 So, welcome everybody. Thanks for coming. I'm Christy Barron, the Executive Director of the Center on Financial Policy. Welcome to a one-for-one lunch talk. And if you haven't already, please do sign in on the way in. First, before we approach your speaker, I want to do a big pitch. The Center on Financial Policy has a few requests coming up. The one that you can register for right now is our global systemic risk conference. It's in Washington, D.C. It will be in the Treasury Building, the cash groups specifically. The spell is just like you might think. C-A-S-H. Pretty fancy. The conference is free. Regrettably, I'm not going to whip out my credit card to get you to D.C. But if you are able to come, then I hope you will. We have L.K. Coney, who is from the Single Resolution Board, and Jillian Tett from the Financial Times. So, you can have speakers. And the practice is maybe about 28 other speakers, or this could be four. Also, some of the leaders from academia, from state tanks, from financial regulators, and other policy makers and so on. We put a bunch of people together in a room. We don't all have a reason to talk and try to produce some people conversations that are perhaps helpful to, you know, having the next kind of crisis. So, that's one thing. I also want to, I also want to know here on campus, Jim 11th and 12th, the summer is going to be co-hosting an event with the Planning Foundation. Former President Bill Clinton will be here for that. That is likely going to be over the Ross School. So, the Ross School is going to be responsible for that. We're talking about public policy. So, if you want to hang out with Bill Clinton, so that any of the students will be off making wheelbarrows with monies, which you can later donate it to the Center on Finance and Law and Policy, or otherwise doing dooter kind of jobs. But you might want to be sick that day to come to our conference. So, that's probably June 12th. And that's what we do in the workplace. So, as part of our ongoing programming, we have, this is our monthly lunch talk. And what I love about Professor Elizabeth Anderson is that she is one of the most unassuming people ever. And she's in my heart for James. And so, one of the beautiful things about the University of Michigan is that every sidewalk takes you directly to a top town school. And we have this ridiculous surplus super talented people who study things in an interdisciplinary way. So, Professor Anderson takes on all psychology, ethics, local philosophy, feminist theory. She has recently published this really great book called Private Government and How the Coopers Will Alive. I'm glad we don't talk about it. And so, for law students, many of you have spent a lot of time thinking about where the government intrudes under life. Professor Anderson might thank you very, very much. So, we're delighted to have you here today. And so, we are going to wrap up finally at one o'clock. And with that, I will take you away. It's really great to be able to address you today. This is a small piece of a very big project I'm working on, which is on the history of the Protestant work ethic from the mid 17th century when it originated all the way to the present. And I'm doing a run through the major figures of political economy, including Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Malthus. And what I've been discovering is that if you read these figures from the perspective of the work ethic, you find that all of them are positively dripping with work ethic values, which I don't think has been clearly recognized. But furthermore, we can trace the influence of the work ethic all the way to the present, look for instance at configurations of contemporary welfare policies in the United States, and find work ethic assumptions absolutely pervading practically everything we do. And consequently, I think it's high time that we go back to the 17th century and sort it out because we're still living under the influence of these ideas. Let's start off with the classic exposition of the Protestant work ethic by Max Weber in 1920. He wrote this great work called The Protestant Ethic in the Spirit of Capitalism. And in this work, he was very, very critical of the work ethic, which is kind of interesting because Max Weber himself was famous for advocating for so-called value-free or value-neutral social science, but he let him have it in this work. He argued that the work ethic simply rationalized the capitalist exploitation of workers' willingness to work. It gave workers a kind of theological view of things that made them sense that they had a duty to give their all to their employer, and the employers just exploited that. So the maximizing profits, this hollow goal that wasn't worth people's absolute dedication thing is putting us all into an iron cage. At least the Puritans had theological reasons for working so hard, but we've left those reasons behind. It were totally secularized. So we complained that the Puritans wanted to work in a calling, but we are forced to do so by market forces. So for us, the work ethic has turned into a prison. We really need to go back to the beginnings of the work ethic. It's basically a 17th century Puritan doctrine. I'll make reference here to what I think is the greatest theologian of the work ethic, Richard Baxter, an incredibly interesting Puritan theologian. What he originally required of us. This is what he thought that every Christian was required to do. Each of us must engage in disciplined work in a calling that is God has called us to a specialized occupation or worldly effort, and we have to dedicate ourselves to that. We're not allowed to waste any time. The Puritans are famously impatient. They're not supposed to be idle. As Baxter said, work, rest must follow labor, right? You're only allowed to rest after you've