The Game

 

 

The Root of All Evil

Some of the most important normative questions that you will have to answer as an adult are questions involving money: how to acquire it and what to do with it. You may also have to consider questions about whether the economic system that we live under is just. In other words, you'd have to think about how far we can depart from capitalist forms of the free market, in the name of justice (e.g., reparations, redistribution of wealth, investment on the wellbeing of future generations, etc.), without losing its efficiency advantages (Wolff 2010). Moreover, if we want to intervene in market processes in the name of justice, there is still the matter of what metric we should use when attempting to address inequities. Should we base our interventions on, say, need? Or how about by making sure everyone has the same basic primary resources, like housing, food, and schooling, regardless of individual needs? To complicate things further, we need to ask ourselves where the boundary of our interventions should lie. Should we draw the line at our nation-state? If this is the case, then we would be neglecting far more needy peoples beyond the borders of our country. Do their needs have less moral urgency simply because they are not geographically near us or don't form part of the same political entity?

In any case, questions regarding the just or unjust nature of economic systems are best covered in a course on political philosophy. What we can cover in this lesson are issues surrounding both the acquisition of money and what to do with it after we've acquired it. There is, however, one issue that just barely crosses over into political philosophy. This has to do with the social organization of the workplace, a topic that brings us to the controversial philosophical position labeled Marxism.

 

Important Concepts

 

The capitalist class-process

Again, Marxism really ought to be covered in a political philosophy class. However, one aspect of Marxism directly relates to both of the matters we are covering in this lesson: how we acquire money and what to do with it. So, let's begin with some context. For Marx, class doesn't necessarily have to do with how much money you earn; rather, your class has to do with your role in the production process. Those who work for private industry, like maybe you do, labor to produce profits for their company. This labor may be in the form of manufacturing some product, of selling some product, or perhaps it has to do with transporting some product so that it can be sold. Whatever the case may be, we know that, for workers, the value that they produce with their labor is less than what they get paid. In other words, if you work in the private sector, you only have a job because there is some value (that you create with your labor) that your boss doesn't pay you for. That's simply how it works. So, there's the value that you produced with your labor that you actually get paid for, and there's the value that you produced with your labor which your boss keeps. Marx has labels for these. According to Marx, necessary labor is performed during the portion of the day in which workers produce goods and services the value of which is equal to the wages they receive (i.e., the value that you produced with your labor that you actually get paid for). Then there's surplus labor: labor performed during the portion of the day in which workers continue to work over and beyond the paid portion of the day (i.e., the value that you produced with your labor which your boss keeps).

With this set of concepts in place, Marx defines what capitalism is. The capitalist class-process—that is to say the class-process that is prevalent in the United States—is the legalized yet ‘criminal’ activity in which the products of the laborers’ creative efforts are appropriated (i.e., taken) by those who have nothing to do with their production and who return only a portion of those fruits to the workers (wages), keeping the remainder (the surplus) for themselves. Put another way, the capitalist class-process in the state of affairs where the employers regularly and reliably exploit their employees by paying them less than the value they produce. This conception of what capitalism is in stark contrast with the way most people use the word capitalism. Many people use the term capitalism to be a synonym for "the economy" itself. But, with this definition, Marxists have fragmented the economy so that capitalism is a part of the economy and not the whole. For Marxists, the capitalist-process is simply the relationship between employers and employees—one in which the employers routinely and legally appropriate the surplus labor of the employees. Marx's contention is that this is exploitation. So, the capitalist class-process must be abolished.

 

Sidebar¹

 

Storytime!

 

What did Marx want?

When Marx makes the case against capitalism, what he really means is the capitalist class-process—the exploitative relationship between employers and employees. That's at least the way that Amherst School of Marxism interprets Marx. This school, which pays special attention to volumes 2 and 3 of Marx’s Das Kapital, claims that the fundamental Marxist argument is that firms should be run by employee-owners (see Burczak, Garnett & McIntyre 2017). The way to do this is to convert society into one in which the workers are the owners of the enterprises in which they labor; in other words, build society so that the norm is worker-owned cooperatives.²

Worker cooperatives are a type of firm where the workers play two roles: 1. their normal labor function; but also 2. an administrative function which allows them to vote on what the firm makes, where the firm makes it, and what the firm does with the profits. In a word, this is democracy at work. These, in case you didn't know, already exist. In these enterprises, surplus labor is still created, but it is appropriated by those who created it: the workers themselves. There could still be pay differentials, with some getting paid more than others, but the key difference is that workers had a say in establishing the pay differentials—through their vote. The result would be that, instead of the authoritarianism that we submit to at our places of work today, we would achieve democracy at work.³

 

What this means for you

There is both acknowledged positive consequences as well as an intuitive fairness about worker-owned firms (see footnote 2). If this truly is a means of reducing exploitation in the workplace, then we can argue from both consequentialist and deontological grounds that, when purchasing goods and services, we should attempt to select only (or primarily) worker-owned firms. In other words, we would be voting against exploitation with our dollar—something which may be morally required of us. We should also, one could argue, vote in favor of any measures or political parties that might make worker-owned cooperatives more commonplace.⁴

Food for thought...

