Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (37 page)

The leisure-and-redistribution alternative to growth is gaining credibility as the economic downturn persists. In Germany, the
Kurzarbeit
, or “short work,” program subsidizes shorter workweeks in order to forestall unemployment, in flagrant denial of the so-called
lump-of-labor fallacy (see note 1). Instead of laying off 20 percent of its workforce, a firm shortens everyone’s workweek by 20 percent. Most of each employee’s pay cut is reimbursed to the employee by the government. Employees can keep their jobs, working 20 percent less with only a 4- or 8-percent pay cut.
⁶
The results have been impressive: German unemployment stayed lower than expected through the recession, and the auto industry, where the policy was implemented most vigorously, did not lose a single fulltime manufacturing job in the first half of 2009.
⁷
The
Kurzarbeit
program is akin to a social dividend on a limited scale, and bears a similar economic and humanitarian motivation.

There is also a philosophical or moral rationale for a social dividend that I became aware of as a teenager when I read a story by Philip Jose Farmer titled, “Riders of the Purple Wage.” Echoing Douglas, Farmer reasoned that industrial technology has given humanity access to such vast, nearly effortless wealth that it shouldn’t be necessary for anyone to work very hard to receive the necessities of life. The easy affluence made possible by technology, and by the natural wealth of the earth, is the collective treasure of the entire human race; merely by being born, each person is entitled to a share of it. Certainly no person has more right than any other to benefit from, say, the inventions of Robert Boyle or Thomas Edison, much less the vast cultural context that made their work possible. You or I have no more right to this cultural endowment than we have to the land or the genome. It comes to us as the gift of humanity as a whole; it is the gift of our ancestors, just as the land is the gift of Earth, Nature, or the Creator.

Let us not be quick to accept the glib phrase I passed off above: “the easy affluence made possible by technology.” This phrase buys into the ideology of Ascent, which as I have described is bound up with the ideology of endless economic growth. Somehow, despite centuries of labor-saving technologies, we have no more leisure than did hunter-gatherers, Neolithic villagers, or Medieval peasants. The reason is the overproduction and overconsumption of those things that technology can produce and the underproduction and underconsumption of those things it cannot. Usually, those latter things are precisely those that defy the homogenizing, depersonalizing rule of money: all that is unique, intimate, and personal. I will return to this theme later; for now, simply observe that in the realm of those needs that do admit to quantification, our needs are easily met. We should not need to work very much to procure the physical necessities of life: food, clothing, and shelter. Certainly we should have to work no more than the average twenty hours that the Kalahari aborigines spent on subsistence, in a harsh desert with Stone Age tools, in 1970. Certainly, we should feel no less secure, and no more anxious about “making a living,” than the high Medieval peasants with their 150 saint’s days off.

What insanity would rather have us build more unnecessary houses than, say, save sea turtle eggs from oil spills? It ultimately comes down to the depletion of the commons being profitable, and its restoration a matter of altruism. The proposals in this book reverse this dynamic. Internalization of costs redirects the flow of money, and the flow of human activity, away from consumption and toward the sacred. Negative interest money allows investment to
go to uses that don’t generate even more money than went in and ends the discounting of the future. However, these measures alone may not be enough because some of the work necessary for the healing of the world is fundamentally uneconomic.
⁸

The question, then, is how to create conditions that allow people to do important work that does not generate an economic return. As with redistribution of wealth, there are essentially two ways. One is the social dividend I have described, which exists today in dilute form as stimulus checks, tax credits, welfare payments, and so forth. This gives people the economic freedom to pursue activities that no one will hire them to do (because they won’t generate income for an employer) and that produce nothing salable.

The second way to foster noneconomic work is for the government (or other entity) to pay people to do the beautiful and necessary things that we have come to value. We saw a harbinger of this during the New Deal, when we hired millions of the unemployed not only to build infrastructure that would one day generate a positive economic return but also to do such things as compile and preserve folk music and create recreational areas. Extended further, this is essentially the vision of state socialism. However, central planning often misses important needs, invites totalitarian abuse of power, and fails to engage the creativity of individuals and grass-roots organizations. With the social dividend, we are trusting that, unconstrained by economic necessity, people will naturally choose good and necessary work. These free, unconstrained
choices—the outgrowth of unfettered desire—will help identify what work is sacred.

At stake are two competing visions of human nature, and therefore two visions of how to run society. One says, “Free people from economic exigency, and they will do beautiful work.” The other says, “Provide beautiful work, and use economic exigency to induce people to do it.” The first trusts people’s natural desire to create and their capacity to self-organize; the second puts the decision of how to allocate human labor into the hands of policy makers. I think that both will have a place for a long time to come, and that eventually, as political processes become more inclusive, grass-roots, and self-organizing, the two will merge into one.

One objection to a social dividend or equivalent entitlements is that people would have no motivation to work. We think, “If people weren’t under some sort of pressure to work, they would do nothing at all. They need some sort of incentive.” Why work if your basic needs are met without working? In this view, scarcity, even artificial scarcity, is a positive good because it counteracts the inborn laziness of the human being. This logic taps in once again to the logic of control, domination, and the war against the self. But is it really human nature to want to do nothing productive? Do we really need rewards to cajole us into labor and penalties to punish indolence?

Or, put in another way, is it human nature to desire never to give, but only to take?

