An accounting of agonies

Eliezer Yudkowsky recently wrote:

What would it be like for people to not be poor? I reply: You wouldn't see people working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them.

There’s an essential insight here that is often lost in discussions about first-world poverty, especially those who treat it as unreal or unworthy of consideration. Yet Yudkowsky is right- if people are doing awful things to survive, they must be poor in some sense.

How are we to make sense of poverty in first-world nations? The global poverty line is $2.15 per day. Plenty of people live below that poverty line. Yet there are people in the West who I would regard as in poverty who earn 150x that! Are these just first-world problems? Foolish people working for nasty bosses when they could just stop and accept far less income?

No. I don’t think it is. I find it notable that many of those who claim have never experienced poverty themselves. Quite a few people miss meals due to poverty, and deaths by, or exacerbated by poverty-induced malnutrition in the West certainly do happen. Often these things happen to people who have been cut off entirely from the welfare system, but it is not at all uncommon for people on welfare in, say, Australia, to go hungry and become thin as a result.

How is this possible? How can people go hungry on 150x the global poverty level?

Here’s the main factors I’m aware of.

Relative status

One explanation that people, I think, are far too quick to run to is relative status. People feel like they have to spend more to keep up with their neighbors. This is a concern, and it does fuel the experience of first-world poverty. However, you’ll notice that even people who have completely dropped out of the mainstream game of relative status played with material goods are still struggling to make ends meet.

Although I think this factor is often exaggerated, in defense of being affected by relative status, I would note that we are deeply social beings with social needs, just as based in our biology as our physical needs. If a big chunk of society plays this game with material goods, almost everyone is going to be unavoidably drawn into it, for fear of losing esteem and access to friendship.

Altered social demands

Sometimes it is not just one’s sense of status in play, sometimes there are actual sanctions.

What is expected of us living in the West is different to what is expected of people living in the global South. Sometimes these demands are policed with direct scorn and contempt for those who breach them. Scorn and contempt are no small things- they certainly hurt emotionally, but additionally incurring contempt might cut you off from future possibilities.

But sometimes the enforcement mechanisms are even more tangible. For example:

1. Having older children in a neighborhood mind younger children might get you arrested and/or your children taken away from you.

2. Building yourself a shack to live in rather than a code compliant house is totally forbidden.

3. There’s a limit to how bad your clothes and grooming can get before you are refused entry to numerous places- including places you might really need to go.

Loss of commercial availability of lower quality options

Oftentimes, low-quality goods of the sort that would be affordable for those living on a few dollars a day simply aren’t available on the market. This is because the relatively small number of people who would be interested in purchasing them and the amount of floor space they would take up relative to their costs, etc. make them unappealing to sell.

Forgetting how to live with cheaper options

We are not raised to be able to live on a few dollars a day, and as a result, we have lost many of the skills. Many of us can’t, for example, light a fire, and even if we could the law might have something to say (see altered social demands). We do not know how to forage or hunt to supplement our nutrition. Many of us can’t build a simple shelter. Our knowledge of cooking is tilted towards expensive options.

Psychological (and perhaps physiological?) dependence on more expensive options

We become dependent on the goods of our society, and through both acclimatization and social reasons, we come to need them. Mostly these requirements are psychological but it is a profoundly silly person who thinks that needs arising from psychology are unreal. To a limited extent, these requirements may be physiological- increased calorie requirements due to a body that has grown larger because of relatively good nutrition in the early years, reduced cold and heat tolerance, etc. Mostly though they are psychological- ranging from increased nervousness about insecurity to unawareness of cheaper options etc. There’s also a willpower issue- it’s hard to avoid spending five bucks you can’t afford on buying some quick and delicious food when you’re hungry when that food is available everywhere.

I’m aware that this might sound like a ‘first world’ problem but: Give it a try if you’re so far above it.

Literal survival

Another factor is the question of survival and disability. A lot of people have medical conditions that disable them or could kill them, or even more commonly, fear developing such conditions. Therefore, they are motivated to pay for healthcare costs, sometimes even if it means going hungry. If healthcare were not advanced enough to deal with their problems- or if it were totally unaffordable as for many people in the third world- it would not be an issue. In an odd sense then (obviously only partial) the invention of better healthcare can make the poor poorer.

