Episode 179 - Unemployment Transcript

[00:00:00] David: Hello, and welcome to Overthink

[00:00:01] Ellie: The podcast where two philosophy professors bring big ideas to everyday life

[00:00:06] David: I'm David Peña-Guzmán

And I'm Ellie Anderson

As always, for an ad-free extended version of this episode, community discussion, and more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack

[00:00:17] Ellie: Before we get into the very exciting content of today's episode, uh, David and I have a very important announcement to share, and I say this with a heavy and yet also a joyful and grateful heart. We are going to be ending the official "Overthink" podcast this summer at the end of August. Ah!

[00:00:43] David: It's hard to know how to share this information, but it's something that we decided together and that, as Ellie said, we share with a combination of feelings. I mean, I feel very sad, I feel very happy, I feel very thankful to you, Ellie, to our listeners. And it's not a decision that we made lightly. Um, it's something that we've been thinking about for some time, and the time now feels right for us to end on a high and positive note

note

[00:01:09] Ellie: does. It does. I am, I'm imagining

that this is coming as unwelcome news to many of you. Maybe some of you are like, "I was sick of you anyway. I'm done." Or like,

"I randomly found myself listening to or watching this and where am I?" I think the majority of you may not be feeling that way. Um, and so we will just say we are so excited for these next few episodes. Our last episode will be number 182, and we're overall just extremely proud of what we've achieved. And so I feel mostly really positive about this decision.

Obviously, there's a lot I will miss about Overthink. We are gonna keep the podcast available. We're gonna keep the YouTube videos up, and so don't worry, none of the Overthink you love will go away. But we will at the end of August be ceasing production of our main podcast episodes and will be pausing any and all billing for our Substack

[00:02:01] David: Yeah, so our last day officially is August 25th. Mark your calendars, send us gifts in the mail, do whatever your heart compels you to do. But I think it's a good moment for us to just, you know, remember the good things about Overthink, of which there were, there are many. I mean, we've had it, this show for five years,

And we've had an episode either every week or every two weeks.

Like, and we've never missed a

single

[00:02:27] Ellie: never have.

[00:02:29] David: that

[00:02:29] Ellie: Yes. Yes. The l- the past year where we were doing weekly episodes was too much.

It was,

[00:02:36] David: We wanted to

[00:02:36] Ellie: we could handle. Yeah. I will say a little bit more about that in, um, a moment, but I will say we have now gone back to every other week episodes

before, um, finishing. But yeah, every week or every other week for over five years.

We

first ideated Overthink" almost six years ago to the day of when our last episode will air, because, um, it was actually in August 2020

that we recorded, uh, our first episode and then had to re-record it because it was so

bad. And I guess we actually started ideating it even before that then, so

[00:03:07] David: Yeah, so it will have been six years. And, uh, Ellie, I'm very thankful to you for being my partner. It's been a wonderful journey, and I'm really happy that we're leaving on good terms and, uh, you know, looking forward to what's next. Because we've really done, I think, great job, not to toot our own horn too much, but I think it's fair to feel proud of what one has done when one has put a good amount of work into

it

[00:03:33] Ellie: really proud. I mean, we were friends for almost a decade before we launched "Overthink." We will remain friends, uh, after

"Overthink"

ends. Yeah, we

[00:03:41] David: since.

[00:03:43] Ellie: But do think we've had a really interesting different form of our relationship that has emerged through the show, and I am just, like, so grateful for having worked with you.

I think our hunch that we would make a good podcast together was totally right, and I'm excited for more potential collaborations in the future in whatever form that might take.

I do think it's fair to say that philosophy is a lot more in mainstream discourse than it was six years ago. That's definitely not entirely due to us, but I think like, you know, if we've had some small role to play there, that's amazing.

[00:04:12] David: And there are the ways in which the field has changed, , but also the way in which we have changed as persons because of Overthink. And at least in my case, I wanna note that when we began Overthink, I was beginning to question my relationship to philosophy as a discipline, and that had a lot to do with personal issues, but it also had to do with the institutional reality that I did not get hired in a philosophy department.

And so I thought, if philosophy doesn't want me, why should I want it? Why not pivot to something else? And I credit Overthink, uh, single-handedly, with helping me work through my relationship to the discipline and, , rehabilitating it, actually. And so, you know, that's something that's been extremely meaningful to me, especially as now I find myself coming back to a philosophy department for reasons unconnected to Overthink.

Um, and so it's been a bit of a full circle where I began not being sure of what my relationship was to it, and now feeling much more comfortable calling myself a philosopher and embracing this relationship. And so thank you, Ellie, and thank you, Overthink, for helping me make that pivot.

[00:05:25] Ellie: Oh, no, that's incredible. I feel like for me it's just been such a constant source of joy to learn about a lot of things that we hadn't previously known. I mean, some of the episodes are totally in our wheelhouse. They're drawing on things that we work on. And other episodes like, "Oh, wow, I, you know, read four books on this topic and I'd

never known anything about it before."

And so I think the format of "Overthink" uniquely played to our skill sets as philosophers who are trained in the history of philosophy and who have a pretty wide base of knowledge. But I also ended up honing a different, set of research skills, I would say, in addition to learning a bunch more content than prior.

And so I would say, like, that's what I'm most grateful for, and that's also what I'm gonna miss the most. I'm gonna miss the

most having a quick thought, idea, seeing something on TV, having a conversation with somebody, and being like, "Oh, that's an Overthink episode." And then getting to come to you with

it, getting to talk with you and with our student workers about how to bring this, you know, episode to life.

