Pulling Your Own Weight

The idea of pulling your own weight is based on the idea that each person incurs costs for upkeep, including food, water, clothing, and shelter.  In the U.S., we might add things like internet and electricity to this, but really it comes down to the fact that every person has an upkeep cost, and someone has to pay it.  The idea of pulling your own weight is a very old idea, but also a conditional one.  Each person in a society that is capable of doing so is expected to pull their own weight.  Of course, there have been some deviations from this, but it is largely the most common way of running an economy.

There are some occasional historical exceptions to this, but there are also some chronic exceptions.  Historical exceptions almost always involve slavery.  Greek philosophy and math were built by people who did not pull their own weight.  In fact, if they had not had slaves to pull their weight for them, we would probably not have modern technology and science as we know them.  Slavery has been common off and on throughout history.  In the U.S. and most of Western civilization, slavery (overt slavery, anyhow) has been abandoned and replaced with an economic philosophy very common to cultures that reject slavery.  This philosophy is the idea that every person must pull their own weight.  Chronic exceptions to this are very common and will never go away.  Babies, young children, elderly people, and disabled people are not expected to pull their own weight, because they cannot.  Stay-at-home mothers are treated as not pulling their own weight in many parts of modern society, however this is a filthy lie.  They may not be producing goods, but stay-at-home mothers are doing work that is far more important than most of the work done outside the home.  Now, the slavery exception is becoming an unusual one that is likely to overturn how we view economy, probably within the next half century.

In older economies, the pull-your-own-weight ideology was a fairly sound one.  While it is possible for a small number of people to provide for a large number, the work involved has been excessive.  One slave working 16 hours a day might be able to provide the needs of ten or twenty other people, but that slave cannot have any freedom because there is just no time for it.  Modern technology has changed this though.  Besides finding more efficient ways of producing, it has also provided ways of replacing human labor with mechanical slaves.  Mechanical slavery is completely ethical.  The machines can work 24 hours a day, and they never need time off or personal time.  The only down time is time spent on repairs and maybe upgrades.  Experts estimate that this ethical form of slavery will replace about 50% of the human workforce by 2050.  This presents a very serious ideological problem.

Here is the problem: The U.S. economy is based on this pull-your-own-weight ideology.  We are in the process of rapidly replacing human workers with mechanical slaves.  These two things are completely incompatible.  If we replace half of the human labor force with slaves and then still expect the humans to pull their own weight, we are expecting the impossible.  Actually, we are perhaps doing something worse.  We are missing something important. What is the actual weight of a human?

The "weight" of a human is the amount of labor required to meet that human's needs.  Slavery with human slaves does not change the weight of a human; it just displaces the labor.  Some human still has to pull the weight.  Slavery with machines slaves, however, does change the weight of humans.  Replacing human labor with machine labor directly reduces the human labor required to meet the needs of humans.  This is what we are missing: As we automate more processes, we are reducing the weight of humans.  The problem is that we are not accounting for this.  We have high unemployment largely because we have reduced the weight of humans, and those humans that are still doing the same amount of work are now pulling more than their own weight.  The result is that there is not enough work left for everyone else, because their weight is already being pulled.  Unfortunately, because we have not noticed this problem, we are not distributing the results of the work appropriately.  The consequence is that some people are pulling more than their own weight, and they are getting the proceeds of that.  The people that are not able to pull their own weight are stuck without enough to survive, because their portion is being given to the people that are pulling their weight for them.

This is complicated, and it is not obvious that this is what is happening.  Further, there is a very important reason that this is happening: We have reached a point where it is actually substantially less efficient for each person to pull their own weight.  When each person's weight costs 2 to 4 hours of work per day (and, when that burden is centralized to one or two people per family), it is fairly efficient for businesses.  Each employee spends enough time working to easily keep up with overhead.  Now, however, each person's weight comes out to around 1 or 2 hour per day, or even less.  When centralized, this comes out between 10 to 20 hours a week.  Having every employee work half time doubles the overhead, because the number of employees are doubled (reducing hours does not reduce overhead).  In addition to that, higher end jobs often have warm up and cool down time that results in unproductive hours on each end of a shift.  This means, in an 8 hour shift, if an hour at each end is unproductive, 75% of the work time is productive.  In 4 hour shifts, productivity is reduced to only 50%.  In lower end jobs this effect is dramatically lower, but in high end jobs (especially in problem solving work like engineering and science), this is a major obstacle to reducing hours (note that in these jobs, longer time between shifts tends to increase the unproductive warm up time, so 8 hours three days a week is not an efficient solution either).  This is an efficiency problem that is never going to go away.  It is just not efficient at current human "weight" for each person to pull his or her own weight.

Is there a solution to this?  Yes, but it is not a very popular one.  It is incredibly unpopular among conservatives, and it is at least mildly unpopular among liberals.  The solution is abandoning the pull-your-own-weight ideology.  We are quickly becoming a slave state, just like Greece was, except that we are doing it ethically.  If we do not abandon this pull-your-own-weight ideology, we are going to either let the majority of Americans starve as their jobs are replaced by machines, or we are going to have millions of Americans working workweeks so short that they are costing more overhead than the value they are generating.  Neither of these is a good long term economic plan.  One short term solution might be long vacation time, where each employee works "normal" hours, but only for 1/4 of the year, and the rest of the year is vacation time, however, that only partially mitigates overhead costs.  The most efficient solution is for some people to work 20 to 40 hour weeks at least 50% to 75% of the year, while everyone else lives off of the proceeds of that work.  Some kind of motivation would be necessary for those who work, and this would probably be complicated and difficult to do without resulting in an overprivileged working class and an underprivileged non-working class (ironic, given that historically the opposite happens).  Ultimately though, it is going to eventually become necessary, or we are going to have an epic economic crash when so many consumers starve to death that consumption drops below an economically sustainable level.

Things are changing rapidly.  Technology continues to advance faster than we can keep up with.  In the past, the impact of this has been primarily limited to the tech industry itself.  In the near future, however, this is going to have a massive economic impact.  If we are not prepared, we are going to suffer.  In some degree, the consequences are not predictable, but there is one thing that is predictable: If a large portion of human labor is replaced with machine labor, we cannot have a sustainable economy that is based in the pull-your-own-weight ideology.