actually, a good many more of us can sing than Keynes thought; it’s just that life in the coal mines and the factories means that many people haven’t had the same chances to develop their talents that a son of privilege like Keynes did.

 

Morality unhinged from Wisdom

Walter Russell Mead writes about the situation in Syria, as Samantha Power, who urged humanitarian interventions, leaves the Obama Administration:

As a general rule, sad to say, the good guys and the smart guys often play on different teams. For too many foreign policy humanitarians, it is more important to have good intentions than to understand the crooked and wicked ways of the world you want to change. This instinct for the ideal over the real was a hallmark of humanitarian policy failures all during the 20th century and on the evidence to date the deadly mixture of political amateurism with ambitious humanitarian international agendas has persisted into the 21st. America’s university campuses are packed with people who believe that the flaws in our foreign policy are failures of morality rather than failures of forethought and execution, but morality unhinged from wisdom is one of the most destructive forces known to man.

 

The end of entitlement

Robert Samuelson writes that the public is going through a downshift in expectations that is having deeper political consequences.

Weighed down by these contradictions, entitlement has been slowly crumbling for decades. The Great Recession merely applied the decisive blow. We're not entitled to many things: not to a dynamic economy; not to secure jobs; not to homeownership; not to ever-more protective government; not to fixed tax burdens; not to a college education. Sooner or later, the programs called "entitlements," including Social Security, will be trimmed because they're expensive and some recipients are less deserving than others.

The collision between present realities and past expectations helps explain the public's extraordinary moodiness. The pandering to the middle class by both parties (and much of the media) represents one crude attempt to muffle the disappointment, a false reassurance that the pleasing past can be reclaimed. It can't.

I don't think this is true. We still have the paradox that we have more productive capacity and underlying abundance than ever before. The problem is we have less and less clarity on how to distribute it, or what we value, or what incentives are or ought to be.

What it does mean is we need a deeper rethink of economic institutions to cope with a world in which many of the things we value most are not easily traded. Government cannot deliver what people want if we have no shared vision of what people ought to want, in their own different ways. Instead, our general discourse on rights and universal rules tends to evade the question.

"..some recipients are less deserving than others" says Samuelson. That is the heart of the problem. It is a matter of ethics, not economics. The left wants universal (unearned) rights. The right wants a changing mix of pure market allocation and tradition.

People are just not that motivated by money alone

Here's an interesting blog post on the Harvard Business Review site on how money and motivation are related: they're not.

The results indicate that the association between salary and job satisfaction is very weak. The reported correlation (r = .14) indicates that there is less than 2% overlap between pay and job satisfaction levels. Furthermore, the correlation between pay and pay satisfaction was only marginally higher (r = .22 or 4.8% overlap), indicating that people's satisfaction with their salary is mostly independent of their actual salary.

In addition, a cross-cultural comparison revealed that the relationship of pay with both job and pay satisfaction is pretty much the same everywhere (for example, there are no significant differences between the U.S., India, Australia, Britain, and Taiwan).

It puts a little more solid evidence around the argument that is made in books like Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

 

Wittgenstein against scientism

This is a very good article in the NYT about Wittgenstein. It is not surprising he is not popular in current philosophy departments, the author, a Professor at NYU says, as Wittgenstein is so skeptical of standard philosophy. The article summarizes Witgenstein's position:

Philosophical problems typically arise from the clash between the inevitably idiosyncratic features of special-purpose concepts —true, good, object, person, now, necessary — and the scientistically driven insistence upon uniformity. Moreover, the various kinds of theoretical move designed to resolve such conflicts (forms of skepticism, revisionism, mysterianism and conservative systematization) are not only irrational, but unmotivated.The paradoxes to which they respond should instead be resolved merely by coming to appreciate the mistakes of perverse overgeneralization from which they arose. And the fundamental source of this irrationality is scientism.

The dream of social physics dies hard. Economics, even more than philosophy, has suffered from an overtemptation towards generalized parsimonious models.

As Wittgenstein put it in the “The Blue Book”:

"Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive."

And so therefore the purpose of philosophy is not explanation but therapeutic.

traditional philosophy is necessarily pervaded with oversimplification; analogies are unreasonably inflated; exceptions to simple regularities are wrongly dismissed.

— Therefore — the fourth claim — a decent approach to the subject must avoid theory-construction and instead be merely “therapeutic,” confined to exposing the irrational assumptions on which theory-oriented investigations are based and the irrational conclusions to which they lead.

Labor and Social Links

I've been working intensively on another project in the last few weeks, so blogging has been lighter here. There's a build-up of things I want to blog about and say.

I just wanted to note this column by Ross Douhat in the NYT about the decline of work, however. The transformation of work is a major theme on this blog.

If the utopia of a world without work is being achieved, Douhat says, it isn't because the upper classes can afford it and it will gradually spread down to laborers and high school dropouts. It's happening from the bottom up.

Yet the decline of work isn’t actually some wild Marxist scenario. It’s a basic reality of 21st-century American life, one that predates the financial crash and promises to continue apace even as normal economic growth returns. This decline isn’t unemployment in the usual sense, where people look for work and can’t find it. It’s a kind of post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job. So instead of spreading from the top down, leisure time — wanted or unwanted — is expanding from the bottom up. Long hours are increasingly the province of the rich.

The problem with this, he says, isn't so much income or survival. People are not starving. It's lack of social integration. It's part of the wider trend of the decline of community and social links.

One could make the case that the right to not have a boss is actually the hardest won of modern freedoms: should it really trouble us if more people in a rich society end up exercising it?

The answer is yes — but mostly because the decline of work carries social costs as well as an economic price tag. Even a grinding job tends to be an important source of social capital, providing everyday structure for people who live alone, a place to meet friends and kindle romances for people who lack other forms of community, a path away from crime and prison for young men, an example to children and a source of self-respect for parents.

It's a problem of flourishing.

In a sense, the old utopians were prescient: we’ve gained a world where steady work is less necessary to human survival than ever before.

But human flourishing is another matter. And it’s our fulfillment, rather than the satisfaction of our appetites, that’s threatened by the slow decline of work.

This is an interesting take. And of course I agree that the prime question is how our institutions contribute to human flourishing, so he is going in the right direction.

But he doesn't go far enough, perhaps. There is a difference between the labor market, which is going to keep getting more productive, and a sense of vocation.

What is clearly at issue is motivation and purpose, and how you retain and encourage and cultivate them when the economy is changing. Our civil discourse has become very bad at providing that, as I've often argued , such as here.