So I know we will both have a lot of different iterations of our public-facing philosophy career.

I don't think this is the last time you will, yeah, hear us on a podcast mic. But I think it feels like, feels like the right time to sort of wrap "Overthink" up and,

um, even though there-- I know I will h- be missing it a lot in future months.

I will say, um, you know, the best ways to stay in touch with us, David, you can speak for yourself. I will say for me, I'm gonna remain really active on Substack.

That's actually something I'm planning to put more of my time and energy into, and so you can check my work out on Substack at ellieanderphd. I'm also on Instagram with the same handle. I think I still technically have an X and a Blue Sky account, but I haven't used them in a while. Who knows? Maybe that will change.

But definitely, uh, Instagram is a place where you can reach me as well.

[00:07:13] David: Yeah, and for me, you can reach me by googling my email address, , whether that is my personal one, which is davidmpena@gmail.com, or my professional one, which is davidmpena@sfsu.edu. and I look forward to thinking about what is next for me, , whether I will continue to have a public-facing presence. I suspect so.

In what form? I'm also really looking forward to getting back into writing and into research that is more specialized rather than what you said is, you know, this, um, maybe a topic of the week, uh, epistemology that we've had in over, I think, which has been wonderful, but also a trade-off, right, in terms of the work and the kind of thinking that we do.

[00:07:56] Ellie: Yeah, and I have to say, I think that's part of why I'm feeling ready to, uh, close this chapter because I think the breadth of topics we've covered on "Overthink," although there are still many more topics that we could, you know, take an "Overthink" approach to, um, I think that breadth felt right for a particular moment, both for myself personally and also for the role of philosophy in the broader landscape of intellectual discourse. but I think I'm feeling like we're living in a bit of a different moment that might need a somewhat different approach.

[00:08:28] David: No regrets, um,, only love, but Overthink is coming to an end.

[00:08:35] Ellie: Wipe your tears 'cause we're now about to start the actual main content of this episode, which promises to be very exciting. Not, not apropos actually of the announcement we just made since the topic is unemployment. Although I don't know whether it would be fair to say that we've ever technically been employed by Overthink because we haven't really made any money

from it.

[00:08:53] David: the problem.

[00:08:55] Ellie: Uh, in any case, um, yeah, join us for the remaining episodes and we look forward to staying in touch with you Now for the topic at hand. Unemployment.

Unemployment is a constant anxiety for the working person under capitalism. To lose a job can be detrimental to our physical and mental well-being, increasing the daily stress you have to manage, and lowering your self-esteem. Without secure employment, you lose not only your livelihood, like how are you literally gonna make ends meet?

Um, How are you gonna pay your rent? How are you gonna pay your grocery bill? How are you gonna pay for childcare if you have kids? But also access to health insurance and the ability to support family members who can't work themselves, whether those are children or not.

[00:09:39] David: I found a post on Reddit on r/jobs with 4,000 upvotes and 1,000 comments that I think speaks to the psychological impact of unemployment.

Somebody said the following, and it just resonated with me as a very powerful expression of the condition of the unemployed. "People don't understand just how torturing and soul-crushing long-term unemployment can be. I've done everything you're supposed to do. I have a supposedly competitive MSC from a supposedly top uni.

I have technical skills. I have internships with big names on my CV and good references. I speak languages. I know people. I apply left and right. I use keywords. I have a CV that's been professionally reviewed. I engage with people on LinkedIn. Job searching is a full-time job by this point, and still, I have nothing to show for it.

It's completely soul-shattering. I have no money and no savings left. My friends and acquaintances have a life, do things, get married, make plans, give birth to kids, start mortgages, book trips. I can't do anything because I don't have the money, and I am depressed because I feel like I have no future."

[00:10:58] Ellie: Mm. This is just so evocative and so devastating, and I think indicative also of the dilemma that so many people find themselves in. I'm struggling to come up with a good metaphor for this, but as you were reading that, David, I was thinking about like to try and get on a fast-moving train to, time it just right that you'll be able to grab the handle of a train car and launch yourself inside it when a door is open. It just just sounds, like, so difficult, but then when you're actually on the train, it's like, "Oh, look at the nice sur- landscape surrounding me." And it just

seems so easy that you've gotten on the train, and of course you will remain on the train, right?

Although more and more people are getting thrown off the train at any particular point

[00:11:45] David: Well, and it's not just that you are trying to get on a train that's moving very fast and it's very dangerous for you to make the transition, but then you have people on the train yelling at you, "Oh my gosh, why don't you like trains? Are you taking a break from trains? Um, uh, you, it must be nice, uh, standing on the ground without having to worry about where you're going."

And so

[00:12:06] Ellie: like one hot dog that's thrown out to you by some rando on the train, and then they're like, "Oh, see? You're, you're getting public assistance."

[00:12:14] David: Yeah. Yeah, and like the, the hot dog doesn't even land anywhere near you, right? Like, I, I, mean, the, the metaphor is maybe getting away from us like the train,

[00:12:21] Ellie: I the, the hot dog was maybe a

little

questionable

[00:12:23] David: but but, but it does capture, um, I think the sense of speed is right, the sense of being left behind, the sense of high stakes and danger is right, and the sense of other people judging you without understanding or thinking about the situation from your perspective is right.

[00:12:40] Ellie: although maybe you think I should be prohibited from adding more to this metaphor after the hotdog, uh, part of it, but I feel like also we need to think about the, what the ground the person is running on is like.

