Unemployment

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Introduction to Overthink

1:13Hello, and welcome to Overthink. The podcast where two philosophy professors bring big ideas to everyday life. I'm David Pena Guzman. And I'm Ellie Anderson. As always, for an ad-free extended version of this episode, community discussion, and more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack. Before we get into the very exciting content of today's episode, David and I have a very important announcement to share. And I say this with a heavy and yet also a

1:47joyful and grateful heart. We are going to be ending the official Overthink podcast this summer at the end of August. It's hard to know how to share this information, but it's something that we decided together and that, as Ellie said, we share with a combination of feelings. I mean, I feel very sad. I feel very happy. I feel very thankful to you, Ellie, to our listeners. And it's not a decision that we made lightly. It's something that we've been thinking about for some time. And the time now feels right

2:22for us to end on a high and positive note. It does. It does. I am imagining that this is coming as unwelcome news to many of you. Maybe some of you were like, I was sick of you anyway. I'm done. Or like, I randomly found myself listening to or watching this. And where am I? But I think the majority of you may not be feeling that way.

Upcoming Episodes

2:42And so we will just say we are so excited for these next few episodes. Our last episode will be number 182. And we're overall just extremely proud of what we've achieved. And so I feel mostly really positive about this decision. Obviously, there's a lot I will miss about Overthink. We are going to keep the podcast available. We're going to keep the YouTube videos up. And so don't worry, none of the Overthink you love will go away. But we will, at the end of August, be ceasing production of our main podcast episodes. I will be pausing

3:14any and all billing for our sub stack. Yeah. So our last day officially is August 25th. Mark your calendars. Send us gifts in the mail. Do whatever your heart compels you to do. But I think it's a good moment for us to just remember the good things about Overthink, of which there are many. I mean, we've had this show for five years. And we've had an episode either every week or every two weeks. And we've never missed a single episode during that time. Yes. Yes. The past year

3:46where we were doing weekly episodes was too much. It was more than we could handle. Yeah. I will say a little bit more about that in a moment. But I will say we have now gone back to every other week episodes before finishing. But yeah, every week or every other week for over five years, we first ideated Overthink almost six years ago to the day of when our last episode will air because it was actually in August 2020 that we recorded our first episode and then had to re-record it

4:16because it was so bad. And I guess we actually started ideating it even before that then. So. Yeah. So it will have been six years. It will. And Ellie, I'm very thankful to you for being my partner. It's been a wonderful journey. And I'm really happy that we're living on good terms and, you know, looking forward to what's next because we've really done, I think, great job not to toot our own horn too much. But I think it's fair to feel proud of what one has done when one has put a good amount of work into it. I feel really proud. I mean, we were friends for almost a decade before

4:49we launched Overthink. We will remain friends after Overthink ends. We've become acquaintances since. But I do think we've had a really interesting, different form of our relationship that has emerged through the show. And I think our hunch that we would make a good podcast together was totally right. And I'm excited for more potential collaborations in the future in whatever form that might take. I do think it's fair to say that philosophy is a lot more in mainstream discourse than it was six years ago. That's definitely not entirely due to us. But I think like, you know,

5:20if we've had some small role to play there, that's amazing. We've had close to a million podcast downloads and over 8 million YouTube views as of this point. So who knows if you're listening to this episode years later, it could have changed a lot. But I think even as of this moment, that's a lot relative to, you know, I would say that the ambitions we started with, which were just for people to listen. And there are the ways in which the field has changed, but also the way in which we have changed as persons because of Overthink. And at least in my case, I want to note that when we began

5:52Overthink, I was beginning to question my relationship to philosophy as a discipline. And that had a lot to do with personal issues, but it also had to do with the institutional reality that I did not get hired in a philosophy department. And so I thought if philosophy doesn't want me, why should I want it? Why not pivot to something else? And I credit Overthink with helping me work through my relationship to the discipline and rehabilitating it, actually. And so, you know, that's something that's been

6:23extremely meaningful to me, especially as now I find myself coming back to a philosophy department for reasons unconnected to Overthink. And so it's been a bit of a full circle where I began not being sure of what my relationship was to it and now feeling much more comfortable calling myself a philosopher and embracing this relationship. And so thank you, Ellie, and thank you, Overthink, for helping me make that pivot. Oh, no, that's incredible. I feel like for me, it's just been

6:53such a constant source of joy to learn about a lot of things that we hadn't previously known. I mean, some of the episodes are totally in our wheelhouse. They're drawing on things that we work on and other episodes like, oh, wow, I, you know, read four books on this topic and I never known anything about it before. And so I think the format of Overthink uniquely played to our skill sets as philosophers who are trained in the history of philosophy and who have a pretty wide base of knowledge. But I also ended up honing a different set of research skills, I would say, in addition to learning a bunch more content

