For Money To Matter, Our Work Time Has To Matter

Yet another report of unhappiness on the job, only matched - so it would seem - by the unhappiness of not having a job at all! And yet in this WSJ report, there was a bit of an unexpected twist at the end of the article: it turned out that those with low income are happier in their work, perhaps because of the potential "lousy" life options if - in fact, they have no job at all. I had to think about that one. In my last seven years of mostly full time work, it had become progressively more difficult to make money stretch for ongoing responsibilities and obligations. Whereas prior to that, I still had a fair amount of freedom and flexibility, even if self employment meant not much money left over for the doctors visits or vacation time that those years of office work had made possible.

But was I not happy on the job? While the self employment was the happiest even with the obvious above mentioned minuses, working for others was still a tremendous boost for self identity in general. I still remember a couple of days of "calling in sick" in my early twenties and how "illegitimate" it felt for that bit of extra time spent exploring the back roads of nearby areas: pleasant memories to this day. In retrospect, perhaps I needed to blow off a bit of steam from some job related matter. However, the mental "break" I took wasn't indicative of any lack of appreciation for my work, and the job itself was never taken for granted.

Perhaps one's psychological makeup matters for job choice and appreciation. Some are born taking good fortune for granted, and thus not so concerned if a work situation does not feel worth the effort. Certainly I've known people who refused to take the "lesser" jobs which finally felt so necessary for this blogger, when the better ones ran out. There's some rationale to a choosier logic which makes sense: the lesser job route can in fact mean a definite loss of respect in the social life, of those who are able to maintain their identities better with no job at all.

Herein also lies a basic problem: a job in today's terms needs to be able to do at least three things. It needs to somehow maintain our personal level of self respect. Also, at least be able to provide a modicum of both personal responsibility and free time, for us to commit for the long run. Most importantly, it needs to allow us to save enough for an exit option, if in fact the work area is no longer tenable. I became aware that local economies were actually the bigger part of the problem, when - starting around the turn of the century - many cities and their outlying areas in the U.S. became less conducive to  life on a minimum income. What's more, those lower income jobs are the ones on the rise since the Great Recession, in everyplace U.S.A.

What some of my readers now realize: this blogger is adamant that the idea of a living wage is not the issue at all. This is a problem which has grown slowly over time and in layers, as more "bits" of unnecessary overhead, rent capture or other external costs are added on. That in turn raises business costs to meet the most recent add on, rents again rise to take advantage of added wages, and so the cycle continues. The role of the central banks in all this is to maintain money for the system which the citizens in fact create.  Nonetheless they get the blame for "inflation" that local economies create, and central banks are hardly the reason that local economies have - even if inadvertently - put more pressure on their lower income citizens to look elsewhere for a life, even as these lower income jobs come into greater abundance.

We mostly ignored this while it was happening to the lower classes, but now it has started to impact the middle classes to a significant degree, as these two linked posts from Marginal Revolution show. Perhaps the real story of civilization is especially that of many communities just pushing their own citizens out over time. From the second link:

...lower wage and mid wage occupations saw significantly bigger declines in their real wages than did higher-wage occupations...occupations in the bottom three quintiles saw their median wages decline by 3 percent or more.

Part of such wage differential can be attributed to the overall local development complexes. They encourage new housing for income levels beyond what is actually present in the area, in job potential. That is, each community would strive to gain higher income residents rather than cater to lower income residents, in that more expensive building choices also create larger tax bases. There are actually plenty of rational reasons (for the short term) to encourage consumption higher than the abilities of one's citizens, or local economies would not do so on such a consistent basis. The problems of course come in the long term, when infrastructure sometimes needs to start from scratch and there is little money to do so. Municipal bankruptcies due to replacing outdated infrastructure are already a reality.

Even if one takes the idea of high paid city union workers or pensions out of the mix, there are still the security and infrastructural elements which make any municipality want to continue increasing a tax base over time. However, the tipping point is finally a reality in which not enough high income citizens exist to fulfill the dreams of home builder contractors and would be financiers. We are left with a situation in which not only are too few jobs adequate to maintain this once understandable definition of local wealth, but both individual and municipality have become economically fragile by the process itself. No amount of livable income or sufficient work time can presently make up the difference, for either.

If municipalities can reconsider both infrastructure and construction needs based on technological innovation, decentralized infrastructure options and true income matching in product offering, these problems can eventually be overcome. But until they are, the idea of middle class and individual responsibility now hangs in the balance. We can no longer use the buildings we live and work in as a wealth based means to hijack our own time. After all, our time feels too short as it is, to do all we want to accomplish in a day.

If there is a paradox in all this, it would be that in order to take care of the middle class, we start by taking care of the problems of the poor. Had we stopped to do that in the first place, i.e. allowing full throttle technology and innovation for lightweight building and construction, middle class definition would not have become such an issue. This quote from The Browser (Joseph Brodsky) illustrates the hapless situation of the present: "The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time." The lack of space in our lives and too much time on the hands of those left out, are the prison we now live in. We have the capacity to overcome prisons of every kind, through the use of our own imaginations. Society only needs to find the will, to let it happen.