exhausted yourself from work. You're not allowed to waste any material goods. God has given the whole earth and all of its natural resources for us to use to improve human welfare. So you're not allowed to waste any of this stuff. Our job on earth is to execute God's will. God wants us to help each other and promote human welfare. So don't waste anything. Don't trash the earth. We also shouldn't indulge in worldly pleasures or any kind of vanities. That's just covetousness. It's a sin. And we shouldn't even want more than is strictly needed to do our duty. Now, he acknowledged that if you're a fancy sort of person with a fancy occupation, like ambassador, that maybe you will need more to do your duty. You might need finer clothing and a fancy mansion to entertain people. So he allowed that you could have some inequality, but he worried that the great ambassador who's doing all these fancy things risked his soul because you could go overboard into vanity and then your soul would be lost. At the same time, though, Baxter also argued that every man has a duty to frugally get it and save it as much as he can. So there's the heart of the idea of profit maximization right there. Now, you wonder what on earth someone would do with all that money if they're not allowed to spend it on themselves. And this is before the era of where we could imagine just endless economic growth. So he didn't have a concept that you just constantly reinvest all that savings into your business for growth. That just wasn't really on the horizon figures in the mid-seventh century. Instead, Baxter argued that if you pile up all this money and you can't spend it on yourself, you still are not allowed to waste any of it. So you do have to spend it. Who do we spend it on? You must spend it on your needy brethren. He invented the doctrine of effective altruism. Okay, so there's the origins of philanthropy right there in the mid-seventh century. Baxter's view, one of the fundamental reasons to do all of these duties is to gain certainty of salvation. Baxter was a good behaviorist, so he was a Calvinist and like all Protestants, he believed in justification by faith alone, but how could you possibly know whether you really have faith in God? You can't introspect. He's a behaviorist. Introspection is not reliable because everyone is so desperate to get saved that they're just going to fool themselves at the thinking that they have faith in God. The only way to tell is that you work in like the dickens. So you tell from your own external behavior whether you really have faith. Okay, now as I pointed out, Weber thought that the work ethic was nothing more than an ethic designed to rationalize the consignment of workers to endless drudgery. But I went back and read Richard Baxter. He has this wonderful five-volume comprehensive Christian directory. The Christian directory is a comprehensive account of the duties of a Christian. And believe me, he has a lot in question-and-answer format. Like, what if this happens? What should I do? He's actually a terrific English writer. And when I went back and read Baxter, although there is this harsh side to Baxter, where you're working like crazy and don't get any rest, he actually has a very strong pro-worker side that I think Weber neglected. And that's what I want to stress today. It's not just Baxter, but another wonderful Puritan minister, Robert Sanderson, has a terrific sermon in which he explains how one is to discover one's calling. Everyone has a duty to follow the calling that is the specialized occupation to which God has called them. And Sanderson, in the course of explaining how you figure out what your calling is, invented the modern discipline of career advising. So how do you find out what kind of occupation would you like? And what has your education fitted you to? And could you really stand working in this occupation for a long time? Basically, he's telling you to sort your tastes. And also your parents, because they love you and they care about you and they probably have a pretty good idea of what you would be good at. And so in this wonderful way that's so characteristic of the Puritans, they convert duties into individual rights. Everyone has a right to the free choice of occupation because they can only know from their own temperaments what would be a good occupation for them. Baxter stressed the dignity of all workers. Even the most menial worker does God's will and should be honored on that account. In fact, the work ethic is trying to uplift the standing of ordinary workers. The people really to be despised are the idle, including the idle rich, which I'll get to in a moment. Workers, Baxter, Senates are entitled to meaningful work, honest, labor, profitable for the Commonwealth. We have to recognize that even workers who are doing what we consider drudgery are doing socially necessary work that's advancing the welfare of human beings. Think about people who are cleaning out porta-potties or something. Or any kind of cleaning work tends to be ranked very lowly today. But Baxter says, look, we have to clean. It's socially necessary. These people should be honored. They're doing God's work. They're promoting human welfare. Workers are entitled to relief from employers' abuses. Baxter warns employers to rule your employees. Don't rule them tyrannically. Workers are entitled to safe and helpful conditions. They're entitled to fair and living wages. The poor have a right to charity. Eventually, although you don't get much rest here on earth, upon salvation you get everlasting rest, right, finally. And then it's eternal. Baxter railed against the idle rich. They have to labor too. Think of those lazy landlords. Collecting all these rents. They're not lifting a finger. God had strictly commanded labor to all. And if you read John Locke, writing, oh, just