7:25than prior. And so I would say like, that's what I'm most grateful for. And that's also what I'm going to miss the most. I'm going to miss the most having a quick thought idea, seeing something on TV, having a conversation with somebody and being like, oh, that's an Overthink episode. And then getting to come to you with it, getting to talk with you and with our student workers about how to bring this episode to life. So I know we will both have a lot of different iterations of our public facing philosophy career. I don't think this is the last time you will hear us on a podcast, Mike. But I think it feels

7:58like the right time to sort of wrap over, think up, even though I know I will be missing it a lot in future months. I will say, you know, the best ways to stay in touch with us, David, you can speak for yourself. I will say for me, I'm going to remain really active on Substack. That's actually something I'm planning to put more of my time and energy into. And so you can check my work out on Substack at EleanderPhD. I'm also on Instagram with the same handle. I think I still technically have an X and a Blue Sky account, but I haven't used them in a while. Who knows? Maybe that will change.

8:29But definitely Instagram is a place where you can reach me as well. Yeah. And for me, you can reach me by Googling my email address, whether that is my personal one, which is davidmpenna at gmail.com or my professional one, which is davidmpenna at sfsu.edu. And I look forward to thinking about what is next for me, whether I will continue to have a public facing presence, I suspect so. I'm also really looking forward to getting back into

9:00writing and into research that is more specialized rather than what you said is, you know, this may be a topic of the week epistemology that we've had in Overthink for five years, which has been wonderful, but also a trade-off, right, in terms of the work and the kind of thinking that we do. Yeah. And I have to say, I think that's part of why I'm feeling ready to close this chapter, because I think the breadth of topics we've covered on Overthink, although there's still many more topics that we could, you know, take an Overthink approach to, I think that breadth felt right for a particular moment, both for myself personally, and also, I think, for the role of

9:35philosophy in the broader landscape of intellectual discourse. But I think I'm feeling like we're living in a bit of a different moment that might need a somewhat different approach. No regrets, only love, but Overthink is coming to an end. Wipe your tears, because we're now about to start the actual main content of this episode, which promises to be very exciting. Not, not apropos, actually, of the announcement we just made, since the topic is unemployment. Although I don't know whether it would be fair to say that we've ever technically been employed by Overthink, because we haven't really made any money from it.

10:08In fact, that's the problem.

10:11In any case, join us for the remaining episodes, and we look forward to staying in touch with you.

Unemployment Under Capitalism

10:16Now for the topic at hand, unemployment. Unemployment is a constant anxiety for the working person under capitalism. To lose a job can be detrimental to our physical and mental well-being, increasing the daily stress you have to manage, and lowering your self-esteem. Without secure employment, you lose not only your livelihood, like how are you literally going to make ends meet? How are you going to pay your rent? How are you going to pay your grocery bill? How are you going to pay for child care if you have kids? But also access to health insurance and the ability

10:47to support family members who can't work themselves, whether those are children or not. I found a post on Reddit on our jobs with 4,000 upvotes and 1,000 comments that I think speaks to this psychological impact of unemployment. Somebody said the following, and it just resonated with me as a very powerful expression of the condition of the unemployed.

Personal Experience with Unemployment

11:10People don't understand just how torturing and soul-crushing long-term unemployment can be. I've done everything you're supposed to do. I have a supposedly competitive MSc from a supposedly top uni. I have technical skills. I have internships with big names on my CV and good references. I speak languages. I know people. I apply left and right. I use keywords. I have a CV that's been professionally reviewed. I engage with people on LinkedIn. Job searching is a full-time job by this point.

11:45And still, I have nothing to show for it. It's completely soul-shattering. I have no money and no savings left. My friends and acquaintances have a life, do things, get married, make plans, give birth to kids, start mortgages, book trips. I can't do anything because I don't have the money and I am depressed because I feel like I have no future.

12:11This is just so evocative and so devastating and I think indicative also of the dilemma that so many people find themselves in. I'm struggling to come up with a good metaphor for this, but as you were reading that, David, I was thinking about what it's like to try and get on a fast-moving train, to time it just right, that you'll grab the handle of a train car and launch yourself inside it when a door is open. It just sounds like so difficult. But then when you're actually on the train, like, oh, look at the nice landscape surrounding me. And it just seems so easy that you've gotten on

12:46the train. And of course, you will remain on the train, right? Although more and more people are getting thrown off the train at any particular point. Well, and it's not just that you are trying to get on a train that's moving very fast and it's very dangerous for you to make the transition. But then you have people on the train yelling at you, oh my gosh, why don't you like trains? Are you taking a break from trains? It must be nice standing on the ground without having to worry about where you're going. And so we'll talk about this later in the episode. But the political theorist, Michael Denning, I think got it right

13:21when he said that under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited. So yes, the train might have a lot of problems with it, but they don't really compare to the lived experience of those who are denied entry into it. Yeah. I can't tell you how much I'm just like feeling this in my core right now, having stable employment, but having had some very precarious employment in the past and periods where I wasn't sure where that next paycheck was coming from. And, you know, who knows what the future is for any of

13:56us as well. So I think this line from Denning is great because it highlights the false choice at the heart of capitalist society. You might have some choice in what line of work you pursue, depending on your circumstances. So nobody forced me to become a philosophy professor. That was a choice I made. But when it comes to work in general, the choice is between a job or struggling to meet your basic needs. Work isn't an option we take up, but it's an imperative that's imposed on us by the conditions that we live in. And an imperative is experienced as a constant looming anxiety of

14:30falling through the cracks. Today, we are talking about unemployment. Is unemployment a bug or a feature of capitalism? Is AI going to put us all out of a job? And how does widespread unemployment fuel reactionary politics?

