Work, Service and Worship
"All work is worship."
When I read this Indian saying, reported last year in The Economist, it struck me as appealing but very exotic, a cultural artifact that hinted at the wisdom of a civilization very different from our own. Yet the phrase is not so foreign to Western tradition, after all. Medieval Catholics assumed that the work of one social class at least—the clergy—was worship. Later, the Protestants extended the notion of the "calling" or "vocation" to the whole range of honorable worldly professions, an idea that left behind a linguistic footprint in the word "vocational."
Economics changed man's relationship to work. Adam Smith explained how the "invisible hand" of the market would organize society's labor supply with splendid efficiency even if people just viewed work as a way to earn a wage, so there was no need for any "callings." J. M. Keynes explained how the government could, and should, use fiscal and monetary policy to manipulate aggregate demand and ensure full employment. A calling became a job, and a job became an entitlement such that politicians can be held accountable if they do not materialize. Our society has realized the ideas of Smith and Keynes, and in the process become one of the more humane and prosperous in history, but labor has lost some of its power to give meaning to our lives and cohesion to our communities.
Part of the populist appeal of John Edwards owed to the way he senses this loss. He told the Democratic National Convention that "a job is about more than a paycheck; it's about dignity and self-respect." His statement is confirmed by recent research in "happiness economics," a branch of research that has emerged recently which examines how people report their own happiness under a variety of conditions. "To 'compensate' men exactly for unemployment would take a rise in income of approximately $60,000 per annum," report [authors]. "The costs from unemployment are large relative to the costs from taking a cut in income."
This result confounds the traditional labor market model. In such a model, workers get disutility from working, and utility from getting paid. If this were the case, the happiness loss from unemployment should be smaller than the loss from the associated income, since the effect of less money would be offset by the effect of not having to work. Instead, workers seem to gain happiness—or perhaps, "dignity and respect"—from working. This in turn undercuts the traditional argument for free trade. Defending free trade, economists will admit that there are "winners" and "losers" from free trade, but