Whatever happened to the work ethic?

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The work ethic is the most important engine of capitalist civilization. It keeps workers working long after they have satisfied their basic needs, drives entrepreneurs to found new companies and inventors to create new things, and generates the surplus that pays for productive investment and social welfare.

Yet the belief that work is a moral duty rather than an inconvenient necessity is hardly natural. In most civilizations, social status has been determined by your distance from productive labor — while workers abandoned the grindstone for the alehouse at the slightest opportunity.

Ever since Max Weber published his landmark "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" in 1905, historians have debated his claim that Protestantism, particularly in its Calvinist form, was responsible for the rise of capitalism because it treated hard work and wealth accumulation as proof of salvation. But they have largely agreed with the basic idea that the rise of capitalism required a revolution in attitudes to work.

Which raises a troubling proposition: If the work ethic is the product of cultural change, it can be destroyed by cultural change. America is the world's leading example of the power of the work ethic. The North was settled by work-obsessed Puritans fleeing persecution in England; the South was settled by Cavaliers who despised work and relied for their leisure on slave labor. Benjamin Franklin coined aphorisms about time being money and early to bed, early to rise being the secret of wealth as well as wisdom. Horatio Alger insisted that anybody could make it if they worked hard. Immigrants came to the United States in their millions in the hope that hard work would finally be rewarded.

In some ways, this culture still survives. Americans in the labor force work longer hours than Europeans and take shorter vacations. High-earning Americans in law, banking and the executive suite routinely work well over 50 hours a week.

The post-work revolution was led by men without college degrees. In "Men Without Work," which was first published in 2016 and revised in 2022, Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute produces some astonishing statistics on the number of prime-age men (25 to 54) who have fallen out of the labor market. More than 11% of these men — some 7 million souls — are neither working nor looking for a job. Barely half of native-born prime-age men with no high school degree are in the job market.

The pandemic spread the post-work revolution to new groups — hence all the talk of "the great resignation" and "quiet quitting." Many older Americans decided to fast forward their retirement. Some prime-age workers (particularly women) decided during the furlough that going out to work wasn't worth the hassle if you were spending most of your income on caring for children or aging parents.

Most worrying of all is the changing attitude to work among the young. A 2010 Pew Research Center Report sounded the alarm with its discovery that three-fourths of respondents claimed that older people had a better work ethic than younger people do — a belief that was held just as strongly by the young as by their seniors. Since then, evidence of disillusionment has multiplied.

Employers report that millennials are more likely to regard work as a means of self-fulfillment rather than just an income stream. Anti-work activists cite appalling corporate practices on Reddit, praise "The Right to be Lazy" (1883), by Karl Marx's son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, debate the relative merits of "rage quitting" vs. "quiet quitting," and advocate the virtues of a universal basic income, which does away with the need to work at all.

This anti-work revolt is obviously troubling for economic reasons: It reduces the economy's overall productivity and leaves urgent jobs undone. It is also demoralizing. On being asked how a person might flourish, Sigmund Freud replied "love and work ... work and love, that's all there is." Timework studies of men who have dropped out of the labor market show that they spend most of their abundant "socializing, relaxing and leisure" time in front of a screen. Similar studies of early retirees also show enormous amounts of screen time.

The opioid epidemic has wrecked lives across the country. Ill health and obesity make it harder for people to hold down a job. Disability rules discourage retraining. Ex-convicts find it hard to get back into the workforce, yet close to 1 in 8 American men have been in prison.

Tackling the opioid crisis and addressing the incarceration madness will also help to tackle the work crisis. The problem of premature retirement may also be solving itself as retirees discover that they don't have as much to live on as they previously expected.

But the problem also has deeper cultural roots that require deeper digging if they are to be torn up. Start with two famous paradoxes about the nature of capitalism.

In "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" (1942), Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism produces its own gravediggers in the form of tenured intellectuals who gorge on capitalism's fruits while devoting their energies to denouncing its evils. This problem has now reached an extreme. It's not just that liberal academics and administrators outnumber conservative ones by ever growing margins in the humanities. This progressive mindset is also now in the ascendant among faculty at traditionally vocational institutions such as law schools and business schools. Where once Harvard Business School students learned that their only duty was to maximize shareholder value, now they learn that they must reimagine capitalism in a world on fire.

In "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism" (1976), Daniel Bell took the argument further by arguing that capitalism was undermining itself by producing so much wealth. If the Puritan work ethic depended on self-denial, the affluent society depended on endless consumption and instant gratification, which destroyed the foundational virtues of thrift and sobriety.

To these two classic paradoxes I'd add a couple of my own. One is the paradox of opportunity. The neoliberal revolution was justified by the idea that people had a right to rise as high as their talents would allow without paying an undue amount of money back to the state in the form of income or inheritance taxes. But the resulting explosion in inequality is undermining faith in equality of opportunity.

The second is the paradox of work. Work is increasingly becoming an all-or-nothing proposition. You either devote your life to the job or give up entirely. Employers not only expect their employees to be available to answer emails or even take calls at all hours of the day and night, they link their pay to ever more precisely measured performance. Office workers' days are crammed with Zoom meetings and performance reviews. Amazon warehouse workers have their visits to the lavatory timed. The faster the hamster wheel revolves, the greater the temptation to jump off.

Solving the first three of these paradoxes may be the work of Sisyphus. But a few encouraging signs suggest that these problems are being addressed. The University of North Carolina recently voted to establish a School of Civic Life and Leadership which will give a voice to academics from across the political spectrum, including conservatives.

Meanwhile, some Republicans are rethinking the party's tax-cutting and government-shrinking orthodoxy and emphasizing instead the importance of jobs-based prosperity. Ever more Americans are worried about the size of inherited fortunes. Yet a broad-ranging campaign to restore the work ethic will require an appetite for preaching that is rare and a willingness to work across political lines that has evaporated.

The one bright spot is the nature of work. The pandemic has had the unexpected consequence of shaking workers free from ossified practices and unleashing the power of new technologies such as Zoom. Companies are adopting a hybrid work system whereby workers cut their commuting to two or three days a week and workers are using their newfound flexibility to combine working with domestic duties. A solid body of evidence suggests that this is producing higher productivity and higher engagement. Companies need to widen and deepen this revolution rather than using the current spate of layoffs to tighten the organizational harness.

The easiest way to start addressing America's work ethic problem is to start making work itself more attractive.