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17:16It feels like we're always talking about AI on the show these days, but it's impossible not to talk about AI in an episode about unemployment. Just last year, ChatGPT was putting eight fingers on every hand that it drew, and it couldn't identify how many P's are in the word strawberry. But it seems like AI is now in a new league. I don't know if you've heard about this, Ellie, but the company Anthropic recently decided not to release its newest model called Mythos to the

17:51public due to safety concerns. And basically the reason is that it's too powerful and too good. They said that the decision was made because the LLM performed really highly on hacking and on cybersecurity tests. So apparently the model found vulnerabilities in every single major

AI and Unemployment

18:13browser and operating system that it was tested on, including bugs that were very nuanced and decades old. Yeah, we have seen the rapid evolution of generative AI, not in a way that I think a lot of the people in Silicon Valley are seeing it as like we're approaching singularity, but certainly the decision to keep Mythos out of the public was like a very telling moment. We are recording this a bit before the episode comes out. So it could be that things have changed by the time listeners hear it.

18:43But I think your point stands, of course, that it is getting better at a very rapid rate. Yeah. And granted, chatbots are still very clumsy in relation to some basic skills and some reasoning tasks, right? Like they're not yet at the level of a human adult performer. But it's also the case that some of the new models are making a lot fewer mistakes than they did even a year ago. Not to mention that AI is now entering into the domain of deep fakes that really put pressure on

19:14our ability to tell what is real versus what is fake. So it's producing now video content that is virtually indistinguishable from reality in a lot of cases. And, you know, I consider myself a relatively AI literate person. And I have been fooled by various videos thinking that they're real. Yeah. And then later realizing that they're actually AI generated. And so it's really hard not to wonder, will AI, as it gets better and better at more and more things, put us out of

19:48our jobs if it can suddenly replace us? Yeah. And I think all the hype coming from the CEOs of the tech world is certainly stoking this fear that AI is going to take our jobs. But I think there are some good reasons to take the question seriously, even from a broader standpoint than, you know, each of us in different professions being like, it can't take over what we do, right? For example, researchers at OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania claimed recently that 49% of US jobs are at risk of being exposed to LLMs. And a similar study run by the consulting firm McKinsey

20:20derogatory concluded that 57% of US work hours could be automated with AI and robots. So they're like, yeah, they could take your jobs. But the historian and social theorist Aaron Beninov has some quite compelling critiques of these studies. He mainly points out that they work only in theory, and they don't take into account important practical considerations. Just because a task could imaginably be automated doesn't mean it's profitable to automate it. I love how they put it, you know, these jobs are going to be exposed to LLMs as if LLMs are a force

20:54of nature, like rain, like there is nothing we can do to stop it. We just have to not expose ourselves to it, find refuge. But I think your point about, you know, like just because in theory, they could do it doesn't mean that it's feasible. It's really good. And I think we see this play out in robotics. We are constantly promised robot cashiers, robot baristas, you name it. But the cost of actually implementing complicated robots that are functional in restaurants or in coffee

21:24shops, far outweighs the cost of just hiring a human, at least given the current state of robotics. And that's especially true in the service sector where workers have to do really complicated embody things in order to perform their function, right? Like they have to leap over obstacles, they have to like navigate narrow spaces, they have to manage a lot of relations and moving pieces. So even though robotic automation is theoretically possible, it may not be economically feasible. And that's an important point to keep in mind. Yeah. And I think one example of this that's

21:59really funny is the Neo home robot, which was supposed to be a home housework robot. It costs 20k. You could buy it from this startup, the Neo startup. And the idea was that for the cost of a car, you'll have a robot who can do your dishes for you and do all of these other household tasks that we love not to do and that, you know, are time consuming and boring. But then the videos that the company released showed that the Neo home robot seemed not to be able to do basic things like close a dishwasher, let alone like not break your grandma's China, perhaps. And the company then

22:35ended up admitting that the robots were often being remotely controlled by humans. But then the idea was that in selling the Neo home robot and having users use them repeatedly, they would be able to train the robots. Like this is also so creepy surveillance state. They would be able to train the robots. So eventually the Neo home robots could do the things that they were saying they could do. Oh my God. So you're essentially paying it to be the training data for future robots as a person who