It's is not just a smooth and even terrain. This is an extremely challenging terrain. It's like, you know, uphill. They're trying trying not to lose their breath. They're trying not to faint, pass out, maybe even die. It's like a quicksand is pulling them under because their, their basic conditions for sustaining their life are not even present

[00:13:09] David: Okay, I, I know I feel weird, like, adding a humorous element to what is a very serious discussion,

[00:13:13] Ellie: know as I'm saying all of this, I feel so intense. Like, this is so awful. But yeah,

I know, the like, your metaphor also breaks down 'cause, like, you know, the, the terrain of somebody running but it's

[00:13:23] David: also so quick, Sam. prevents you from running. That, that part doesn't quite work, but I think the, the image in general and the feelings that we're trying to evoke are correct.

And we'll talk about this later in the episode, but the political theorist Michael Denning I think got it right when he said that Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited. So yes, the train might have a lot of problems with it, but they don't really compare to the lived experience of those who are denied entry into

[00:13:58] Ellie: Yeah. I feel bad that I created a weird mixed metaphor when I really... Like, I, I can't tell you how much I'm just, like, feeling this in my core right now. Um,, had some very precarious, uh, employment in the past and periods where I wasn't sure where that next paycheck was coming from, and, you know, who knows what the future is for any of us as well. So I think this line from Denning is great because it highlights the false choice at the heart of capitalist society.

You might have some choice in what line of work you pursue depending on your circumstances. So nobody forced me to become a philosophy professor. That was a choice I made. I was it comes to work in general, the choice is between a job or struggling to meet your basic needs. Work isn't an option we take up, but it's an imperative that's imposed on us by the conditions that we live in.

And as that imperative is experienced as a constant looming anxiety of falling through the cracks

[00:14:57] David: Today we are talking about unemployment Is unemployment a bug or a feature of capitalism?

Is AI going to put us all out of a job?

[00:15:06] Ellie: And how does widespread unemployment fuel reactionary politics?

[00:15:11] David: It feels like we're always talking about AI on the show these days, sad but true. Yeah, it, but it's impossible not to talk about AI in an episode about unemployment. Just last year, ChatGPT was putting eight fingers on every hand that it drew, and it couldn't identify how many Ps are in the word strawberry. But it seems like AI is now in a new league. I don't know if you've heard about this, Ellie, but the company Anthropic recently decided not to release its newest model, called Mythos, to the public due to safety concerns.

And basically, the reason is that it's too powerful and too good. They said that the decision was made because the LLM performed really highly on hacking and on cybersecurity tests. So apparently, the model found vulnerabilities in every single major browser and operating system that it was tested on, including bugs that were very nuanced and decades old

[00:16:16] Ellie: Yeah. Yeah, we have seen the rapid evolution of generative AI, not in a way that I think a lot of the people in Silicon Valley are seeing it as like we're approaching singularity, but certainly the decision to keep Mythos out of the public was like a very telling moment. We are

recording this a bit before, , the episode comes out, so it could be that things have changed by the time listeners hear it.

But your point stands, of course, that it is getting better at a very rapid rate

[00:16:44] David: Yeah, and granted, chatbots are still very clumsy in relation to some basic skills and some reasoning tasks, right? Like, they're not yet at the level of a human, adult performer. But it's also the case that some of the new models are making a lot fewer mistakes than they did even a year ago. Not to mention that AI is now entering into the domain of, you know, deepfakes that really put pressure on our ability to tell what is real versus what is fake.

So it's producing now, um, video content that is virtually indistinguishable from reality in a lot of cases. And you know, I consider myself a relatively l- uh, AI literate person, and I have been fooled by, various videos, thinking that they're real, and then later realizing that they're actually AI generated.

And so it's really hard not to wonder, will AI, as it gets better and better at more and more things, put us out of our jobs if it can suddenly replace us?

[00:17:49] Ellie: Yeah, and I think you and I have a lot of thoughts on why AI couldn't do what we do. Uh, but, you know, that's not the point of this.

I'm sure a

lot of people in different-- Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people in different fields have that view, but there are certainly some tasks that it could do for most jobs at least.

And all the hype coming from the CEOs of the tech world is certainly stoking this fear that AI is gonna take our jobs. But I think there are some good reasons to take the question seriously, even from a broader standpoint than, you know, each of us in different professions being like, "It can't take over what we do," right?

example, researchers at OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania claimed recently that 49% of US jobs are at risk of being exposed to LLMs, and a similar study run by the consulting firm McKinsey, derogatory, concluded that 57% of US work hours could be automated with AI and robots.

So they're like, "Yeah, they could take your jobs." But the historian and social theorist Aaron Benanav has some quite compelling critiques of these studies. He mainly points out that they work only in theory, and they don't take into account important practical considerations. Just because a task could imaginably be automated doesn't mean it's profitable to automate it

[00:19:05] David: Yeah, I love how they put it. You know, these jobs are gonna be exposed to LLMs as if LLMs are a force of nature like rain. Like, there is nothing we can do to stop it, we just have to not expose ourselves to it, uh, find refuge. Um, but I think your point about, you know, like just because in theory they could do it doesn't mean that it's feasible, uh, is really good, and I think we see this play out in robotics. We are constantly promised robot cashiers, robot baristas, you name it, but the cost of actually implementing complicated robots that are functional in restaurants or in coffee shops far outweighs the cost of just hiring a human, at least given the current state of robotics.