 

 

 

Singer (1971): Famine, Affluence, and Morality

 

Effective altruism

The Basics

Although Peter Singer has been immensely influential and is one of the most recognizable utilitarians in philosophy, new faces are popping up in the field of applied ethics. One of those new faces that's made quite a splash is William MacAskill, Associate Professor at Oxford University. MacAskill is one of the founders of the effective altruism movement.

In Doing Good Better, MacAskill (2016) gives a snapshot of what effective altruism is all about: trying to figure out, using scientific tools, how to help as many people as possible. In the introduction, MacAskill distinguishes between what we might term unreflective altruism and effective altruism by juxtaposing between the Roundabout PlayPump fiasco and a deworming campaign in Kenya. The PlayPump was a failed method of getting clean water to rural parts of South Africa. The pumps were fun for investors but actually created more work for communities, since they were less efficient than the standard pumps they replaced. One statistic says it all: to provide enough water for the community, a Roundabout PlayPump would have to be pumped for 27hrs per day—which is, of course, impossible.

On the other hand, in Kenya, a group of researchers were trying to figure out how to improve schools. In doing so, they tried something that was, at least at the time, hardly utilized in the development sector: randomized controlled trials. Via their controlled trials, the researchers concluded that getting new textbooks to schools didn’t have an effect. Funding schools so that they could hire more teachers, thereby allowing for smaller class sizes, also didn't help. Neither did workbooks and a variety of other interventions. What did work? Deworming—providing students with an anthelmintic drug to rid them of parasites such as roundworms, flukeworms and tapeworms. Deworming allowed children to focus more in school, do better in their studies, and earn more after their schooling was complete. The project even paid for itself with increased tax revenue once the first cohort was of working age. In short, even though it isn’t a "sexy" cause, deworming is effective altruism.

So, in short, effective altruism takes aspects of the scientific method, such as randomized controlled trials, causal models, decision matrices, and other tools, to see what interventions and charities actually have measurably positive consequences. The key questions of effective altruism are the following:

1. How many people benefit and by how much?
2. Is this the most effective thing you can do?
3. Is this area neglected?
4. What would happen otherwise?
5. What are the chances of success and how good would success be?

See MacAskill's Doing Good Better for more information.⁵

Where should you work?

You might now be thinking to yourself that charity is all well and good, but you're not there yet. You're not at the stage of your lifecycle where you have expendable income to give to charitable causes or international aid organizations. That's fine. MacAskill argues that effective altruism can still guide you in one of the most important decisions you'll ever make: how to make money.

So... where should you work? MacAskill (2016, ch. 9) discusses how one should select a career. He first makes the point that “following your heart” is terrible advice in basically any given domain. For starters, the fact that you’re passionate about something typically means that the activity is a worthwhile activity, which means that other people pursue it. This means, of course, that it will be difficult to find a job in this field given that there’s so much competition. This isn’t mere speculation. MacAskill cites a Canadian study that shows that undergraduates with interests in either sports, music, or art represented more than 80% of the student population. However, using census data, one could see that less than 3% of jobs are in sports, music, or art. To follow your heart, then, is a recipe for disappointment for most people.

Second, our interests and passions change over our lifecycle. MacAskill cites a study by a group of psychologists (including Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness) that concludes that our passions change so much that we reliably overrate their importance. So, what you are passionate about today is likely not what you'll be passionate about twenty years from now.

Third, the best predictors of job satisfaction are actually features of the job itself, not how much your passions link up with the job. For example, what can be referred to as engaging work is one of the strongest predictors of job satisfaction. What is engaging work? Jobs that qualify as engaging work typically feature five traits. First off, it is work that features independence. That is to say, workers have a say in how they spend much of their day: the rational planning of the day's tasks. Engaging work also gives employees a sense of completion. They aren't merely parts of a big assembly line, such that they never get to see the end product of their labor. Engaging work allows workers to see products through to completion. Engaging works also enjoy variety; i.e., it isn't the same task over and over again. Another feature that is an important part of engaging work is regular job feedback. This makes intuitive sense. Getting reliable feedback on how well you are doing your job meshes well with the other traits of engaging work, such as a sense of completion and independence. Lastly, engaging work gives workers a sense of contribution to society. Chances are that if you find a job in which you participate in engaging work, the passion will follow—rather than the other way around.