23:07is buying one of these. And no, but I think this speaks to just how difficult it is to perform, especially like physical movements for robots, like, you know, how to ride a bike or how to like walk over uneven terrain, which is why to just throw another example, Amazon has been doing a lot of automation of a lot of things. But the thing they cannot seem to automate is what is called the last mile, which is actually delivering the package from the truck to the front of your house, because robots can't adapt to the to the terrain. They can't like jump over the dog or like adapt to the

23:39irregular sidewalk. And I think that principle that there is a difference between theoretical possibility and implementable reality also applies to AI. It's just not yet clear what implementing AI in most jobs would actually look like. And so there might be some jobs where you can incorporate AI, but maybe AI won't fully automate the job in question. And so there have been cases, you know, where people are fired because companies want to automate with AI and then those same people have to be hired back because

24:15they realize that the AI can't actually supplant or replace the human intellect and the human skill set. We needed you after all. Yeah, I mean, Beninov in his book, Automation and the Future of Work also makes an important point that I want to discuss here. The worry that automation will bring

Automation and Work

24:32about mass unemployment is not new. It's in fact, a recurring part of capitalist society. And so when you say like, we're constantly being told that we're going to get replaced by robots, this constantly being told goes back quite far in the 2010s, in the 1980s, in the 1950s, and so on, all the way back to the 1830s with texts like Charles Babbage's on the economy of machines and manufacturers. Beninov also points out that these anxieties about automation are often paired with utopian fantasies for a world without work

25:05altogether. If technology will put us all out of work, maybe we should embrace it. And you see this with the growing popularity of universal basic income as a solution to automation and unemployment. It's taken for granted, and you see this actually among people on both the left and the right, that technological change will create a world that can run almost entirely without human labor. And proponents of UBI argue that this new world will require radical changes to the way that work is structured under capitalism, or perhaps a move beyond

25:40capitalism altogether. Right? And so here, the idea is like, yeah, most of us will be put out of jobs, but maybe it's actually not so bad. As long as we have other things to put in place to make sure that people are surviving. Yeah, as soon as the utopian fantasy becomes a reality. But I like putting this in the historical context that you put it in thinking about the history of technology and the role of automation in the structuring of the workforce since the 1830s. And you know, we can say probably even before that, because it's really easy to get wrapped up in the novelty of AI. And I think in some cases,

26:17that makes a lot of sense. But in others, it doesn't, because it is just another new technology that is a profit accumulation tool. And so it's not as if it's unprecedented in that way. What I want to know is what Beninov says about the risk of automation. So I understand that there is this history of technology, creating these fears, but also fueling this fantasy that maybe we will also move to a better society where we don't work. But what does he say about the present moment? Is AI actually

26:50threatening to put us out of work? Or is that not really a threat? Well, he thinks that the automation discourse gets some things right and some things wrong. So first, it does put its finger on a real problem. Global capitalism is failing to provide good jobs for an increasing number of people. And I think it's really important to point out here that unemployment statistics don't capture the severity of the problem. They don't include all unemployed people. And they often don't capture the increase in precarious underemployment, such as part time or contract work that barely makes a

27:24living. Remember when we interviewed Premilan Addison for the episode on care? In her book, she has this statistic about statistics that just I cannot forget about, which is that in the US, you only count as unemployed officially, if you are unemployed and actively seeking a job. So the people who have become discouraged because they keep looking for a job, but they can't get one. And so they stop looking for a job. They don't even get counted, which means that there is actually a lot more unemployed people than we think that there are because of this artifice of statistics. And also in other

27:59official statistics, you also count as employed, if you work one hour a week, right? Like nobody in their right mind would consider that actual employment. Yeah. So unless you're really, really running for that train, you don't count. If you take a pause to breathe, you are yeah, you're you're not counted. If you temporarily grab hold of the handle on the train and hoist yourself up, but then you don't make it inside and then you, you know, fall back down, you're not counted. There's so so many people who

28:30are not counted here. This being said, we often think that unemployment and underemployment are caused by technological innovation. The myth that automation will put everyone out of work while a persistent one that goes back centuries. And like I said, one that is popular among both left and right. Beninoff thinks this whole myth is wrong. He thinks the primary cause is not technological innovation, but global economic stagnation. Stagnation leads to a persistently low demand

29:01for labor. And so when the economy is growing faster than productivity, technological innovation actually doesn't lead to job loss. Companies will just hire more people and make more money. So if the economy is doing really well, let's say the demand for cars is especially high. The car company will hire more people, even if they also are investing in some fancy new assembly line technology. But once the economy slows down, it starts to be more profitable for companies to shed labor. The demand for workers goes down and people lose their jobs.