And that's especially true in the, service sector, where workers have to do really complicated embodied things in order to perform their function, right? Like, they have to, like, leap over obstacles. They have to, like, navigate narrow spaces. They have, um, to manage a lot of relations and moving pieces. So even though robotic automation is theoretically possible, it may not be economically feasible, and that's an important point to keep in

[00:20:16] Ellie: Yeah. And I think one example of this that's really funny is the Neo home robot, which was supposed to be a home housework robot. It cost 20K. You could buy it from this, you know, startup, the, the Neo startup. And the idea was that for the cost of a car, right, 20K, you'll have a robot who can do your dishes for you and do all of these other household tasks that we love not to do and that, you know, are time-consuming and boring.

But then the videos that the company released showed that the Neo home robot seemed not to be able to do basic things like close a dishwasher

[00:20:54] David: Oh, wow.

[00:20:54] Ellie: like, not break your grandma's china perhaps. Um, and the company then ended up admitting that the robots were often being remotely controlled by humans, but that the idea was that in selling the Neo home robot and having users use them repeatedly, they would be able to train the robots.

Like, this is s- also so creepy surveillance state. They would be able to train the robots so eventually the Neo home robots could do the things that they were saying they could do.

[00:21:25] David: Oh my God, so you're essentially paying to be the training data for future robots as the person who is employing or buying one of these. Um, and no, but I think this speaks to just how difficult it is to perform, especially like physical movements for robots, like, you know, how to ride a bike or how to like walk over uneven terrain, which is why, to just throw another example, Amazon has been doing a lot of automation of a lot of things, but the thing they cannot seem to automate is what is called the last mile, which is like actually delivering the package from the truck to the front of your house, because robots can't adapt to the, to the terrain.

They can't like jump over the dog or like adapt to the irregular sidewalk. And I think that principle that there is a difference between theoretical possibility and economic implementable reality also applies to AI. So it's not just robotics, it's also just AI even without the robotic application. It's just not yet clear what implementing AI in most jobs would actually look like yet.

That's a discussion that people are having, right? Like, what's the role of AI in this profession or in this field, and can it really do the job that a human needs to be able to do? And so there might be some jobs where you can incorporate AI, but maybe AI won't fully automate the job in question. And so there have been cases, you know, where people are fired because companies want to automate with AI, and then those same people have to be hired back because they realize that the AI can't actually, supplant or replace the human intellect and the human skillset.

[00:23:07] Ellie: after all. Yeah, I mean, Benanov in his book, "Automation and the Future of Work," also makes an important point that I wanna discuss here. The worry that automation will bring about mass unemployment is not new. It's in fact a recurring part of capitalist society, and so when you say, like, we're constantly being told that we're gonna get replaced by robots, this constantly being told goes back quite far. 2010s, in the 1980s, in the 1950s, and so on, all the way back to the 1830s with texts like Charles Babbage's "On the Economy of Machines and Manufacturers." Benanov also points out that these anxieties about automation are often paired with utopian fantasies for a world without work altogether.

If technology will put us all out of work, maybe we should embrace it, and you see this with the growing popularity of universal basic income as a solution to automation and unemployment. It's taken for granted, and this, you see this actually on, among people on both the left and the right, that technological change will create a world that can run almost entirely without human labor, and proponents of UBI argue that this new world will require radical changes to the way that work is structured under capitalism, or perhaps a move beyond capitalism altogether, right?

And so here the idea is like, yeah, most of us will be put out of jobs, but maybe that's actually not so bad

as long as we have other things to, you know, to put in place to make sure that people are surviving.

[00:24:43] David: Yeah, as soon as the utopian fantasy becomes a reality. But I like putting this in the historical context that you put it in, thinking about the history of technology and the role of automation in the structuring of the workforce, since the 1830s, and, you know, we can say probably even before that. because it's really easy to get wrapped up in the novelty of AI, and I think in some cases that makes a lot of sense, but in others it doesn't, because it is just another new technology that is a profit accumulation, tool.

And so it's not as if it's unprecedented in that way. so what I, I wanna know is what Benanav says about the risk of automation. So I understand that there is this history of technology, uh, creating these fears, but also, fueling this fantasy that maybe we will also move to a better society where we don't work.

But what does he say about the present moment? Is AI actually threatening to put us out of work, or is that not really a threat?

[00:25:46] Ellie: Well, he thinks that the automation discourse gets some things right and some things wrong. So first, it does put its finger on a real problem. Global capitalism is failing to provide good jobs for an increasing number of people. And I think it's really important to point out here that unemployment statistics don't capture the severity of the problem.

They don't include all unemployed people, and they often don't capture the increase in precarious underemployment, such as part-time or contract work that barely makes a living

[00:26:16] David: Mm-hmm. No, I-- So remember when we interviewed, uh, Premilla Nadasen for

[00:26:21] Ellie: care episode yeah

[00:26:23] David: Yeah, in her book, she has this statistic about statistics that just I cannot forget about, which is that in the US, in a lot of, statistical analyses, you only count as unemployed officially if you are unemployed and actively seeking a job.

So the people who have become discouraged because they keep looking for a job, but they can't get one, and so they stop looking for a job, they don't even get counted, which means that there's actually a lot more unemployed people than we think that there are because of this artifice of statistics. And also, in other official statistics, you also count as employed if you work one hour a week, right?

Like, like nobody in their right mind would consider that actual employment.

[00:27:08] Ellie: So unless you're really, really running for that train, you don't count. If you take A pause to breathe, you are, yeah, you're, you're not counted. If you temporarily grab hold of the handle on the train and hoist yourself up, but then you don't make it inside and then you, you know, fall back down, you're not counted.

