TL;DR: I believe that we in the US have been brainwashed to glorify productivity and villainize laziness, and it's led to a cancerous growth of business and capital
I'm sure that I won't articulate this the way I want to, and I worry that this is going to come across as more of a chaotic rant than a well-structured argument, but I just wanted a place to vent about my frustrations with capitalism and its influence on our moral intuitions as a society in the US.
I grew up in a fairly diverse community in Los Angeles that included people from a wide range of ethnicities, religions, socioeconomic statuses, and political beliefs. But basically everybody – rich and poor, liberal and conservative – agreed that there's no such thing as a free lunch and that you'd have to work hard to survive in this world. The idea of just “giving” people what they needed to live – food, water, shelter, access to healthcare – was seen as obviously absurd and not even worth entertaining. The argument that seemed to convince everyone was the problem of motivation – if people got all of their most basic needs taken care of for free, wouldn't most people choose not to work? For most of my life, I agreed with this mentality. It seemed obvious to me that we needed to incentivize people to perform the jobs that society needs to function or the nation would collapse.
Things changed for me when I graduated from college and entered the working world. Growing up, I fully embraced the “work hard” mantra in school and, after pushing myself to get an econ degree from an Ivy League undergrad, I managed to get what I would consider a fairly cushy finance job at a wealth management firm. Working there for five years was a transformative experience for me. While I was personally compensated well and everybody was perfectly pleasant to be around, my time there convinced me that I had been brainwashed into the cult of capitalism for most of my life.
I think many people have the intuition that the financial sector is predatory but may not be able to explain specifically how/why. Here is one example. Very early on in my investment education, I came to realize that, after fees, basically all of our clients were worse off using our products than they were if they simply invested their money in a market-tracking ETF, which is a very cheap product easily accessible to anyone with a brokerage account. (For those interested, the product I typically recommend to people with a 10+ year investment horizon is SPY, which tracks the value of the S&P 500.) Our clients invested an average of $10 million with us, so each of them essentially paid us hundreds of thousands of dollars to leave them worse off than they would've been without us. This is not unique to the firm I worked at. It is a well-documented fact in the investment industry that the vast majority of active managers underperform the market. And yet, they collect hundreds of billions of dollars in fees every year.
I left the firm in 2020 and have had a lot of time to think about it since. It still amazes me how many hundreds of billions of dollars are essentially wasted by the wealth management industry. 82% of active managers underperformed the market over the 10 years from 2010-2020, and 94% underperformed from 2000-2020. There were 600+ employees working at my firm. What was the point of all the work we did for all those years, if in the end the clients are actually worse off than if they spent the 30 min to open a brokerage account and invest in an ETF? What was the point of any of these firms if 95% of them leave their clients worse off over a 20-year period?
This line of questioning led me to think about whether the country would be better off without an active wealth management industry. And I realized there are perhaps a lot of industries like this. Health insurance companies, for example, lead us to spend significantly more per person on healthcare than basically any other developed country. There's obviously a lot more to say about the healthcare industry, and I'm not being particularly nuanced about the roles of particular companies, but I think most people would agree that the health insurance industry has made it harder, not easier, to get access to healthcare in general. Are these industries really necessary? Should we really be grateful that these specific jobs, which arguably make life worse for people, exist?
One of the most important measures of our economy that both conservative and liberal politicians like to bring up is job creation. My time in wealth management taught me that jobs don't have intrinsic value, and simply doing things and getting paid for it doesn't mean that you're actually contributing to the well-functioning of society. In fact, some jobs make society function worse.
So, why do politicians continue to look so closely at job reports, without even really caring what those specific jobs are? Because American society has fully embraced the cult of capitalism, which glorifies productivity and villainizes laziness. I studied economics in college, and there seems to be this misunderstanding that markets are morally neutral, so governing society capitalistically is not making a moral judgment. But there is an implicit moral framework to capitalism. It's called utilitarianism, and its central tenet is to “maximize the greatest good for greatest number of people.” This may sound innocuous, but what it really means is that markets assume that “more is always better.”
But that's not true. When you already have enough, “more” can be overwhelming. In fact, in many, many industries in this country, we are way overproducing. It may not feel like this to some – many seem to feel like we're living in an age of scarcity, but that is more a problem of distribution than underproduction. (As many people already know, a massive proportion of the wealth that is generated from production goes to a very small proportion of society.) The reality is that we produce so much that we've had to develop a $200 billion waste management industry to deal with all that we've overproduced. Rather than force people to work long hours at jobs that they hate to produce all these things we don't even consume, and then force other people to show up to jobs that they hate in order to manage the waste we produce, why don't we just let people work fewer hours, produce less, and then have less waste to manage? Our GDP numbers may take a hit, but ultimately, everybody would be less worked and in fact better off, right?
I want to start wrapping things up by responding to the community that I grew up in, where I was told that we can't just “give” people the things they need to live or they won't be motivated to work. First of all, the implications about motivation are just completely wrong. Of course, people are motivated by a number of different things, and even if they had three meals a day, a bed to sleep on, and access to healthcare when they needed it, I think most people would still be motivated to find jobs so they can afford more. But the deeper, more important point that I've been trying to make in this post is that it's actually completely ok for people to be unmotivated to work. Already, we have too many people working too many hours on jobs that don't contribute anything to, and in some cases detract from, society. There are literally hundreds of thousands of jobs our society could lose and not be any worse off, and in some cases, we'd be better off. Many people could be at work for half the hours they're currently working, and the end result of their work would be the same.
On a human level, I also just believe that our obsession with work has led to the tragic condemnation of the worst off in society. I remember hearing people telling me to work hard or I'll end up homeless, implying that people who experience homelessness are lazy and deserve their situation. This has always been a tragic way of looking at things to me. From my perspective, there's absolutely nothing a person can do, as long as they're not hurting anyone, that would make me think they don't deserve to eat three meals a day, sleep on a bed, and be treated for their illnesses. We Americans live in the wealthiest country that has ever existed in human history. The idea that a person who has never hurt a fly deserves to suffer hunger, homelessness, and sickness simply because they're lazy is morally unconscionable to me. And yet we let them suffer unless they agree to sacrifice long hours doing something they hate to generate products/services that will never be consumed. The worst part is that many of these people, who work jobs that don't contribute to society and in some cases detract from society, look down on those who don't work. Rather than encourage the “lazy” homeless person to find a menial job as well, wouldn't it be better if in the richest country in the world, neither person had to do menial work and both were able to live with the most basic essentials anyway?
We need to stop measuring our value as a society by our jobs and GDP numbers, and start measuring our value by how well we treat the most vulnerable in society.