I think not. Perhaps you can identify with my own experience, that some of the most painful times of my life were when I was unfulfilled in my work, when I was not applying my gifts toward a purpose I believed in. I remember quite well a meeting with a software company in Taiwan, where I worked as a translator and
business consultant in my twenties. We were discussing some new technology, 3D sound or something like that, and everyone in the room seemed avidly concerned about its implications for their product. I had a moment of incredulity: “Wait a minute, you mean you people actually care about this? Because I don’t care at all whether this or any other product has 3D sound.” The next feeling was bleak despair because I realized I only cared because I was paid to care, and I couldn’t imagine a realistic alternative to that. “Do I ever get to do something that I care about for real?” I thought. “When do I get to live
my
life, not the one I’m paid to live?”

A fundamental premise of this book is that human beings naturally desire to give. We are born into gratitude: the knowledge we have received and the desire to give in turn. Far from nudging reluctant people to give unto others against their lazy impulses, today’s economy pressures us to deny our innate generosity and channel our gifts instead toward the perpetuation of a system that serves almost no one. A sacred economy is one that liberates our desire to work, our desire to give. Everybody I know has so much to give, and most of them feel they cannot because there is no money in it. Yet that is not because their gifts are unwanted. There is much beautiful work to be done. Money as we know it fails to connect gifts and needs. Why does everyone have to work so hard just to survive when (whether thanks to technology or not) such needs could easily be met with a tiny fraction of human labor? It is because of the scarcity-inducing nature of money.

The assumption that people do
not
want to work runs very deep in economics and taps into a yet deeper source: the story of the separate self. If more for you is less for me, if your well-being is irrelevant or inimical to my own, why should I desire to give anything to anyone? The “selfish gene” of biology, seeking to maximize
its reproductive self-interest, is congruent to the “rational actor” of economics, seeking to maximize its financial self-interest. We supposedly don’t want to do any work that contributes to the benefit of others unless there is something in it for us. We don’t really desire to give; we must be forced to, paid to.

Economics textbooks speak of the “disutility” of work, assuming that if not “compensated” with wages, people will naturally prefer to … prefer to do what? Prefer to consume? Prefer to do nothing? To be entertained? The justification for a scarcity-based economic system is built into its premises, which include deep prejudices about human nature. This book assumes a different human nature: that we are fundamentally divine, creative, generous beings; that to give and to create are among our deepest desires. To embody this understanding in the money system, we must find ways to richly reward gifts to society, without those rewards becoming a form of pressure or slavery.

Not only is the experience of scarcity an artifact of our money system, but the laziness we view as human nature is a valid response to the kind of work that system engenders. If you find yourself being lazy, procrastinating, doing slipshod work, showing up late, not concentrating, and so on, then perhaps the problem isn’t your character after all: perhaps it is a soul’s rebellion against work that you don’t really want to do. It is a message that says, “It is time to find your true work: that through which you can apply your gifts toward something meaningful.” Ignore that message, and your unconscious will enforce it through depression, self-sabotage, illness, or accident, disabling you from living any more a life not aligned with your generosity.

In a sacred economy, people will still work hard—not because they have to, but because they
want
to. Have you ever wanted to
give your time or labor to a good cause but refrained from doing so because you couldn’t “afford to”? A social dividend frees gifts to flow toward needs and aligns our labor with our passion, our generosity, and our art.

Many people will work at paying jobs anyway, either to supplement the social dividend (which would probably be at bare subsistence level) or because they like those jobs on their own merits. But it would be a choice, not a necessity. In the absence of the coercive mechanism of “making a living,” there would be little market for degrading or tedious jobs. To attract workers, employers will have to provide jobs that are meaningful and work conditions that respect human dignity. Many such jobs will exist because so much of the work financed by a commons-based money system will be by nature meaningful (because of financial incentives to conserve and restore).

Tellingly, even without a social dividend, people do enormous amounts of uncompensated work anyway. The entire internet is built mostly by volunteer labor, from open-source server software to free content. Entire organizations are staffed by hard-working volunteers. We do not need financial incentives to work, and in fact we do our best work when money is not an issue.
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What would the world be like if people were supported in doing the beautiful things they must struggle against economic necessity to do today?

Sacred Economics
envisions a world where people do things for love, not money. What would you be doing in such an economy? Would you be reclaiming a toxic waste dump? Being a “big sister”

to troubled adolescents? Creating sanctuaries for victims of human trafficking? Reintroducing threatened species into the wild? Installing gardens in inner-city neighborhoods? Putting on public performances? Helping decommissioned veterans adjust to civilian life? What would you do, freed from slavery to money? What does your own life, your true life, look like? Underneath the substitute lives we are paid to live, there is a real life,
your
life.

To be fully alive is to accept the guidance of the question, “What am I here for?” Most jobs today deny that feeling, since we are evidently not here to work on an assembly line or to push product or to do anything complicit in human impoverishment or ecological destruction. No one really wants to do such work, and someday, no one shall.

Is that a realistic pronouncement? Let me share with you a little rumination I wrote last spring.

I am writing at this moment in a large airport. Thousands of people work at jobs associated with this airport, and few of the jobs actually befit a human being
.

I traveled to the airport in a hotel shuttle. On the way I told the driver, a Peruvian immigrant, about the talk I had given this weekend and about my vision of a more beautiful world, and at one point, by way of illustration, I said, “Here you are driving back and forth to the airport all day—surely you must have moments when you think, ‘I
was not put here on earth to do this.’ ”

“Yeah, that’s for sure,” he said
.

I can’t help but think the same as I watch the cashier at the airport kiosk, typing in purchase items and handing out change and saying, “Thank you sir, have a nice day,” and the man going from trash can to trash can, emptying them into his cart and changing the plastic bag, silent and sullen, wooden-faced. What kind of world have we created, that a human being spends all day doing such tasks? What have we become, that we are not outraged by it?