There's so, so many people who are not counted here. Being said, we often think that unemployment and underemployment are caused by technological innovation. The myth that automation will put everyone out of work, while a persistent one that goes back centuries, and like I said, one that is popular among both left and right, Benkler thinks this whole myth is wrong.

he thinks the primary cause is not technological innovation, but global economic stagnation. Stagnation leads to a persistently low demand for labor. And so when the economy is growing faster than productivity, technological innovation actually doesn't lead to job loss.

Companies will just hire more people and make more money. So if the economy's doing really well, let's say the demand for cars is especially high, the car company will hire more people, even if they also are investing in some fancy new assembly line technology. But once the economy slows down, it starts to be more profitable for companies to shed labor.

The demand for workers goes down, and people lose their jobs

[00:28:34] David: so just to clarify this, Ellie, the idea seems to be that unemployment is less a consequence of technology and technological development, and more something that depends on economic cycles of growth and stagnation in which technology is implicated, but it's not the only driver.

[00:28:54] Ellie: And what is true of technology for making cars is also true of AI and the digital revolution. It's wrong to say that new digital technologies single-handedly automated away the need for labor because those technologies lead to more employment whenever the economy is actually in really good shape.

So the problem is that according to Benanav, our economy has been slowing down since the 1970s, and this is what Robert Brenner calls the long downturn. And so global growth rates have been slowing, which even mainstream economists have started to acknowledge. They call it secular stagnation. And why the global economy is stagnating is a big question.

Benanav's explanation draws from Marxism. Capitalism has a structural tendency to seek profit at all costs, And in doing so, spreads technological developments all over the place so widely that the technology becomes omnipresent

[00:29:49] David: Okay. I mean, so we are not economists, so I'm not gonna weigh in on the, not that I could, you know, on the details of this theory and the debates behind it. But I think Benanov's point is really helpful in shifting our focus away from is AI the problem, and to broader dynamics of capital, capitalist accumulation, and just the way in which technology fits into a larger mode of production.

And normally we tend to think about unemployment especially in personal terms, right? We think about it as a failure of the individual, either to find a job or to develop marketable skills, and we know that that's wrong. But even thinking about unemployment as a small glitch in the capitalist system that spikes during times of crisis and recovers during periods of growth may not be entirely right either. and it seems to me like we ought to think about unemployment as a permanent feature of our economic reality, that as long as we are under capitalism, and honestly this is an observation that Marx made already in the 19th century, there will be unemployed and the number of the unemployed have to increase over time. And so in a sense, it seems like we are facing an unemployment catastrophe. if we keep in mind especially this idea of the long downturn, that our economy has been kind of in the toilet since the 1970s, we are facing an unemployment catastrophe because if unemployment increases when the economy is down, and it's been down for a long time with no signs of recovery, then we should expect unemployment to get worse and worse with the passage of time unless there is a radical restructuring of the economy. and so I think unemployment really should be viewed as a feature of capitalism.

It's a necessary byproduct of capitalism, and not a small error that we could fix from within capitalism, which is often how I think it's interpreted and understood by economists and sometimes political theorists

[00:32:02] Ellie: Yeah, and not just unemployment, but the low demand for labor. That's a feature of capitalism at this particular juncture, Benanov says that's what proponents of technocratic solutions like universal basic income often miss. He points out that wealth redistribution is certainly helpful. It can be great, but it doesn't get at the root of the problem. UBI assumes technological progress will independently bring about the conditions to move beyond capitalism, whether it's through fully automated luxury communism or what have you.

And, you know, I found this challenging 'cause I'm in general a supporter of UBI, but I take his point that in reality, it's still a kind of technocratic solution to a problem that goes far beyond such solutions.

Technology can't do the work of changing our social relations for us. And for Benanov, this means that we have to think less about such solutions and more about social movements that can really address the deeper structural issues.

[00:32:55] David: Ellie, now that we've talked about AI and some of these misconceptions about whether it leads to unemployment or not, I wanna talk about the concept of unemployment itself. Right off the bat that unemployment is a negative concept. It's defined as a lack of a lack of employment or an exclusion from wage labor, and the definition makes sense. It's intuitive to think about it. It's even built into the structure, unemployment, with the prefix.

But it reflects the fact that employment itself is often normalized as the basic condition of life under capitalism, and not just the basic condition, but the ideal and only rational way of existing under capitalism. So when we think about employment as the default and the ideal at once, unemployment becomes a deviation that we have to avoid, and if we fail to avoid it, we have to course-correct from it, both on a personal and a political level.

So I as individual need to do everything in my power to not be unemployed, and we as culture try to do everything in our power to minimize the number of the unemployed so that we can claim that we are a good, rational society

[00:34:13] Ellie: Yeah. No, this is such a good point that, like, it's taken as the default that people work and then unemployment is then understood as this deviation. And part of the stress of being unemployed is precisely feeling like you're at fault or somehow falling short of the norm. stigma around being unemployed, especially for longer periods of time, and I've been feeling this a lot in my social circle in LA in the past few years because after the combination of COVID, the writers' strike, and the streaming bubble bursting, a lot of my very successful friends who work in the industry here in Hollywood have been out of work and have then been launched into a crisis.

They're like: "Oh, I was-- I had this really successful career in Hollywood, and now suddenly the rug is pulled from under me when I'm, like, in my 30s, 40s, even 50s, and what do I do about that?" Right? And obviously there are the material aspects, but also really those psychological ones. there's also the fact that during the pandemic, a lot of people became unemployed, and they often stayed unemployed for a long-ish period of time, and, you know, all of that makes sense.