So, given that one aspect of engaging work is the sense that you are making a meaningful difference, let's assume that you want to make a career-choice that will allow you to help as many people as possible. Some intuitively think that choosing to be a doctor would fulfill this desire. However, MacAskill discusses the work of physician/researcher Greg Lewis, work that might change your mind. Here's the key insight that Lewis had: becoming a doctor doesn’t increase the number of doctors in a country. As all of those attempting to go to medical school know, spots in medical schools are very limited. That's why some start preparing for medical school applications in middle school. Let's just say you do make it to med school. By your becoming a doctor, you don’t increase the raw number of doctors in the industry, just who the doctors are—in particular, you made sure one of them was you. So, you're not actually increasing the number of doctors who are helping others. Put another way, you're not helping anyone that wouldn't have been helped anyway. What then should you do if you want to maximize your impact? One option is to earn-to-give. This is, in fact, what Greg Lewis decided to do. In other words, select a realistic career-path for yourself where you can earn the highest income you can get. Then, donate as much as possible to charitable causes that have been rated as effective by a charity evaluator such as givewell.org. MacAskill goes even further, though. Given his analyses, he wager that going into, say, law, might not be the best option if you want to do is help the most amount of people. The jobs that do have the most impact might surprise you. He's setup an organization that helps people decide how they should spend the 80,000 hours of their life that they will spend working. It's called 80000hours.org (see also the talk by Benjamin Todd in the Related Material section below).

 

 

 

Reparations(?)

Reparations are common after wars. For example, it was French reparations awarded to Germany (after the former lost to the latter in the Franco-Prussian War) that funded the growth of Berlin, both industrially and intellectually. A few decades later, Germany was required to pay reparations to the Allied Powers after its defeats in World War I and World War II. Similarly, Japan was required to pay reparations to the Allies after World War II. These reparations are intended to make amends for unjust harms that were inflicted on innocents. If reparations between states is seen as a legitimate exchange, then it might be the case that states can offer reparations to harmed groups as well, especially if these states were the ones that inflicted the harm on those groups.

Perhaps the most obvious groups of people that might qualify for reparations in the United States are African Americans, especially the descendants of slaves, and Native Americans (Corlett 2018). However, in this section, I'd like to focus on more recent instances of the state disadvantaging a certain group of people for the sake of the white majority. For example, in The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein reviews how government housing policies in the 20^th century explicitly discriminated against African Americans to the benefit of whites. Here's the context.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, in which Lenin and his group of revolutionaries took power in Russia, the Wilson administration thought it could stave off communism at home by getting as many white Americans as possible to become homeowners—one of the many ways in which the fear of communism shaped the United States during the 20^th century. The idea was that if you own property, you will be invested in the capitalist system. And so, the “Own Your Own Home” campaign began.

The program, however, was largely ineffectual and the housing crisis only grew. In the 1930s, then, as part of his New Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt subsidized various aspects of homeownership, such as insuring mortgage loans and construction on new housing, through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). But since segregation was still in the books, these programs necessarily had a racial bias. Due to unfounded worries about African American inability to pay loans and “community compatibility”, African Americans were denied housing in white areas and were denied loans, even when they met all the non-racial qualifications.

This continued after the conclusion of World War II. Several subsidized housing projects with racial restrictions arose as WWII veterans were returning to the mainland. California natives will recognize some of these communities: Lakewood, CA; Westchester, CA; and Westwood, CA.

It's not just the FHA that is culpable. During these time periods, local law enforcement enabled or were at least complicit in the white terrorizing of black citizens which took the form of harassment, protests, lynchings, arson, and assault. Just to see how egregious this negligence by law enforcement was, Rothstein reminds us that this was during a time period when federal and local agencies were expending considerable effort to surveil and arrest leftists and organized crime syndicates. In other words, they certainly had the capabilities to investigate and infiltrate dissident groups. So, it is telling that law enforcement did not extend this effort to curtailing attacks against African Americans; they mostly just let it happen.

It's even the case that the federal government was guilty of suppressing wages for African American workers. When minimum wage requirements were rolled out, it was not uniform across all industries. Namely, no minimum wages were mandated in industries were African Americans predominated. It gets worse. During WWII, FDR mandated that American factories be taken over as military factories, manufacturing war materiel. At first, these factories employed white men, due to segregation. After white male manpower had been exhausted, the factories began to let women into the workforce. It was only when white women were not numerous enough to fill the workforce that African American males were recruited. African American women were last. Until they were hired on to these factories, African Americans had to labor in low-wage industries. And so, in government-run factories with decent wages, there was a policy of delaying employing African Americans as long as possible.

