Hard Work is Only Sometimes Necessary and Never Sufficient, But What Else Can You Do?

People have become anti-work because work used to be a source of meaning and prosperity, and now it isn’t. But meaningful work is the one of the only sources of meaning along with family and religion. If we lose it, we only have nihilism. Freddie deBoer on why the left is a labor movement. From David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: “Perhaps the reason the... See more

When we place our faith in hard work, we’re wishing for the creation of character; but we’re also hoping, or expecting, that the labour market will allocate incomes fairly and rationally. And there’s the rub, they do go together. Character can be created on the job only when we can see that there’s an intelligible, justifiable relation between past... See more

Michael Sullivan

6h

Economic thought -- and traditional sort of center-right thought in general -- generally is grounded in an ethos of, "The world is deeply imperfect. Some people are going to get shitty deals."

And a lot of people just really deeply want to reject that. They want a world in which either nobody gets shitty deals, or only people that ... See more