Like, there were very good reasons why people, were But a recent psychological study showed that some employers still preferred and labeled or

[00:35:34] David: yeah. Um, the, the stigma, right, of having been unemployed. And we talked about a similar phenomenon our illness episode, where talk about how there is a strong social against missing work because of a global pandemic, um, and or even a common cold, right? Like even more so a common cold. So there's like this idea that you have to w- go to work no matter what, unless you're dying, and at that point maybe we'll overlook it.

And, uh, in our everyday lives, I think we treat unemployment like a blemish that must be covered up as soon as possible, right, with makeup, and we see that even in the way of speaking. Like when people lose their jobs, often they refuse to say they are unemployed. They say, "I'm between jobs." Right? Like the- that's, that's a, that's a different way of presenting what amounts to the same reality.

And here I wanna talk a little bit more about Michael Denning, whom I mentioned earlier, because he argues that the key concept for understanding capitalism is not employment, but actually unemployment. So

[00:36:40] Ellie: Hmm.

[00:36:41] David: we often assume capitalism is all about making people work so you can exploit them in the workplace, so you can extract as much, uh, profit from their labor.

But Denning thinks that this is overstated. Instead, he argues, we need to center what he calls wageless life, which is the condition not of those who work, but of those who desperately need to work, but don't, for many reasons.

So wageless life is life under capitalism outside of wage labor, and there are a lot of subjective positions that fit under this category. So you have people who are literally in between jobs for a short period of time. You have the unemployed, independently of for how long they've been unemployed.

You have the elderly and also, of course, you have children. And his argument is that if we think about capitalism from the perspective of unemployment rather than employment, we don't just get a more comprehensive view of the problem, but we actually get a better view of the problem. So it reshapes the way we think about capitalism as a whole

[00:37:52] Ellie: Okay, interesting. I, I think there's a trivial way to think about this nobody literally born into a job, right? You always have to start unemployed and then you gain employment. that he's not making that trivial claim.

[00:38:08] David: no,

[00:38:10] Ellie: is

[00:38:10] David: more sophisticated conceptual point.

[00:38:13] Ellie: just like children don't work, they are wageless.

[00:38:15] David: yeah.

[00:38:16] Ellie: take it

[00:38:17] David: them a job immediately. Um, no, so by introducing this concept of wageless life, Denning wants to separate the state of living outside of formal wage labor from the various ways in which we think about the experience of living outside of formal wage labor.

So he says there is wageless life, and there are the ways that we represent wageless life in order to control it and govern it in different ways. And so he points out, for example, that the term unemployment is a lot more recent and narrow than most of us think. It was first used in the 1800s, in the late 1800s, to displace earlier terms, like the poor, the idle, uh, or even the Marxist concept of the lump- lumpenproletariat.

[00:39:09] Ellie: Hmm.

[00:39:10] David: And since then, once it was introduced, and especially as we moved away from criminalizing or moralizing about unemployment, economists started thinking about it, , especially in the US and Europe, as something that needs to be solved by means of economic policy and better governance. So this was the principle behind early 20th century movements for social democracy, right? Like, unemployment needs to be studied by the government, it needs to be measured, and it needs to be solved with things like trade unions or unemployment insurance at a government level, right?

And so Denning's core insight here is that we represent wageless life in a particular way with this notion of unemployment, and then that allows us to govern the subjects who fall into that category in this way, right? With government programs and top-down management

[00:40:07] Ellie: Hmm. So it's not a coincidence that we tend to think of unemployment as a problem to be solved by returning to the norm of full employment. It-- The term itself only emerged with this kind of governance

[00:40:20] David: Yeah, no, that, that's exactly right. The term and the governance go hand in hand. some of the history that Denning writes about I think is relevant here, because this way of thinking about unemployment as something

[00:40:32] Ellie: kinda

[00:40:33] David: stands in need of governmental management is part of what led it to the rise of the welfare state in the wake of the Great Depression and after World War II. For a couple of decades, actually, in the 1950s and '60s, it really seemed that full employment could be achieved.

And you even see this with some of the idealism of the UN around, the discourse of work, where the right to work and protection against unemployment were enshrined as a human right, , by the UN in 1948. But when the economy began to slow down during the '70s and '80s, during that period that you mentioned, Ellie, called the long downturn, those protections started getting stripped away by neoliberal reforms.

And so the rise of neoliberalism, especially under Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK, sort of emerges as a reaction against the welfare state. And so we start moving away from the social protections that are meant to minimize unemployment, and we start, a large-scale process of economization and liberalization.

And so as neoliberalism takes off, the idea that unemployment is this marginal deviation from the norm that we need to avoid at all costs starts to disappear or crack because unemployment itself becomes more and more common, right? More and more people under neoliberalism find themselves out of a job, and so you can't say, "Oh, it's this aberration," because it's actually quite normal, , and visible to find people in a condition of unemployment.

And I think all of this really reached a climax, first with the 2008, , financial crisis, where lots of people lost their jobs and their homes, and then it reached another climax during COVID, and during the recession that, that it produced. And as you said, a lot of people also lost their jobs

[00:42:32] Ellie: Yeah. Yeah, and I'm-- The dismantling of the welfare state is still very much an ongoing process today. I'm thinking back to the episode you mentioned a bit ago, David, our care episode with Pramila Nadison about the crisis of care that many people are living through because social services are getting increasingly privatized, especially in Black and brown communities already marginalized by histories of racial oppression.

She has a lot there about how, up the relationship is between unemployment and welfare eligibility.

[00:42:59] David: Yeah, that's a great observation, Ellie, that we need to think about how different communities experience unemployment differently, and that's also a point that Denning makes in his work. He says, again, there is wageless life, just to reiterate the core idea, but then there are different ways in which we represent or think about that wageless life.