Minimising the badness of third-world poverty

One reason why we fail to recognize that first-world poverty is bad is that we minimize just how bad third-world poverty is. This point speaks for itself so I won’t harp on it.

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We might then give a definition of poverty:

Someone is poor if they are in a situation where they feel the need to work forty hours for a boss they hate.

EY suggests 60 hours, I’d suggest even a willingness to do something horrible for forty hours is a sign of desperation. Forty hours, plus preparation and commute time is about 42% of total waking time. Obviously this will have to be adjusted for parents given time commitments- and also for those who can’t reasonably work like the disabled, children and elderly, but outside these cases, I’d suggest we have an operational definition of poverty.

Now there is at least one concern with this definition- viz:

Barry could live a comfortable life working 20 hours a week in a position he enjoys, but he has chosen to spend the next year working a horrible, long hours job which will set him up for life.

The definition can be patched up, but getting the details exactly right isn’t the point of this article.

All this connects with a long-term project of mine reimagining economics as flows of suffering.

We can model the economy as a flow of between persons- but a flow of what? Roemer imagines the economy as a flow of labor hours between persons. Exploitation is understood as consuming vastly more labor than one produces.

But, as I have argued previously, labor isn’t quite right for a moral critique of political economy (Roemer agrees). Ultimately, exploitation is the wrong way to understand the morality of distribution tout court. I would say however that a better stab at it than modeling the flow of time is modeling the flow of suffering.

Some people in the economy suffer a great deal. Some people suffer very little or not at all. Others consume products that require a great deal of suffering to generate, while many suffer far, far more than they ever consume in suffering.

This is important because it tells us who sacrifices most especially relative to what they consume in order to keep the economy going. It is, of course, like Roemer’s measure, not a measure of, or attempt to estimate price. By modelling the economy as a flow of suffering and sacrifice, we see various questions about distribution, consumption and production for what they are in human terms.

There is of course a pure Roemerian model, in which we replace Labor hours with bits of suffering, but in addition, I think there is also many other opportunities brought about by this way of thinking- analogues for conventional economics conceived of in the currency of suffering. Suffering here can be measured in many ways- from Eliezer’s revealed preferences definition to measures of subjective well-being. Each suffering-welfare analog to traditional economic concepts will have many possible definitions. The point is to open doors in thought.

Hence we have a class: Roemerian-Yudkowskyian poverty measures

For some defined measure and level of suffering a person undergoes that level to meet their economic needs OR

A person would be willing to undergo that degree of suffering to meet their economic needs, but can’t find an opportunity to do so.

But once we start thinking of economic concepts in terms of pain, a variety of options open themselves up.

Inflation

Let’s start by defining a real income measure, or class of real income measures-

Change in real income equals change in the amount of suffering the median person has to go through in order to buy a basket of goods

But there’s another way to think about defining inflation through welfare.

It is common for economists to define inflation with respect to a basket of goods, and how much it costs to purchase this basket, but there are problems with this approach. Not everyone purchases the same basket of goods. There are conceptual issues involved in changes in the typical basket of goods over time and in the appropriate adjustments for change in quality etc.

Self-rated well-being, it is well known, varies with income (the most obvious interpretation of this is that money does, to some degree, ‘buy happiness’).

Using a suggestion from Kieran Latty, We can then define wellbeing inflation as:

The change in the amount of income necessary to achieve, on average, a given level of well-being, as measured by some given well-being measure.

Suppose for example that, on average, people start rating their happiness at 7.5 when their income exceeds 60,000. Over five years, this rises to 70,000. This means that the five-year well-being inflation is ~17%.

If society becomes very much less happy, it is possible that well-being inflation might become infinite or undefined relative to some metric and some level of that metric. It could be that no income level will result in a previously attainable level of happiness. Likewise, massive wellbeing deflation- including infinite wellbeing deflation- is possible if even 0 expenditure will result in the given level of happiness. There are various mathematical fixes that could be suggested for this problem, but I won’t get into that here.

Productivity

John Quiggin writes of hourly productivity measures:

The simple economic answer is that the relevant cost is the disutility of effort. This will generally depend on both hours and intensity.

But we can look at it another way. I assume we’re agreed that, if you increase your weekly hours from 50 to 55 and your output rises by 10 per cent, there’s no change in productivity.

One way of doing that would be to cut official lunch and tea breaks by an hour a day. No change in actual or measured productivity.