29:34So just to clarify this, Ellie, the idea seems to be that unemployment is less a consequence of technology and technological development and more something that depends on economic cycles of growth and stagnation in which technology is implicated, but it's not the only driver. And what is true technology for making cars is also true of AI in the digital revolution. It's wrong to say that new digital technologies single-handedly automated away the need for labor

30:05because those technologies lead to more employment whenever the economy is actually in really good shape. So the problem is that according to Beninov, our economy has been slowing down since the 1970s. And this is what Robert Brenner calls the long downturn. And so global growth rates have been slowing, which even mainstream economists have started to acknowledge. They call it secular stagnation. And why the global economy is stagnating is a big question. Beninov's explanation draws from Marxism. Capitalism has a structural tendency to seek profit at all costs. And in doing so,

30:39spreads technological developments all over the place so widely that the technology becomes omnipresent. So we are not economists. So I'm not going to weigh in on the, not that I could, you know, on the details of this theory and the debates behind it. But I think Beninov's point is really helpful in shifting our focus away from is AI the problem and to broader dynamics of capitalist accumulation and just the way in which technology fits into a larger mode of production.

31:11And normally we tend to think about unemployment, especially in personal terms, right? We think about it as a failure of the individual, either to find a job or to develop marketable skills. And we know that that's wrong. But even thinking about unemployment as a small glitch in the capitalist system that spikes during times of crisis and recovers during periods of growth may not be entirely right either. And it seems to me like we ought to think about unemployment as a permanent

31:43feature of our economic reality, that as long as we are under capitalism, and honestly, this is an observation that Marx made already in the 19th century, there will be unemployed and the number of unemployed increase over time. And so in a sense, it seems like we are facing an unemployment catastrophe. If we keep in mind, especially this idea of the long downturn that our economy has been kind of in the toilet since the 1970s, we are facing an unemployment catastrophe because if

32:15unemployment increases when the economy is down, we should expect unemployment to get worse and worse with the passage of time unless there is a radical restructuring of the economy. And so I think unemployment really should be viewed as a feature of capitalism. It's a necessary byproduct of capitalism and not a small error that we could fix from within capitalism, which is often how I think it's interpreted and understood by economists and sometimes political theorists.

32:49Yeah, and not just unemployment, but the low demand for labor. That's a feature of capitalism at this particular juncture. And Beninoff says that's what proponents of technocratic solutions like universal basic income often miss. He points out that wealth redistribution is certainly helpful. It can be great, but it doesn't get at the root of the problem. UBI assumes technological progress will independently bring about the conditions to move beyond capitalism, whether it's through fully automated luxury communism or what have you. And, you know, I found this challenging because I'm in general a supporter of UBI. But I take his point that in reality, it's still a kind of technocratic

33:25solution to a problem that goes far beyond such solutions. Technology can't do the work of changing our social relations for us. And for Beninoff, this means that we have to think less about such solutions and more about social movements that can really address the deeper structural issues. This message is brought to you by the Capital One Venture X card. Venture X offers the premium benefits you expect, like a $300 annual Capital One travel credit for less than you expect. Elevate

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34:45Eli, now that we've talked about AI and some of these misconceptions about whether it leads to

Concept of Unemployment

34:51unemployment or not, I want to talk about the concept of unemployment itself. One thing to note right off the bat is that unemployment is a negative concept. It's defined as a lack of something, a lack of employment or an exclusion from wage labor. And the definition makes sense. It's intuitive to think about it. It's even built into the structure on employment with the prefix. But it reflects the fact that employment itself is often normalized as the basic condition of life

35:23under capitalism. And not just the basic condition, but the ideal and only rational way of existing under capitalism. So when we think about employment as the default and the ideal at once, unemployment becomes a deviation that we have to avoid. And if we fail to avoid it, we have to course correct from it, both on a personal and a political level. So I as individual need to do everything in my power to not be unemployed. And we as a culture try to do everything in our power to minimize the number

35:56of the unemployed so that we can claim that we are a good, rational society. Yeah, no, this is such a good point that like it's taken as the default that people work and then unemployment is then understood as this deviation. And part of the stress of being unemployed is precisely feeling like you're at fault or somehow falling short of the norm. There's a stigma around being unemployed, especially for longer periods of time. And I've been feeling this a lot in my social circle in L.A. in the past few years, because after the

36:28combination of COVID, the writer's strike and the streaming bubble bursting, a lot of my very successful friends who work in the industry here in Hollywood have been out of work and have then been launched into a crisis. They're like, oh, I had this really successful career in Hollywood. And now suddenly the rug is pulled from under me when I'm like in my 30s, 40s, even 50s. And what do I do about that? Right. And obviously there are the material aspects, but also really those psychological ones. There's also the fact that during the pandemic, a lot of people became

36:59unemployed and they often stayed unemployed for a longish period of time. And, you know, all of that makes sense. Like there were very good reasons why people were unemployed during COVID. But a recent psychological study showed that some employers still preferred candidates who were employed throughout COVID and labeled those who were out of work as unprofessional or underqualified. Oh, yeah. The stigma, right, of having been unemployed. And we talked about a similar phenomenon in our illness episode where we talk about how there is a strong social pressure against missing work

37:32because of a global pandemic or even a common cold, right? Like even more so a common cold. So there is like this idea that you have to go to work no matter what, unless you're dying. And at that point, maybe we'll overlook it. And in our everyday lives, I think we treat unemployment like a blemish that must be covered up as soon as possible, right, with makeup. And we see that even in the way of speaking. When people lose their jobs, often they refuse to say they are unemployed. They say, I'm between jobs, right? Like that's a different way of presenting what amounts to the same reality.