One of those ways is the concept of unemployment, but he says that concept is highly geographically and historically specific. It's really how people in American and European contexts think about wageless life, and maybe how they experience it too. Meanwhile, in places like Africa, Asia, and Latin America, histories of colonialism have that wage labor has never really been the norm, even after independence.

Denning says that in the colonial and the post-colonial context, wageless life isn't just an accident that you can be insured against or a macroeconomic failure that the state can save you from, it's actually the main mode of existence for colonized and neo- neo-col- colonized subjects. And that's why unemployment hasn't been the main concept that is used for governance in most places of the Global South.

Instead, , the dominant term for wageless life in these contexts is what he calls informality. Now that's a bit of a confusing term. You know, what does informality have to do with this? Basically, the concept of the informal economy was coined by economists in the 1970s to refer to the various

[00:44:38] Ellie: falls

[00:44:39] David: of self-employment, part-time, , temporary work that fall outside of the norm of wage labor. So think about your untaxed street vendor, , garment workers, day laborers.

And he says that this precarious existence under capitalism became normalized in these contexts, in places like Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and sort of people accepted it as part of what it means to live outside of the Global North. And so there's a difference here between the Global North that experiences wageless life as unemployment and the Global South that experiences it as this informal economy

[00:45:23] Ellie: Yeah, that's super interesting. This idea that like in context where unemployment is so widespread that it can't be treated as something to be solved by new policies, we have to call it something else altogether. so I'm wondering, do unemployment and informality cover the options here, or do we need something else altogether

[00:45:44] David: So

[00:45:45] Ellie: in discussing wageless life?

[00:45:46] David: yeah, so I think Denning's position is that these concepts are too historically and geographically specific, and so we actually need a new term for thinking about wageless

life. And he turns to Marx for an alternative and tries to reclaim the Marxist concept of the virtual pauper. So for Marx, the fundamental condition of workers under capitalism isn't employment.

Workers rather are defined by the possibility of being absorbed into wage labor, but always, once they are absorbed into wage labor, also by the possibility of being abandoned once again, once their labor is not needed. And so the Marxist notion of a virtual pauper is the idea that, look, we're all paupers virtually because we are disposable.

And so for Denning, this notion of the virtual pauper maybe captures better the truth of wageless life, that nobody is safe under capitalism from unemployment, even those who are currently employed, because everybody can be tossed away for no reason the moment their bosses, the capitalists, decide

[00:46:56] Ellie: Adults of all demographics can be unemployed or underemployed. But I think our standard way of thinking about unemployment tells us a lot about who we expect to work. I would say when I think about a paradigmatic character of unemployment, I think about a white man who has lost a job, either like a young white man who has lost a job, maybe like due to AI or something like that, or the pandemic, and especially an older white man who perhaps lost a manufacturing job due to the rise of globalization and other factors, um, that voided out the Rust Belt of all of its economic opportunity.

And I don't know, maybe that's just me. But I think that that paradigm, if that because the person I'm seeing there is somebody you might expect to be a breadwinner in the standard model that we have in our society, And I do think therefore it's the white man, especially the older white man, likely a blue collar former factory worker or somebody who worked in the manufacturing industry, who is seen as a particularly depressing figure of unemployment, somebody who stood to lose

[00:48:14] David: that we choose

[00:48:15] Ellie: whether or not they lost the most materially speaking.

Does this make sense?

[00:48:19] David: No, it does. So two observations I have about this is that, one, the figure as a starting point for thinking about unemployment changes the discussion altogether, right? And so beginning with, say, the figure of the white man who is despondent due to having lost their job leads us to have certain discussions about the role of white men, in, the workplace and their role in politics.

I think we get somewhere else if we start centering, say, the undocumented worker or, the single mom suddenly deemed unemployable. But I think you are right that in America, that figure of the white man who has lost their job and is rightfully angry at the world dominates our political imagination, and it is not just because of the relationship between men and work, but also because of the assumption that in the US, if anybody is to suffer, it shouldn't be white people, right?

And so this idea that white people should be at the throne or at,, in a position of comfort and affluence,

[00:49:23] Ellie: On the train

[00:49:24] David: yeah,

on the train.

On, on the throne that is at the front of the train. Let's just push this metaphor until it

crashes.

[00:49:32] Ellie: the throne. I, I actually think on the train, 'cause we're talking mainly about, like, potential blue-collar workers here. So the idea that I have in mind that I think really encapsulates this, is the song "Allentown" by Billy Joel, which came out in 1982. And the reason this song is very strongly on my radar is because I used to live in Allentown.

It was actually my first job after I finished my PhD, was a one-year sabbatical replacement in Allentown, where I spent most of my time being very grateful that I had a one-year job and terrified of looming potential unemployment until, like, another one-year job, you know, come, came and, caught me just at the right moment.

But "Allentown" is a song that, portrays the perceived disenfranchisement or sense of not being on the train that was widely experienced by, at the time, youngish men who were trying to seek jobs in the Rust Belt, 'cause Allentown is a to- is a city in Pennsylvania. and the lyrics of the song include lines like, "We're living here in Allentown and they're closing all the factories down. Our fathers fought the Second World War, spent their weekends on the Je- Shore, and we're living here in Allentown." And it, there's a sense of restlessness, of not knowing what to do because, you know, the parental figures, there's definitely, like, a nostalgia for post-World War II America here that we might wanna question.