Now suppose that there’s no change in official hours, but everything is tightened up – you have to be at your workstation and ready when work starts, private phone calls are banned, toilet breaks are timed, etc. In this case, measured hours probably won’t change much, and measured productivity will rise, but the increase is illusory. Output per hour of actual work hasn’t changed.

Now go to the micro-level and think of a job as consisting of a series of tasks with brief breaks between them. On an assembly line, for example, each time the line moves is one task. An increase in work intensity arises when you shorten the breaks, for example, by speeding up the line. I hope its clear that, in conceptual terms, this is no different from the previous examples. The increase in productivity is illusory.

Finally, go to the case when you just work harder and faster. It ought to be apparent that this is just a limiting case of the previous example.

Some important points here:

1. Labor contracts are not as they seem. While formally the employer purchases a whole hour, the amount they can extract from that hour depends on how tight the labor market is, cultural factors, how much they are willing to spend on surveillance, the particular bargaining power of a given worker relative to others, etc.

2. Some extra work that the employer extracts from the employee by intensifying work reduces aggregate economic ‘welfare’. In a world where such bargaining was possible, the worker would be willing to pay more not to do the extra work than the employer would pay to have it done.

3. Traditionally there has been something of a reluctance to defend the right of a worker to not be working a whole hour. It seems like a lazy and shiftless demand. Doesn’t even the unionist promise a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage? Sure, but the truth is that no one, almost no one, works every minute at their job, and most people go far below that. The idea the employer should be able to extract this at current wage rates just because it is promised (often not even explicitly) in a labor contract is absurd. Given that 100% is not reasonable, and 0% is unsustainable, all that remains is to haggle. Reduced work intensity, the right to a phone break, etc. etc. should be defended by unions and workers. As many have noted, unions often seem far too concerned about wages, and not enough about conditions.

4. From an econometric statistics perspective, intensification of work by way of forcing workers to be ‘working’ all the time they are at can lead to illusory productivity gains- effectively it increases the number of hours workers are working.

5. Intensification of work by forcing workers to work faster while they are working will lead to ‘real’ productivity gains, but measured against the far more important yardstick of disutility, there is no gain in productivity.

All this points the way to an alternative measure of productivity where the labor input is measured not in hours but in disutility and/or loss of welfare This, I think, gives us a profoundly different ‘lens’ for thinking about the political philosophy of production and distribution.

Consider Jack with an income of $1000 per week and a 40-hour work week in a brick factory. We could measure Jack’s productivity as:

Bricks made/dollars Jack would be willing to forego to earn an income without work

Which we take to be the disutility of work. To explain, presumably, Jack would sacrifice a dollar of his weekly income if he could earn the same income but without having to work. Presumably, he would sacrifice a lot more than a dollar. Let’s say he would take living on 600 dollars if he didn’t have to work for it, then the disutility of labor for Jack is 400 dollars. Now we can adjust this system by factoring in differences in the marginal utility of income caused by inequality of income- but I won’t go through the details of that here.

Suppose that Jack produces 10,000 bricks a week, then Jack’s productivity is:

25 bricks per dollar of the disutility of labor.

Notably, this measure has the great advantage that productivity increases as labor becomes more pleasant.

But we can also quantify things in different ways. if we quantify, for example, points on a happiness scale lost per brick produced. Or loss of utility flows using a Prescott-Kahneman style experience sampling methodology.

The important thing is that it is not time people care about, any more than it is commodities people care about, it is experiences, those experiences have positive and negative valences, and can be added and subtracted in various ways. The world is now laid out before us as flows of joy foregone and suffering endured from the rich to the poor.

Thinking about the world in these terms allows us to see, in quantitative terms, what ultimately strikes many as unfair. That some suffer, and others reap suffering as pleasurable leisure, to see the flows of agonies- small and great that make the world move, and the unevenness of who it is made to move for. It is an accounting of something ultimately far more precious than lost time or lost dollars- it is an accounting of lost joy and felt suffering for some turned into felt joy and lost suffering for others.

These flows are not limited to economics in the most crude sense of the term. Everywhere, society allocates, through governments, ‘civil society’ and through markets based on property rights sustained by governments, both joy and suffering, transferring and allocating experience. There’s nothing terribly novel in that thought of itself, but where I see the value is in adopting this framework as a way of seeing. if we could really bring ourselves to durably see things like that, we would start to think very different thoughts indeed.