38:05And here I want to talk a little bit more about Michael Denning, whom I mentioned earlier,

Wageless Life and Unemployment

38:10because he argues that the key concept for understanding capitalism is not employment, but actually unemployment. So we often assume capitalism is all about making people work so you can exploit them in the workplace so you can extract as much profit from their labor. But Denning thinks that this is overstated. Instead, he argues, we need to center what he calls wageless life, which is the condition not of those who work, but of those who desperately need to work,

38:45but don't for many reasons. So wageless life is life under capitalism outside of wage labor. And there are a lot of subjective positions that fit under this category. So you have people who are literally in between jobs for a short period of time. You have the unemployed, independently of for how long they've been unemployed. You have the elderly and also, of course, you have children. And his argument is that if we think about

39:15capitalism from the perspective of unemployment rather than employment, we don't just get a more comprehensive view of the problem, we actually get a better view of the problem. So it reshapes the way we think about capitalism as a whole. Okay, interesting. I think there's a trivial way to think about this claim, which is that nobody is literally born into a job, right? You always have to start unemployed and then you gain employment. But I take it that he's not making that trivial claim. No, no, he's making a more sophisticated conceptual point.

39:50So just like children don't work. They're wageless. Give them a job immediately. No. So by introducing this concept of wageless life, Denning wants to separate the state of living outside of formal wage labor from the various ways in which we think about the experience of living outside of formal wage labor. So he says there is wageless life. And there are the ways that we represent wageless life in order to control it

40:21and govern it in different ways. And so he points out, for example, that the term unemployment is a lot more recent and narrow than most of us think. It was first used in the late 1800s to displace earlier terms like the poor, the idle, or even the Marxist concept of the lumpenproletariat. And since then, once it was introduced, and especially as we moved away from criminalizing or moralizing about unemployment, economists started thinking about it, especially in the

40:56U.S. and Europe, as something that needs to be solved by means of economic policy and better governance. So this was the principle behind early 20th century movements for social democracy, right? Like unemployment needs to be studied by the government. It needs to be measured and it needs to be solved with things like trade unions or unemployment insurance at a government level, right? And so Denning's core insight here is that we represent wageless life in a particular way

41:28with this notion of unemployment. And then that allows us to govern the subjects who fall into that category in this way, right? With government programs and top-down management. So it's not a coincidence that we tend to think of unemployment as a problem to be solved by returning to the norm of full employment. The term itself only emerged with this kind of governance. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. The term and the governance go hand in hand. Some of the history that

41:58Denning writes about, I think, is relevant here because this way of thinking about unemployment as something that stands in need of governmental management is part of what led to the rise of the welfare state in the wake of the Great Depression and after World War II. For a couple of decades, actually, in the 1950s and 60s, it really seemed that full employment could be achieved. And you even see this with some of the idealism of the UN around the discourse of work, where the right to work and protection against

42:33unemployment were enshrined as a human right by the UN in 1948. But when the economy began to slow down during the 70s and 80s, during that period that you mentioned, Ellie, called the long downturn, those protections started getting stripped away by neoliberal reforms. And so the rise of neoliberalism, especially under Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK, emerges as a reaction against the welfare state. And so we start moving away from the social protections that are meant to minimize

43:05unemployment. And we start a large scale process of economization and liberalization. And so as neoliberalism takes off, the idea that unemployment is this marginal deviation from the norm that we need to avoid at all costs starts to disappear or crack, because unemployment itself becomes more and more common, right? More and more people under neoliberalism find themselves out of a job. And so you can't say, oh, it's this aberration, because it's actually quite normal and visible to find people in a condition of

43:41unemployment. And I think all of this really reached a climax first with the 2008 financial crisis where lots of people lost their jobs and their homes. And then it reached another climax during COVID and during the recession that it produced. And as you said, a lot of people also lost their jobs. Yeah. And the dismantling of the welfare state is still very much an ongoing process today. I'm thinking back to the episode you mentioned a bit ago, David, our care episode with Premal and Addison about the crisis of care that many people are living through because social services are getting

44:16increasingly privatized, especially in black and brown communities already marginalized by histories of racial oppression. She has a lot there about how messed up the relationship is between unemployment and welfare eligibility. Yeah, that's a great observation, Ellie, that we need to think about how different communities experience unemployment differently. And that's also a point that Denning makes in his work, he says, again, there is wageless life, just to reiterate the core idea. But then there are different ways in which we represent or think about that wageless life. One of those ways is the concept