a few decades after Baxter, in the first treatise of government, Locke asks and answers the very same questioning against the identical answer that Baxter does in the Christian directory. Question? If I'm so rich that I could just hire other people to do my work, is that good enough to fulfill my Christian duty? Baxter and Locke's answer was no, because God told Adam he had to work by the sweat of his brows at the end of his days, and that's a universal commandment. All right. What happened to the work ethic? Well, Montz Weber accurately argues that the work ethic became secularized over time, the original theological rationale for the work ethic, based on the idea that you have to work like the dickhands and never rest and save all your money in order to attain certainty of salvation. That falls away, but by then we've only internalized this ethos of the work ethic. And by the late 18th century, in the turn of the 19th century, we get the Industrial Revolution. And here's the critical thing, is that if you go back to the Puritan writers, who was the model worker? It would be somebody like a Yalmin farmer or a master craftsman. And what's interesting about that type of worker is that they're both manual laborers and they own their own capital. And consequently, they have both the duties and the rewards combined in the same person. The duties of the work ethic have certain rewards attached to them, but they're combined into the same person. What the Industrial Revolution did was that it split the owners of enterprise. That's a separate class of people from the people who are doing all the work. And by heightening class divisions, that raise the possibility that the burdens of the work ethic might be assigned to one group and the benefits to another. And indeed, that's precisely what happened. Now Weber stresses the version of the work ethic in which the benefits all go to the capitalist, that is the owner of the enterprise, and all the burdens and duties of the work ethic are assigned to the working class. But what I found in my readings is that there's another version of the work ethic in which that's not true, in which indeed workers are entitled to the benefits of all the hard work that they're doing. And that's, I think, an aspect of the work ethic that Weber missed out. But we can find both traditions of the work ethic continuously in the history of political economy all the way to the present. So here I'm going to give you two secularized work ethics and show you the essential contrast between the two of them. And you should find the claims on both sides completely familiar because they've even continued to present debates. So the conservative view here is the, you know, pro-capitalist view, right, that the benefits should go to the owners. And the progressive side, I'm calling progressive, that's the pro-worker view, that the benefits of the work ethic should go to the workers. So on the conservative view, the only people entitled to dignity are those who are self-sufficient. The poor are presumptively undeserving if they have to rely on some state welfare assistance or something or private charity. That's just proof that they're not really deserving. Only the self-sufficient are deserving. Whereas on the progressive view, what is stressed is that all workers are entitled to dignity and to meaningful work. The conservative view, you find the origins of the idea of shareholder capitalism. Right, we got a maximized profit. Policy should favor the interests of capital over the interests of labor. Maybe you say tax capital almost not at all and put most of the taxes on wages. Whereas progressives believe that workers are entitled to high and rising wages, as Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations. The conservative view consistently prefers that the needy should rely on private charity or if they rely on the state, work conditions should be attached to whatever state benefits they get, just like in current Medicaid expansion, exemption waivers that states are getting where they want to impose work requirements on access to Medicaid. So these ideas are still around. Whereas the progressive view said, workers have a right to comprehensive social insurance and even unconditional benefits of various sorts. And so you can see the roots of the social democratic tradition also traced back to puritanism. Conservatives argue that workers should not get any vacations, they haven't earned, no leaves that they haven't earned, and indeed that's the standard for the United States. We don't have any state guaranteed vacations, only about half of workers even get paid vacation as part of their labor contract. And Americans so deeply abused with the work yet they don't even take all the earned vacation they're entitled to. Whereas progressives argued and in Western Europe at least largely got rights to maximum hours, paid vacations and leaves, Denmark for instance, workers get five weeks of paid vacation. It's stunning. Imagine that. Conservatives argued for a workplace regime that we could call the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The honors, our dictators over the workers, they run the factories, the workers got to take all the orders. Whereas progressive advocates of the work ethic who want the benefits of the work ethic to accrue to workers, advocated things worker self-governance. Workers should own their own firms, maybe in a co-op, workers co-op co-op, or be self-employed. So now let's consider the work ethic today. I'm skipping over a few centuries of history but I guarantee you if you have any questions I can tell you about how various figures in classical political economy carry through these two different versions of the work ethic. But I'm going to jump ahead to today and here we can see something interesting happening in the