Our national discussion about how to fix capitalism seems limited to those who believe that more government will fix the problem and those who think that free markets will fix themselves, Steve Malanga laments:
The genius of America in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville thought, was that it pursued “productive industry” without a descent into lethal materialism. Behind America’s balancing act, the pioneering French social thinker noted, lay a common set of civic virtues that celebrated not merely hard work but also thrift, integrity, self-reliance, and modesty — virtues that grew out of the pervasiveness of religion, which Tocqueville called “the first of [America’s] political institutions,… imparting morality” to American democracy and free markets. Some 75 years later, sociologist Max Weber dubbed the qualities that Tocqueville observed the “Protestant ethic” and considered them the cornerstone of successful capitalism. Like Tocqueville, Weber saw that ethic most fully realized in America, where it pervaded the society. Preached by luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, taught in public schools, embodied in popular novels, repeated in self-improvement books, and transmitted to immigrants, that ethic undergirded and promoted America’s economic success.
What would Tocqueville or Weber think of America today? In place of thrift, they would find a nation of debtors, staggering beneath loans obtained under false pretenses. In place of a steady, patient accumulation of wealth, they would find bankers and financiers with such a short-term perspective that they never pause to consider the consequences or risks of selling securities they don’t understand. In place of a country where all a man asks of government is “not to be disturbed in his toil,” as Tocqueville put it, they would find a nation of rent-seekers demanding government subsidies to purchase homes, start new ventures, or bail out old ones. They would find what Tocqueville described as the “fatal circle” of materialism — the cycle of acquisition and gratification that drives people back to ever more frenetic acquisition and that ultimately undermines prosperous democracies.
And they would understand why. After flourishing for three centuries in America, the Protestant ethic began to disintegrate, with key elements slowly disappearing from modern American society, vanishing from schools, from business, from popular culture, and leaving us with an economic system unmoored from the restraints of civic virtue. Not even Adam Smith — who was a moral philosopher, after all — imagined capitalism operating in such an ethical vacuum. Bailout plans, new regulatory schemes, and monetary policy moves won’t be enough to spur a robust, long-term revival of American economic opportunity without some renewal of what was once understood as the work ethic — not just hard work but also a set of accompanying virtues, whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets too few now recall.
Work ethic, self discipline, or, god forbid, restraint are fascist notions by now. You may just as well send people to the Hitler Youth, and Jocko may just as well draw a swastika on his forehead. Discipline sets you free? Sounds like arbeit mach frei to me!
Fun fact: Benjamin Franklin inspired Napoleon’s maxims, who considered Poor Richard’s Almanack (full text) significant enough to translate. It has good stuff like:
“Bad commentators spoil the best of books.” (or blogs)
Hear hear!
The described mindset also spilled into warfare, and the Vietnam war became the first fought from a purely managerial business perspective, with war managers, and soldier workers, producing enemy bodies, and if the only thing that counts in warfare is economics, then it was impossible for the US to lose, it was impossible for a peasant economy to beat the US, it just couldn’t happen, just like the 2008 financial crisis couldn’t.
I have a theory, maybe it’s nonsense but…
Work ethic doesn’t pay off like it used to. Not that it doesn’t pay off or that there aren’t millions of Americans with a strong work ethic, but that it isn’t nearly as much of a factor for getting in the economy or excelling once there.
From a moral perspective a strong work ethic is about maintaining the ability to respect yourself as much as anything, but economically a work ethic doesn’t get you hired because no one knows if you have it before they hire you. Factors that get through the rats nest of HR are much more important.
Once in the workforce, the government has interfered with the economy so thoroughly that a strong work ethic won’t save you and won’t help you get ahead when the inevitable downturns and implosions occur.
The only safe spaces are in highly technical fields that are resistant to outsourcing and the H1B plague (where the work ethic is alive and well) or in those positions where you are the one calling the shots about what gets done and by whom (not as safe as the first category).
Real wages have fallen like a brick and much of the complaints about “work ethic” are by managers who made twice as much in real terms at the same point in their career as those they manage now.
Workers aren’t stupid. If they know that giving their all doesn’t have any real connection to a better life, why bother?
“vanishing from schools”
Right. And who runs the schools? More government isn’t going to fix the problem.
Hoyos is right about this part: “Work ethic doesn’t pay off like it used to.”
I’m not so sure about the “only safe spaces are in highly technical fields that are resistant to outsourcing part.
Think back, for a moment, to 18th-century America.
The immigrants were whites of various social classes. Some were rising peasants. Others were falling aristocrats.
Many of them signed themselves into near-slavery because they trusted that the law would respect their rights, and their indentures would elapse when the time had elapsed. Nowadays, Americans don’t trust the government to stop the “indentured servitude” when they promise it will stop.
Furthermore, “work ethic” was largely a male phenomenon. Males signalled that they were good providers because females didn’t want to mate with hoboes. And the females who tried to get sexual attention from “bad boys” often were found with their throats cut, so most women didn’t take risks on “bad boys.”
Bankers were relatively weak. Surveillance was limited to gossip and a few professional spies. Violent men could secure respect – or at least fear – by their fists. Violent men could start out as outcasts and fight their way to respect, even becoming middle-class or more. (Consider Andrew Carnegie and his rough approach to violence, although perhaps Boss Tweed was a more typical case.)
Nowadays, the man who works hard to signal his provider status doesn’t attract a lifelong mate. It’s most likely that he attracts swarms of regulators. So why work hard? Why take a risk and start a new business?
Nowadays, bankers are an overclass, surveillance is pervasive, and violent men are fodder for the prison system (which deprives them of the social dignity they would need to be middle-class leaders).
Actually, I should have just linked Uncabob’s post about Plunkitt of Tammany Hall.
You ask what happened to the work ethic?
Tammany Hall happened to the work ethic.
“People ignore the fact (if they ever think about it), that the two most famous deaths in the West – Socrates and Jesus – were men both killed by the State.”