Work sucks, I know

And being clever won't save you

I’m no expert, but I watch the right pretty closely for someone on the left. The online right has recently split into two factions on Twitter- a pro-work and an anti-work faction. This is a continuation of the struggle over H1-B visas, but further abstracted, and reaching deeper principles.

Recently I posted this caricature of the situation as a note:

The two warring factions of the online right at the moment in their most extreme and perfect forms would be:

“Having painstakingly engorged Forbidden Wisdom- Nietzsche, Evola and Mishima. Having spent six to twelve hours out of my fucking mind on LSD imagining what a based-Christian crusader would do, I have exhaustively determined that work is for other people. My noble chad physiognomy is instead built for manly, homoerotic pursuits, and discussing important books I haven’t read. Moreover, even worrying about “how the work will be done” and “The economy” is not in my purview, for I am a Knight and not a Merchant. Certainly, we must not import coloreds to do work. The peasants (who will any day now be assigned to me by the Rightful King) are already ugly enough as it is.”

“I am a hollow entity. I literally do not give a fuck about anything except the line going up. There is no future in which I could be happy, for I am a spring, pointed up, ready to be fired into the endless darkness above an abyss- our womb. The spring is not happy till it is dead, till the arc is over- and this arc must never end. The line must rise. My popularity- just another line. Sex? Just more numbers- all feeding on the greatest line of all- money. The less I eat, drink, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more I save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume -- my capital. The less I am, the less I give expression to my life, the more I have, the greater is my alienated life, for I transform my own cast off existence into a grim costume and wear it merrily. If you threaten the fucking line I will melt your body into a viscous substance suitable for fuelling the Soul Harvesters. Also, buy Dogecoin.”

The way this is playing out at the moment, in a sadly less comical fashion, is better to-do conservatives asserting that all work has dignity- even fast food. Meanwhile, more alienated conservatives thump the table and demand good jobs, by which they seem to mean really good jobs.

100,000 is approximately the 60th percentile of household (not individual) income. It is over twice the median individual income. I can maybe understand why an educated person would find that an underwhelming result- but it is by no stretch of the imagination a bad result.

I’m going to try to be as sympathetic as I can. I’ll put aside the darkest hypotheses about what is really happening here. We won’t talk about the person who tweeted this, or his 5.4 thousand admirers for example:

Leaving aside the outright vicious who think life should just be hard for other people what is going on with right-wingers who feel cheated by the job market? In most cases, I think, this:

1. I am very clever

2. Therefore I should get an important job - what we will call a clever job - a job for clever people managing important matters through the application of cleverness.

Let’s take these conservatives at their word, put aside uncharitable (but possibly true) interpretations, and assume they’re clever individuals who thought that meant they we going to make it and are now perplexed that they haven’t, despite giving it a good go. I know there are all sorts of subtleties here, but I largely want to take the idea of clever jobs and clever people at face value and explore the consequences. I want to show why, even if all this is true, none of it is surprising.

Here are a few basic truths I want to explain.

1. It’s possible to be a very clever, agentive person who gives life a red-hot go and never “makes it.”

2. This is true even if people on your political “side” are in ascendance.

3. Although this might be mitigated if the world were properly run, it’d probably still be true.

The first reason this is true is that the world has far less need for generically “clever” people than you might think- and far more need for the right domain expertise and job-matched background. Noah Smith once fondly fantasized about what he would do if he were in the Ukranian military, his answer was that he’d be some kind of “analyst”- in truth, he might get lucky, but he would likely be a grunt with a gun. The military simply does not need that many clever people without the right domain expertise. It isn’t just the military- this is true in most times and places.

The second reason these things are true is that even to the degree generic cleverness is useful, it is difficult to screen for. IQ is far from a perfect instrument, and for various reasons- many of which have nothing to do with “woke”- prospective employers are leery of this sort of quantification. The difficulty in screening has two synergistic effects, both of which reduce a clever person’s likelihood of getting a clever job:

A) People who aren’t very clever manage to pass themselves off as clever, and get “clever” jobs- taking jobs from the clever people.

B) Employers are leery of creating positions premised on the “cleverness” of the job holder because they cannot guarantee they will get a truly clever person in the role.

The third reason is that the kind of positions that most benefit from generic “cleverness” are desirable because they often involve relatively unalienated labor. This high desirability means that the well-connected hone in on them, and use their connections to get them. To make matters worse, their social skills often allow them to present themselves as extremely clever. By contrast, clever people often have autistic and other neurodivergent traits that do not gel with existing formal and informal hiring systems. Some people deny that there is such a correlation- but hang around a bunch of maths, economics, philosophy, or physics professors if you don’t believe me.

The fourth reason is that managers don’t like the idea of hiring someone for their cleverness because they might be hard to control, might outshine them, etc.

The fifth reason is that managers, departmental heads, and capital owners aren’t thrilled about hiring clever people to do clever roles because they want to do as much of the strategy and analysis as possible themselves. This is because 1. it’s some of the most fun and unalienated labor- why give it to someone else? 2. because giving away clever work to a clever person requires admitting you’re not clever enough to figure it all out on your own. and 3. Delegating ‘clever’ work often requires high degrees of trust in the person as a fiduciary, which is hard to come by, especially in a random hire [this, along with their inherent desirability, is why such roles are often given to friends or family as a sinecure].

The sixth reason is that our current hiring processes are bad and random. They’re extremely poorly designed, and seemingly obvious fixes- asking for work samples rather than self-promotional essays on why the applicant is so great (cover letters)- have not been adopted. This is partly due to the ascendance of HR and outsourced recruitment processes. Abolishing “wokeness” will not magically end this.

The seventh reason- obvious but important- is that life is tragic. Maybe you graduated during a recession. Maybe you fell ill for a few years. Maybe you have a disability that further narrows the range of jobs you can work. Maybe you just had a string of bad luck on your applications during your prime years.

The end result is that cleverness helps, but is no guarantee of anything. Look at this graph shared by Emil Kirkegaard from Marko Tervio’s work. Performance in the 99th percentile gets you… 72nd percentile income- and that’s on average. It’s entirely possible to give it a good go and get much less than that.

Clever people [and people who merely think themselves clever], including elements of the right more than anyone, have bought into the lie that if only we make things meritocratic enough then of course there will be a place for us. Indeed the promise of meritocracy has been very effective in severing the educated and intellectually inclined worker from workers generally. The fellow working reception with a good degree thinks of himself as a temporarily embarrassed analyst or strategist. Trust me, I’d know.

The juster and higher alternative is to accept that you may never get your golden ticket and fight for a world in which the wages and conditions of work allow dignity for everyone. A culture where people, even people working simple jobs, have the money, time, and space to raise families and cultivate spheres of grand achievement outside of work. Reforming work, healthcare and housing costs are the most immediate steps here.

If you truly want things to go well for everyone, then even if you are sure you are going to get a golden ticket yourself, more lifeboats- lifeboats for everyone- is the answer- not squabbling over seats. The left must once again seize the basic idea “most work sucks” and offer solutions that aren’t just about being at the top of the pile.

Footnote: Since posting this, I have noted a few right-wingers exploring the logical conclusions of their beliefs by suggesting that status is a zero-sum game. Ergo all one can really do is try to win as much status for oneself and one’s friends as possible. This is incorrect, there are configurations of status that lead to higher aggregate happiness than our current configuration. In particular, it appears that all else being equal, lower levels of overall status inequality lead to higher aggregate happiness because those at the bottom of the pile lose more from extreme status inequality than those at the top of the pile gain.