mid-1970s. You can see from the post-World War II era till about 1972 or three an era of equitable growth where workers' wages rose exactly in line with growth of GDP per capita. And then starting around 1972 we see a massive divergence. GDP per capita keeps on rising. Actually this is productivity growth. It's productivity growth. Keeps on rising but hourly compensation stagnates. And this has been going on for decades since the 70s. That's just US data but if you look at advanced the rich countries worldwide we can see that the labor share of income has been declining. Although we do have an exception for CEOs like they've really made out big time. And here you can see CO compensation has just galloped ahead. A lot of that compensation comes from the linking of their compensation to the stock shareholder value increasing shareholder value so they're getting compensated by the, purportedly, the degree to which they're helping out shareholders and reaping greater profits for them. Here's the problem though. In the 17th century most of the super rich were idle. We're looking at the lazy aristocrats. They really didn't have to do anything. They could fob off all the real work to underlings. And in fact Adam Smith in his lectures on jurisprudence observed that in reality here he's writing in the 1760s or so in reality there's an inverse correlation between how wealthy you are and how hard you work. But today is different. Those CEOs, they're working like crazy. Insane hours. So an interesting case comes with George Bush Jr.'s Secretary of the Treasury. I can't remember his name now but Bruce headed Alcoa. Paul O'Neill. I'm sorry? Paul O'Neill. Yes. Near Ty Sunday magazine had an interesting profile of him when he was Secretary of the Treasury. And they pointed out that his life looked like this. He would wake up before his kids woke up and go to work. He would come home after his kids were put to bed. He worked 364 days per year. In other words, he saw his kids just one day a year. Christmas. So this guy's working like crazy. Not every CEO works that hard but we can see here in this chart an interesting trend which is that these days as income rises people are actually working more harder, more hours. The richer you are the more hours you are working. And that represents a shift. The important stuff here is for men. Women, of course, during this period you have the feminist movement so a lot of women were housewives and then they're moving into the workforce so we have a confounding variable on the left-hand side of this chart. But for men, I think the most interesting thing here is that here in the 70s low income men were doing an awful lot of overcounting and now that's really plummeting. And so we could see here that basically the higher your income and status the more likely you are to be working 50 or more hours a week and that's an accelerating trend. And consequently, we have available today a rationale for these super high incomes of these CEOs that wasn't available to the lazy aristocrats of the past. The aristocrats didn't lift a finger but these people they're working like crazy. So I can say, well, of course we deserve it all. So is that true? Well, let us recall that according to the Puritans it wasn't enough just to be very busy it was important that the work one does be actually productive and by productive Baxter meant this in a strictly utilitarian sense. The Puritans, not Jeremy Bentham invented utilitarianism a full century before Bentham. Work only counts as work if it's promoting the welfare of other people, not just one sum. Okay, it's a pretty stringent standard. So here's Baxter arguing against just activities in which one extracts wealth from system without contributing anything. He says it's a prison and a constant calamity to be tied to spend one's life and doing little good at all to others though we should grow rich by it himself. So in other words, even if you're really, really busy piling up money, doing stuff that will send flows of money to yourself even if you're doing this for just 65 days a year you still have to ask, is this really productive activity is it helping other people? And indeed, Baxter has an entire chapter of his Christian directory railing against unfair and exploited business models which he termed under the label oppression. So here he's actually a pretty smart practitioner of business ethics and these are the kinds of business models that he objects to. Well, he says, first of all, don't tread on your brethren as stepping stones of your own advancement. So he already recognized that that's a lot of what getting ahead involves in the 17th century as well as today. Do not injure your inferiors who are unable to resist. It's a warning against exploiting your workforce. He railed against monopolists, users, hucksters. People are just kind of selling stuff that isn't really worthwhile but hyping it up to get people all excited about something that they're ultimately be disappointed with in the end. And engrossers, engrossers are people who are trying to corner the market and then be able to raise prices that way. He argued against unfair evictions of tenants. Most of the tenants here were thinking about our peasant farmers and so he argued that rents have to be set fairly so that they won't get unfairly ejected. He also argued that it was morally wrong to engage in price discrimination against the poor and the desperate and indeed Locke follows him exactly in this. So just because you could take advantage of another's desperation doesn't give you any title at all to raise the price on them. That might be good advice to offer Martin Screlly. All this, I want to argue that we can observe I think some fundamental contradictions in the ideology of shareholder capitalism. So if you go back to my graph with that inflection