44:49of unemployment. But he says that concept is highly geographically and historically specific. It's really how people in American and European contexts think about wageless life and maybe how they experience it too. Meanwhile, in places like Africa, Asia and Latin America, histories of colonialism have meant that wage labor has never really been the norm, even after independence. Denning says that in the colonial and the post-colonial context, wageless life isn't just an accident that you can be insured against

45:25or a macroeconomic failure that the state can save you from. It's actually the main mode of existence for colonized and neocolonized subjects. And that's why unemployment hasn't been the main concept that is used for governance in most places of the global South. Instead, the dominant term for wageless life in this context is what he calls informality. Now, that's a bit of a confusing term. You know, what does informality have to do with this? Basically, the concept of the informal economy was coined by

45:59economist in the 1970s to refer to the various kinds of self-employment, part-time, temporary work that fall outside of the norm of wage labor. So think about your untaxed street vendor, garment workers, day laborers. And he says that this precarious existence under capitalism became normalized in these contexts in places like Africa, Asia, and Latin America. And sort of people accepted it as

46:31part of what it means to live outside of the global North. And so there is a difference here between the global North that experiences wageless life as unemployment and the global South that experiences it as this informal economy. Yeah, that's super interesting. This idea that like in context where unemployment is so widespread that it can't be treated as something to be solved by new policies, we have to call it something else altogether. So I'm wondering, do unemployment and informality

47:01cover the options here or do we need something else altogether? Yeah. So I think Denning's position is that these concepts are too historically and geographically specific. And so we actually need a new term for thinking about wageless life. And he turns to Marx for an alternative and tries to reclaim the Marxist concept of the virtual pauper. So for Marx, the fundamental condition of workers under capitalism isn't employment. Workers rather are defined by the possibility of being absorbed into

47:35wage labor, but always once they are absorbed into wage labor, also by the possibility of being abandoned once again, once their labor is not needed. And so the Marxist notion of a virtual pauper is the idea that, look, we're all paupers virtually because we are disposable. And so for Denning, this notion of the virtual pauper maybe captures better the truth of wageless life, that nobody is safe under capitalism from unemployment, even those who are currently employed, because everybody can be tossed away for no reason

48:09the moment their bosses, the capitalists decide.

48:17Adults of all demographics can be unemployed or underemployed. But I think our standard way of

Standard Way of Thinking About Unemployment

48:24thinking about unemployment tells us a lot about who we expect to work. I would say when I think about a paradigmatic character of unemployment, I think about a white man who has lost a job, either like a young white man who has lost a job, maybe like due to AI or something like that, or the pandemic, and especially an older white man who perhaps lost a manufacturing job due to the rise of globalization and other factors

48:56that voided out the rust belt of all of its economic opportunity. Maybe that's just me. But I think that that paradigm works because the person I'm seeing there is somebody you might expect to be a breadwinner in the standard model that we have in our society. And I do think, therefore, it's the white man, especially the older white man, likely a blue collar former factory worker, who is seen as a particularly depressing figure of unemployment, somebody who stood to lose the most

49:29confidence-wise from unemployment, whether or not they lost the most, materially speaking. Does this make sense? No, it does. So two observations I have about this is that, one, the figure that we choose as a starting point for thinking about unemployment changes the discussion altogether, right? And so beginning with, say, the figure of the white man who is despondent due to having lost their job leads us to have certain discussions about the role of white men in the workplace and their role in

49:59politics. I think we get somewhere else if we start centering, say, the undocumented worker or the single mom suddenly deemed unemployable. But I think you are right that in America, that figure of the white man who has lost their job and is rightfully angry at the world dominates our political imagination. And it is not just because of the relationship between men and work, but also because of the assumption that in the U.S., if anybody is to suffer, it shouldn't be white people, right? And so this idea

50:33that white people should be at the throne or in a position of comfort and affluence. Well, on the train, because we're talking mainly about, like, potential blue collar workers here. So the idea that I have in mind that I think really encapsulates this is the song Allentown by Billy Joel, which came out in 1982. And the reason the song is very strongly on my radar is because I used to live in Allentown. It was actually my first job after I finished my PhD. It was a one-year sabbatical replacement in Allentown, where I spent most of my time being very grateful that I had a

51:03one-year job and terrified of looming potential unemployment until, like, another one-year job, came and caught me just at the right moment. But Allentown is a song that portrays the perceived disenfranchisement or sense of not being on the train that was widely experienced by, at the time, youngish men who were trying to seek jobs in the Rust Belt. Because Allentown is a city in Pennsylvania. And the lyrics of the song include lines like, we're living here in Allentown and