As I'm reminded every time I do my taxes, owning a home pays dividends in more ways than one. Homeowners may deduct both mortgage interest and property tax payments as well as certain other expenses from their federal income tax if they itemize their deductions. And so, by being denied housing, African Americans were denied one of the primary methods for acquiring wealth and passing it on to their descendants. In other words, whites were privileged specifically by disadvantaging African Americans. The limited amount of housing available for African Americans makes it so that they have regularly paid above-market prices for their homes. For the majority who couldn’t pay these prices, the only choice was to rent, but rents were also reliably hiked up for African Americans. Consequently, a greater percentage of African American paychecks goes to housing than for whites. Costs were further compounded due to commuting costs, since African Americans couldn’t get housing close to their work. As such, African Americans, even if they were not blocked from buying a house, could not save enough for a down payment. As such, reparations seem in order. Oliver and Shapiro summarize the case:

Another set of events from recent history might qualify a group of people, primarily Mexican Americans, for reparations. This has to do with Chavez Ravine, an area primarily occupied by Mexican homeowners in the first half of the 20^th century and which now houses Dodger Stadium.

 

 

 

For want and need of money...

Money links to the topic of the next lesson—drugs—in many ways. For starters, it was pharmaceutical industries driven by the profit motive that played a role in the opiate epidemic. Relatedly, as Quinones (2015) reports, some med students went into pain management precisely because they knew that's where the money was, and some even openly said that they “want a Bentley.” After people became addicted to prescription opiates, many would have their prescriptions cut off. This is when the Xalisco Boys, a decentralized network of black tar heroin dealers, enter the picture and provide a new source of opiates to addicts. What motivated the Xalisco Boys? They wanted to show off all their money at the annual Feria del Elote in their hometown of Xalisco. Sometimes it really does seem like money is the root of all evil...

 

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FYI

Suggested Reading: Peter Singer, Famine Affluence, and Morality 

Supplementary Material—

• Video: Richard Wolff, Understanding Marxism
• Video: Crash Course, Poverty & Our Response to It
• Video: TEDTalks, Will MacAskill | What are the most important moral problems of our time?
• Audio: Fresh Air, Interview with Richard Rothstein on his book The Color of Law.

Related Material—

• Video: Thomas Sowell, The Problems of Marxism
• Video: Talks at Google, Peter Singer on Famine, Affluence, and Morality
• Video: Richard Wolff, Workers’ Self-Directed Enterprises
• Audio: Making Sense with Sam Harris, Doing Good: A Conversation with William MacAskill
• Video: TEDx Talks Benjamin Todd | To find work you love, don't follow your passion

Advanced Material—

• Reading: David Ruccio, Strangers in a Strange Land
• Reading: Erik Olsen, Class-analytic Marxism and the Recovery of the Marxian Theory of Enterprise

 

Footnotes

1. The concept of Stalinism, Priestland admits, is not homogenous. Even Stalin had to become more pragmatic, like Lenin. Stalin, for example, ended the war against managers that began after the revolution. He also restored unequal pay, since he argued that Russia was not ready for full communism and was still in "developmental socialism." Priestland says these are features that exemplify mature Stalinism.

2. In her chapter in González-Ricoy & Gosseries (2016), Virginie Pérotin makes the case that, contrary to popular opinion, worker cooperatives are larger than conventional businesses, are not less capital intensive, survive at least as long as other businesses, have more stable employment, are more productive than conventional businesses (with staff working “better and smarter” and production organised more efficiently), retain a larger share of their profits than other business models, and exhibit much narrower pay differentials between executives and non-executives.

3. In a lesson from my 101 course I discuss primarily the risk of automation. However, in the Sidebar of this lesson, I discuss scientific management—a practice with clear authoritarian roots.

4. For reasons that are completely beyond me, Ronald Reagan once advocated for worker-owned enterprises.

5. One of the most interesting aspects of MacAskill's effective altruism is his use of mathematical techniques for calculating which actions are most likely to make the most positive impact. He uses various tools for this. For example, he measures the good that an aid organization produces through a metric called a quality-adjusted life-year (or QALY for short). This metric allows us to compute the impact of different aid organizations and compare them. It also allows us to measure the effectiveness of an aid organization by calculating a ratio of the QALYs they produce per dollar amount they are given. See the FYI section for interviews of William MacAskill.