point around 1972 it's right around that time that we see the ideology of shareholder capitalism starting to gain strength and then it really bones in the 80s and afterwards. This idea that the purpose of the firm is to maximize shareholder value. But I think actually that this harsh version of the work ethic which rationalizes shareholder capitalism really contains some internal contradictions once we see that it's coming out of the work ethic. Adam Smith argued in the wealth of nations that great volume of economics strongly influenced by the progressive work ethic he argued that you can't expect workers to work hard just for the sake of the idle rich. What incentive do they have? It's absurd. If you want them to work hard you should pay them higher wages. He also addressed this to manufacturers who complained about their lazy workers. If you're complaining that your workers are lazy why don't you look at the wages you're paying them. You can incentivize them to work harder if you pay them decent wages. Whereas of course I'm a conservative harsh version of the work ethic you justify the lousy wages you're paying your workers on the grounds that look they're not working that hard so they don't deserve anything. And Adam Smith said this is perverse logic you're not understanding people work for reward. But you also can't expect hard workers work from workers for capitalists who are busy but pursuing business models that undermine other people's welfare. The workers themselves will feel demoralized from working on bullshit jobs as David Graber has recently complained showing that perhaps as many as 40% of workers in rich countries are working at jobs that are either pernicious or worthless or just slaking the vanity of super rich employers. And we've seen time and again that workers actually want meaningful work or meaningful means it's actually helping people and not just piling up more and more profits for shareholders. So we see recently that Amazon workers walked out of Amazon to protest Amazon's perverse engagement in helping the fossil fuel industry burn down the earth. We also observe that people are willing to work at nonprofits who are doing super meaningful stuff that's really helping people at vastly lower wages than they could get in the private sector. Look at, say, law schools funding lawyers are desperate to get into working through the ACLU promoting human rights and this kind of stuff and they're willing to take vast pay cuts relative to corporate law in order to do this not for any lack of talent in fact often it's the most talented law school students who aspire to some of these public service non-profit jobs because it's more meaningful. So let's think about various business models today where you have capitalists who are really busy but promoting business models that undermine other people's welfare. Near wealth extraction think about vulture capital private equity where the project is to jump in there take over a firm maybe you put down 20% to the value huge leverage buyout now you've sold your firm with gigantic debts but in the meantime you get to do things like exploit the brand name so to service your debts you have to radically cut workers' wages and you also cut the quality of inputs to your goods and give lousier service but you're kind of riding off the accumulated goodwill of what the firm was beforehand and you can fool people for a really long time before they realize that this company isn't as hot as it was then you take out a second loan for maybe $300 million and award yourself for your genius and your brilliant management and by the end of it you know maybe you've extracted 40% of the value of the firm at the moment of its collapse which sends thousands of workers into unemployment and might even devastate entire communities if this was a factory town and okay so now the workers are addicted to opioids but you've come out with 100% profit what a successful model or you could exploit the vulnerable with things like surprise medical bills where somebody might even do all the research and find that their hospital is covered by their insurance and they are scheduled for surgery but the surgeon secretly invites some out of network surgeon to just do a few stitches closing the incision at the end of surgery and then he bills you for $60,000 out of the blue suddenly now you're stacked with overwhelming debt with no way to get out of it and no advance notice and no opportunity to avoid it various predatory credit schemes backs to rail against those the kind of things that are designed to basically make it impossible for people ever to pay off the loan maybe get sink deeper and deeper what about profiting by misleading people we have multi-level marketing scam selling people on the false drain that they could become rich and through self-employment for profit scam schools have abounded Betsy DeVos now wants to revive them with changes in her roles that were set by Obama to prevent these scam schools from getting access to federally backed student loans what about shifting risks to the vulnerable many firms have bankrupted their pension plans and just tossed workers on to their own devices now each of us is expected to run our own 401k program do our own investment choices even though most of us don't have the slightest idea what to do and even though financial services firms do their very best to hide the charges that they're putting on your fund what about just undermining future generations you can rake huge profits now in the fossil fuel industry even though that dooms future generations you could make tons of money by spreading hatred and propaganda undermining democracy promoting genocide and Myanmar all of these are like really effective ways to make a lot of profits by undermining the welfare of other people what I want to suggest here