51:34they're closing all the factories down. Our fathers fought the Second World War, spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore, and we're living here in Allentown. And there's a sense of restlessness, of not knowing what to do because, you know, the parental figures, there's definitely like a nostalgia for post-World War II America here that we might want to question. But there's a sense that the security that was afforded one's parents is not afforded these young men who don't have jobs. He says, we're waiting here in Allentown for the Pennsylvania we never found, for the promises

52:06our teachers gave if we worked hard, if we behaved. Like, it's reminding me a lot of that Reddit post that you read out at the beginning. Yeah, no, I see that. And the emotional coloring of the lyrics, they point to nostalgia, they point to depression, they point to a sense of, what's the term for not seeing a future for yourself? A finality, perhaps? Yeah, despair. I think that's right. And this is making me think, actually, about the analysis of white masculinity that we find

52:38in Wendy Brown's book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, where she has a chapter at the very end of that book entitled, No Future for White Men, Nihilism, Fatalism, and Resentiment, or Ressentiment, where she talks about how when you have that emotional profile, a combination of nihilism, of fatalism, of depression, in that subjective position, which is the white man who feels like they've been, actually, she uses the term dethronement. Maybe that's why I was thinking about a throne. And she says that when you have this combination of factors, somebody who feels

53:13entitled to something, they feel like that something is unfairly taken away from them. The ultimate result is a kind of other directed rage that manifests itself as what Brown herself calls the desublimation of the will to power. And what she means by that, which it's a combination, you know, of desublimation from Freud and Marcuse and the will to power from Nietzsche. But essentially, what she means is that when you see yourself as being denied what is rightfully yours, even though your sense of what

53:48is rightfully yours is based on a fundamental social injustice, you are catapulted into a position that makes you very susceptible to fascist propaganda. And in particular, it's something that makes you act out in rage and anger toward those around you that you see as more vulnerable than you. Women, queer people, trans people, immigrants, especially. And yeah, the way she's she she puts it, which I think is really good for us to think about is how the feeling of dethronement

54:22often results in a self-erogated right to hurt others. And I think the figure of the white man who feels like they've lost their job, the immigrants have taken it, the women are not respecting him is precisely the figure that then feels entitled to lashing out against others and get some gratification from it along the way. Yeah, I mean, I was finding and in doing a little research on this, I found things like a Tucker Carlson segment where he just had like a fake graph up on Fox News

54:56in 2021, claiming that the female labor participation rate was nearly 20 points higher than men's, although the male rate is actually higher. Right. And so basically like blaming the influx of women into the workplace for men's unemployment. And I think we see a lot of that rhetoric around the aggrieved, unemployed man in our society today. I think that man is very often white, but actually not necessarily so. And I do think that the popularity of Trump among Latino voters was

55:29really wrapped up in this as well. His gains with black men, same thing. And there are a number of men that I can think of, boomers whom I know because they're family members or neighbors or acquaintances whose trajectory I have witnessed. These people have and it started or was exacerbated during COVID for the people that I'm thinking about who lost jobs, ended up having to pick up random gig work after having established careers in other areas and suddenly found themselves feeling really

56:03shut out of the system, ended up getting red pilled on YouTube and blaming all the wrong people for why that is the case. And so I think this rise in reactionary ideology is linked to the underemployment and unemployment in our society, which, as we said, like is not even accurately addressed by the statistics. Yeah. And I mean, all of this goes back to that transition that we talked about from the welfare state to neoliberalism, because neoliberalism produces the conditions for increased precarity

56:34and unemployment in the working class. So more people are unemployed. But because neoliberalism also gutted the welfare state, when people find themselves in this condition of wageless life, they no longer have the protections that once were promised to them by the welfare state. And so you find yourself feeling abandoned and on top of that, humiliated by the lack of support. And I think in the context of white masculinity, but maybe just masculinity in general, that turns into this desire to make it all burn or, you know, like destroy

57:09everything around you if that's the only legacy you can leave behind. Yeah. And to make an analogy here to a period of history before the rise of neoliberalism, something that I was wondering about in preparation for this episode and which ended up being true is whether or not there were some similar conditions in Weimar Germany, you know, around the time of the rise of Hitler. And indeed, that is the case. So the Great Depression hit Germany particularly hard. Banks in the U.S. suddenly recalled the loans Germany was relying on for economic

57:43revitalization after World War I. And that caused the German economy to spiral into a severe depression. Winter of 1929 to 1930 alone, the number of unemployed rose from 1.4 to over 2 million people. And then by the time Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, one in three Germans were unemployed. And so you mentioned earlier, like, I'm not an economist. I'm not a historian. And I don't want to make sort of oversimplifying generalizations about the similarities here. But I think there

58:14are striking similarities between that situation and what we're seeing today.

Historical Analogies and Neoliberalism

58:18Well, and I don't think the historical analogy or comparison that you're making is beyond the pale. And in fact, that's the point of Wendy Brown's book that in the wake of neoliberalism, we are seeing the re-resurgence of precisely those fascist sentiments that led to the rise of fascism in Germany and that have led, quite literally, to the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. twice.

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