Um, but there's a sense that the security that was afforded one's parents is not afforded these young men who don't have jobs. He says, "We're waiting here in Allentown for the Pennsylvania for the promises our teachers gave if we worked hard, if we behaved." Like, it's reminding me a lot of that Reddit post that you read out at the beginning

[00:51:11] David: Uh, yeah. No, I see that. And the, emotional coloring of the lyrics, , they point to nostalgia, they point to depression, they point to a sense of like... What, what's the term for, like, not seeing a future for yourself? Um, a finality perhaps, is that a way to describe that? Uh, yeah, Despair?

I think that's right.

And this is making me think actually about the analysis of white masculinity that we find in Wendy Brown's, , book, "In the Ruins of Neoliberalism," where she has a chapter at the very end of that book entitled, No Future For White Men: Nihilism, Fatalism, and Resentment, or Ressentiment, where she talks about how when you have that emotional profile, a combination of nihilism, of fatalism, of depression, in that subjective position, which is the white man who feels like they've been

Actually, she uses the term dethronement. Maybe that's why I was thinking about a throne, 'cause

[00:52:13] Ellie: Okay. I d- I did think that was kind of random, if I'm being honest.

[00:52:17] David: Yeah. no, actually, I think it's a case of, like, something from one book just, like, jumping me thinking it was originally my idea and plopping it, uh, in a discussion.

[00:52:25] Ellie: yeah, yeah, it happens

[00:52:26] David: yeah, and she says that when you have this combination of factors, somebody who feels entitled to something, they feel like that something is unfairly taken away from them, it produces these feelings that we just mentioned. The ultimate result is a kind of other-directed rage that manifests itself as what Brown herself calls the desublimation of the will to power.

And what she means by that, which it's, it's a combination, you know, of desublimation, um, from Freud and Marcuse, and the will to power from Nietzsche, but essentially what she means is that when you see yourself as being denied what is rightfully yours, even though your sense of what is rightfully yours is based on a fundamental social injustice, you are catapulted into a position that makes you very susceptible to fascist propaganda.

And in particular, it's something that makes you act out in rage and anger toward those around you that you see as more vulnerable than you. Women, queer people, trans people, um, immigrants especially.

[00:53:37] Ellie: Yeah

[00:53:38] David: yeah, the way she s- she, she puts it, which I think is really good for us to think about, is how the feeling of dethronement often results in a self-arrogated right to hurt others.

And I think the figure of the white man who feels like they've lost their job, the immigrants have taken it, the women are not respecting him, is precisely the figure that then feels entitled to lashing out against others and gets some gratification from it along the way

[00:54:07] Ellie: Yeah. I mean, I was finding and, and doing a little research on this, I found things like a Tucker Carlson segment where he just had, like, a fake graph up on Fox News in 2021 claiming that the female labor participation rate was nearly 20 points higher than men's, although the male rate is actually higher, right?

And so basically, like, blaming the influx of women into the workplace for men's unemployment, and I think we see a lot of that rhetoric around the aggrieved unemployed man in our society today. I think that man is very often white, but actually, not necessarily so, and I do think that the popularity of Trump among Latino voters, uh, was really wrapped up in this as well, this um, gains with Black men, same thing. And there are a number of men that I can think of, boomers whom I know, um, because they're family members or neighbors or acquaintances, whose trajectory I have witnessed. These people have, and this started, exacerbated during COVID for the people that I'm thinking about, who lost jobs, ended up having to pick up random gig work after having established careers in other areas, and suddenly found themselves feeling really shut out of the system, ended up getting red-pilled on YouTube and blaming all the wrong people for why that is the case.

And so I think this rise in reactionary ideology is linked to the underemployment and unemployment

[00:55:45] David: neoliberalism

[00:55:46] Ellie: we said, like, is not even accurately addressed by the statistics.

[00:55:50] David: Yeah and I mean, I, all of this goes back to that transition that we talked about, , from the welfare state to because neoliberalism produces the conditions for increased precarity, , and unemployment, in the working class, so more people are unemployed. But because neoliberalism also gutted the welfare state, when people find themselves in this condition of wageless life, they no longer have the protections that once were promised to them by the welfare state.

And so you find yourself feeling abandoned and, on top of that, humiliated by the lack of support. And I think in the context of white masculinity, but maybe just masculinity in general, that, that turns into this desire to make it all burn or, you know, like, destroy everything around you if that's the only legacy you can leave behind

[00:56:42] Ellie: Yeah, and to make an analogy here to a period of history before the rise of neoliberalism, something that I was wondering about in preparation for this episode, and which ended up being true, is whether or not there were some similar conditions in Weimar Germany, you know, around the time of the rise of Hitler.

And indeed, that is the case. So the Great Depression hit Germany particularly hard, Banks in the US suddenly recalled the loans Germany was relying on for e-economic revitalization after World War I, and and that caused the German economy to spiral into a severe depression. the winter of 1929 to 1930 alone, the number of unemployed rose from 1.4 to over two million people. And then by the time Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, one in three Germans were unemployed. And so, I mean, you mentioned earlier, like, I'm not an economist, I'm not a historian, and I don't wanna make sort of oversimplifying generalizations about the similarities here. We've made better research analogies between, uh, national socialism and the current rise of US fascism in other episodes.

I think we might have done this in the oligarchy episode, for instance. But I think there are striking similarities between that situation and what we're seeing today.

[00:57:59] David: Well, and I don't think the historical analogy or comparison that you're making is beyond the pale, and in fact, that's the point of Wendy Brown's book, that in the wake of neoliberalism, we are seeing, uh, the re-resurgence of precisely those fascist sentiments that led to the rise of fascism in Germany, and that have led quite literally to the election of Donald Trump in the US twice