is that there is no coherent morally coherent conservative version of the work ethic where all the benefits accrue to capitalists even if the capitalists are very busy and working 364 days a year the supposition that just because you're making a lot of money must be, must imply that you're actually producing a lot of wealth is mistaken and from the perspective of the original work ethic nothing counts as work unless it's helping other people besides yourself and that is a critical moment that we have to confront today if we look at the policies underlying contemporary shareholder wealth maximization we have an agenda of massive deregulation for instance of the financial industry which basically is bringing up banks now to gamble and speculate make profits through gambling and speculating on derivatives and so forth this increases the financial instability of the entire system and we know what happened in 2008 the last time we tried this which is that the bankers came out pretty fine they didn't really lose a whole lot they got bailed out but nevertheless hundreds of thousands of millions of completely innocent homeowners got wiped out I'm not talking about people who never really qualified genuinely qualified for a homeowner loan I'm talking about all of their neighbors who really were honestly paying off their mortgages who got devastated by the subsequent recession which threw them out of work and put them underwater on their mortgages those people didn't deserve that treatment they were working hard and playing by the rules the whole philosophy of deregulation that we see today especially the financial sector but not only there is designed to let people make a lot of money off of speculation and gambling where the fundamental risks of that worthless activity are shifted on to innocent people none of this can possibly be rationalized by the work ethic unless we confuse merely being very busy piling up money with doing real work thank you well yeah that's a really great point I think if you read the original Puritans they thought they did think that money might be a sign of God's favor but you do have to look into the details to see how people made it David Richardson informally attached to Goss just wondering about trade unions in the 20th century any comments? I mean there was a period of time where they were quite strong in order to kind of balance and there really aren't much of a factor anymore here in the US yes correct why have we lost that? well in businesses ran a concerted effort to undermine labor unions and there's been a substantial weakening of the enforcement of labor law recent report out from the Economic Policy Institute finds that 40% of attempts to organize American workplaces today are undermined by pretty flavored violations of labor law and also the whole American labor union model isn't really suited to contemporary times it was much easier to unionize when you had these giant factories like GM with thousands and thousands of workers but now you have to organize unit by unit so like Walmart is vast but each union has to just be for that store and maybe even just a subsection of that store like the food department so with fragmentation of the unit of bargaining it gets impossibly costly to organize so I don't think actually contemporary labor law is well suited to help out workers especially when it's not really even being enforced David Surnick how do you place globalism, global trade within this kind of theoretical context i.e. one could argue that global capitalism has pulled a lot of people out of deep poverty across the world how do you kind of apply that idea to that current situation? Yeah, look I think global trade has been a very powerful force of poverty reduction in developing countries notably China and to a substantial degree also India and some other parts of the world too but those are the two big ones so none of this is an argument against trade trade is incredibly valuable you know there are gains there are gains of trade but we also have to recognize and I think this is consistent with the ethos of the progressive work ethic that we also have to recognize the people who lose from globalization and help them out you know other countries had managed the globalization of trade much more effectively by offering for instance comprehensive and continuous worker retraining over the course of their lives without them having to shell out you know there are last remaining dimes for that there are things we could do to help out people who lose jobs on account of trade agreements but do you think that you know just when this kind of the purging work ethic was coming from is the idea of your neighbor has changed like at the time your neighbor was the person down the street you couldn't you weren't really thinking about someone in China because that I mean they didn't have a concept of global economy is like a comprehensive system the way we have today yeah so we do have to expand our notion of who our neighbor is not just thinking about globalized trade but also the globalized effects of fossil fuel burning right it's affecting everybody yes yeah oh hi hi yeah sorry Anna this is a very close to your question do you have any questions yes okay and are the world conditions that just happen most of the year what I'm saying is that although from a historical from sort of history of ideas point of view you can see a certain conservative version of the work ethic being derived from these 17th century premises it doesn't really make sense yeah yeah because you just have to think that just because somebody's busy they're actually adding value and that's not true yeah I wonder about the today so I was curious about the the vision of number of hours or the hard work what distinctions or what refinements have you theorized or seen like that goes