How to Be Idle

Wil Wilkinson talks to Robert Litan from the Brookings Institute for a solid hour about how great money is and how it solves all of our problems. Lest you think I'm joking, I encourage you to watch. Libertarians go to church, so to speak, more than any other ideological niche. Every discussion among libertarians eventually turns into a contest to see who can conjure up the most embarrassing reverie about how incredibly awesome capitalism is. It's exhausting. Wilkinson himself uses religious terminology to describe his great affection for money twice in the diavlog. I understand and appreciate ideological enthusiasm, but like most theology, libertarian capital-worship is remarkably resistant to outsider argument.

Wilkinson takes pains to say that he doesn't think that money is all that's important in life, and fair enough. He's certainly more educated and smarter than I am in the field of economics. But he privileges capital acquisition above almost all other things, politically, and has the great credulity (I would say naivete) that many arch-capitalists share that economic growth will someday sweep us all up in a great flood of abundance and righteousness, that rising tide lifting all of our boats. And this, to me, is theology, faith. I don't think the available evidence is compelling enough to support the notion that, some day, if we just get the gears of capitalism working freely enough, we'll stop having poor. And I don't even mean relative poor; I believe that, left merely to the crass casualty of the markets, there will always be real, crippling poverty. The belief otherwise is the essence of utopian libertarianism.

The question begging that tends to come with these discussions seems to me to be unconquerable. When libertarians, for example, mock France for having a 35-hour work week, they confront the question with such a pinched, narrow vision that they are unable to see the other perspective. Perhaps it is less productive, in purely mercenary terms, to have a 35 hour work week. But that only means that the French don't consider economic productivity the end-all, be-all of human existence. It only means that the French see value in having more time in the day and in the week, time to eat and sleep and relax and socialize and, you know, have fun. But once someone has decided that only productivity, the accumulation of capital, is important, there's no way to genuinely confront the issue at hand. This is what I mean when I say that Wilkinson tends to insist on a rather narrow framework for discussion of these issues. (Wilkinson and Litan use the phrase "being better off" to describe making more money repeatedly, which is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.)

So: a corrective recommendation. Tom Hodgkinson's writing and ideas, and particularly his book How to Be Idle, are the antidote for capital obsession. Hodgkinson writes about living life prioritizing simple pleasures, spiritual fulfillment (in the general, not religious, sense), and personal reflection. He believes in sleeping in, skipping work, spending significant time doing nothing, idleness and freedom. He's an advocate for drinking, making music and daydreaming. He is, in short, someone who believes in privileging human experience over the acquisition of yet more material goods. His work is the anti-productivity.

Of course, many free market capitalists and libertarians would respond with their favorite line of argument, that this insistence on the primacy of actual human experience is in fact a trick of the bourgeoisie. Only the affluent, according to this vision, have the ability to privilege these things. It's a libertarian's favorite bullet to fire against liberals like me who criticize the preeminence of money. First of all, this is a dodge-- the financial situation of a person who advocates these things is immaterial to the question of to what extent we should prioritize making money. Second of all it simply isn't true that everyone who thinks this way is wealthy, or that it takes affluence to be able to have these kinds of values. A great deal of Hodgkinson's writing concerns how to live cheaply, to get by with less, and to get maximum value out of what you do have. It's a weird notion, that counsel to consume less is a mark of privilege. But I encounter it all the time.

Wilkinson, I'm sure, would have very little use for Hodgkinson. I imagine Hodgkinson would have similar disinterest in Wilkinson. The difference, of course, is that those of us who don't think that acquiring more money is the only way to a fairer and happier society tend to leave those of us who do to their own devices. Whereas the other side can't seem to go without impugning the other side's integrity, intelligence and Very Serious-ness.

Update: Commenter Charles Johnson deploys the "you just don't understand economics" feint, and in doing so again demonstrates my point, taking France's high unemployment rate as proof positive that France's system is a failure. But, again-- the people of France value different social indicators than the people of America do. It is possible to believe, you know, that higher unemployment isn't the worst thing in the world, if it is accompanied by a robust social service. This is the kind of assumption of the supremacy of capitalist values I was talking about.