Don’t Lose Sight of Suffering

The danger of an ever-widening circle of wealth, the late John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in 1958 in his most famous book, The Affluent Society, is that “we will settle into a comfortable disregard for those excluded from its benefits and culture.” What’s more, he continued, “there is the likelihood that, as so often in the past, we will develop a doctrine to justify the neglect.”

Willful neglect of the working poor may be odious, but it does have the benefit of its being self-aware. If often giving little evidence of being especially informed, the opinions sanctioning such neglect, whether or not they congeal into a proper “doctrine,” are still susceptible to principled engagement and possible change. The greater danger, far greater, is a mere oblivion. Ehrenreich warns of it in the conclusion to her book. “Some odd optical property of our highly polarized and unequal society makes the poor almost invisible to their economic superiors,” she writes. “The poor can see the affluent easily enough—on television, for example, or on the covers of magazines. But the affluent rarely see the poor or, if they do catch sight of them in some public space, rarely know what they’re seeing.”

What accounts for such blindness? It may be due, in part, to the cradle-to-grave comforts that, especially in the United States, so many people enjoy today, a condition that distances us from an empathic appreciation of, or even exposure to, a workday consisting of drudgery.

What is drudgery? It’s not merely tedium or time-consuming tasks. Many first-year analysts at investment banks spend enough time staring at spreadsheets to long for the consolations of a jackhammer. No, if as a society we tend to valorize overwork and deprecate leisure in a manner that would have stunned our forebears after a summer day bent double in the fields, those who bumptiously embrace work-life imbalance aren’t at the head of the queue for sympathetic consideration, even if one might think they should seriously get their heads checked.

Drudgery, according to Galbraith, is work for which the only thing that commends it is a paycheck. “It is fatiguing or monotonous or, at a minimum, a source of no particular pleasure,” he says. “The reward rests not in the task but in the pay.”

In contrast to those who so labor, Galbraith described members of a “New Class,” a charmed group of individuals whose work included “exemption from manual toil; escape from boredom and confining and severe routine; the chance to spend one’s life in clean and physically comfortable surroundings; and some opportunity for applying one’s thoughts to the day’s work.” This class of individuals was “new” for Galbraith insofar as the ghosts of the Great Depression still haunted Eisenhower’s America, and it should be emphasized that what characterized these people as a class was not only that work was its own reward for them, but that it was rewarded, too, at least well enough to afford the upper-middle-class comforts and bourgeois peace of mind we associate with affluence.

Galbraith was born in 1908 and therefore was old enough to remember not only both World Wars and a Great Depression but also a time before child labor laws, central air, and the polio vaccine. He, like everyone else of his generation, was intimately familiar with a world that could be cruel and unforgiving regardless of one’s position in society. Cash and connections could no doubt insulate one from a considerable degree of grief and suffering, but in a world where one out of every 10 children died as infants, as they did in the US at the dawn of the 20th century, and no amount of money could replace a bum hip, suffering was far more democratic. No one escaped the gallows of despair.

But the world of 1950s America not only afforded the opportunities for a far more humane existence, there also seemed to be a growing community of people, Galbraith contended, who had escaped old Adam’s curse altogether. They could take for granted that work “will be enjoyable,” and if not, that it was a “legitimate source of dissatisfaction, even frustration.” It wasn’t so much that work need not be drudgery; it should not be drudgery. It should be an activity, however demanding, that is filled with personal satisfaction and even pleasure, a condition that involved the very nature of work as well as its reward.

The lives of others

Three generations now stand between us and the debut of Galbraith’s book, and affluence in the US has only grown. The “New Class” is not new anymore, and it’s far larger. Many people are several generations removed from familial touchstones of toil and economic turmoil, and for those fortunate enough to grow up in such blessed conditions, they live and work at a kind of experiential remove that makes a life of drudgery, and the mishaps of poverty that so often attend it, at best a kind of academic phenomenon, something one can identify and even opine on but hardly understand.

I see this in my own classes at Chicago Booth, disproportionately attended by young people who are familiar with upper-middle-class comforts. A statistic that seems to catch my students especially off guard is the median household income in the US, which, according to the Census Bureau, was just over $63,000 in 2018. Given that many of these students have already enjoyed annual salaries double this amount and have done so without also discharging any of the obligations of parenthood or even partnership, the number is a shock to them. (“People live on this?”) And immediately on the heels of this shock is the bracing realization that half of American households get by on less, often far less. Indeed, in 2018, for those under 65, the federal poverty line was set at individuals making $13,064 or less—or, for a family of four, a maximum income of $25,900. That year, 38 million people made the cut, a number slightly smaller than the combined population of the 23 smallest states.

“Most of the people I write about in this book do not have the luxury of rage,” David Shipler contends in the opening of his best-selling book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America. “They are caught in exhausting struggles. Their wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives, and their lives, in turn, hold them back.” If such individuals do not have “the luxury of rage,” that is because luxuries of any sort, material or emotional, are well out of their reach. Whether they are entitled to feelings of rage, however—or, more to the point, whether those of us a bit more blessed should vicariously indulge them on their behalf—is a moral question, one with substantial social and political implications.

As an ethics professor, I have strong feelings on such matters, while also strongly believing that the lectern is not a pulpit. Students are welcome to come to any conclusions they like. They might, like Galbraith, resolve that, when people “cannot have what the larger community regards as the minimum necessary for decency,” they are therefore “degraded[,] for, in the literal sense, they live outside the grades or categories which the community regards as acceptable,” a belief that led him to conclude that “one of the central economic goals” of a civilized society is “to eliminate toil as a required economic institution.”

On the other hand, they might conclude that rage is only a proper response to manifest injustice, and insofar as the price of one’s labor is determined like the price of any good or service in a free market, by the intersection of supply and demand, if the market determines one’s labor is only worth $15,080 (the annual salary for someone working 40 hours a week for a full 52 weeks at a minimum-wage job), well, there’s nothing unjust about that. You are no more required to take such a job than I am required to pay you a penny more than I must for your services. In the spirit of Milton Friedman, we are both free to choose.

But choice, of either a moral or professional variety, is only meaningful if it is informed. That requires, at least among members of Galbraith’s “New Class,” a kind of curiosity about the lives of those less fortunate, a patient inquisitiveness that imparts a sense of moral perspicacity.

Such an engagement recalls an observation by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier. “I had read the unemployment figures,” he wrote, “but I had no notion of what they implied.” Orwell meant that such figures were meaningless to him in a moral sense if he knew nothing about the lives they intimated. He set about remedying his ignorance by undertaking an experiential regimen that, if more involved, approximates the advice I give to my own students: seek to understand the lives of those who suffer on your behalf.

As he chronicled in The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell went to observe the lives of coal miners in England, at least as they appeared in the mid-1930s. The second chapter of his book is extraordinary, a literary Grand Guignol of the grimmest working conditions. Orwell concluded it by reflecting on what had changed for the miners in recent years, and what remained the same for his readers, in addition to the connection between them. “It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are now,” he wrote.

There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have worked underground, with the harness round their waists, and a chain that passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of coal. But most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they were doing it.

To forget that someone is doing some terrible task on our behalf relieves us of the trouble of taking any responsibility for it. The work is absorbed into some wonderful, mysterious world whose benefits, like manna from heaven, seem to appear from nowhere and drop right into our laps.

Ignorance is undoubtedly bliss, but it is always morally unbecoming.

John Paul Rollert is adjunct assistant professor of behavioral science at Chicago Booth.