beyond sort of that graph or even the three and four days like okay he's away from his family but what does that constitute and is that hard work oh right right right right from the period's point of view hard work meant disciplined work that is you have focused attention on the tasks before you and you're trying to do as good a job as you can on those tasks whatever they might be and you're not wasting time now another notion of hard work that I think was picked up by advocates of the progressive work ethic where hard work means something like drug treatment right where it's onerous maybe it's dirty work maybe it requires heavy or risky manual labor uh maybe it's say at a very rapid pace and so from that perspective a lawyer who takes his clients out for a two hour lunch over three martinis is definitely not working hard right but of course part of that just reflects the class divisions where the people at the top get to design their work conditions and can make them really nice but from the parent's perspective it was really a matter of discipline, focus, attention on the tasks at hand and executing them efficiently you have a better mentor today for what constitutes different qualities of work that goes beyond hours like the period didn't take quite as long as you wanted to be this has to be that it sounds like you lost some of the distinction just by putting a craft in the middle of this, the amount of hours of work it would be really great if we did have alternative measures that built in some of these other aspects that features of work yeah I would love to see such measures so we do have some of these surveys about whether workers themselves think that their work is meaningful and that's the theme of David Graver's bullshit jobs right it's like do you actually think that when you go to work and you're doing your work as prescribed that you're actually doing anything meaningful like helping people right now a lot of people think no this is pointless work or maybe just work that's slinging the vanity of their boss it's like really it's not doing anything good right so maybe we should have more nuanced surveys of that sort you know Abdul and I was wondering about emissions others of this I think American must be rags rages or pulling yourself up by the bootstraps it's a very interesting book tracing how a mission that one time in early modern history was a method of front to God and then it slowly progressed in this virtue and I was just wondering if you have a view on whether that is something that came out of the Protestant work ethic or though it's like well I mean this gets back to the question of whether wealth is a sign of God's blessings right and you know from a certain perspective it's not crazy to think that that focused and disciplined attention to the task before you it's liable to bring more well more money than people who are just kind of slacking off and not really paying too close attention to the other tasks that work that's a reasonable assumption but we just have to add to that some attention to what those tasks are actually doing what are their effects on the world okay given that this has become such a secularized doctrine do you think that there's anything that can persuade the people in controlled capital to recognize these inherent contradictions or must they be enforced by political and legal changes to redress these to redress the situation yeah so I think we need a multi-pronged strategy here so definitely I think some form of multiple forms of countervailing power are needed to counteract the operation of sheer greed but it's also the case that something can be done about the economy of esteem especially in the United States but elsewhere why should people why should we admire people because they're rich in fact maybe you know you should be asking hard questions about how they need their money there have been previous eras even in my lifetime I was going to college in the 70s and high school in the 70s in fact there was much more of an anti-materialist ethos around in the 80s everybody flushed that down toilet I think maybe we're seeing something of a shift now people are asking hard questions I think that would be a good thing Rebecca I'm curious just to you mentioned that the shareholder capitalization what came out of the Protestant ethic but it also feels like there's a lot since that this kind of been combined into this new work ethic and I'm wondering is it that the shareholder capitalism is a contradiction of the Protestant work ethic or is it also a contradiction of today's work ethic well what I'm saying is that the conservative work ethic as we know it today utterly elapsed a coherent moral foundation why should we rig the rules of finance so that mountains of activity is dedicated to risky speculation that vastly enriches people who haven't added any value and then periodically sends millions of people into unemployment and devastation I can't imagine an argument that says that's a good idea what would that look like you know I mean some people say oh it's you know freedom well you know freedom for some that comes at a massive cost of others where the freedom is simply the freedom to shift the risks of your activity onto other people that's not a freedom that's worth respecting Professor Anderson you might be able to tackle a few questions before we bake eggs Janine do you want to say something about the upcoming ethic schools what is the school high school ethic school what is it that you're interested in helping to support very early on this February 22nd or the third sponsored by the volunteer by the way we also are involved in those comments and I think actual I'm sorry it's going to be about a judge too so please come I'm going to replace that with the 150 high school students discussing ethics these things thank you