The work ethic is the most important engine of capitalist civilisation. It keeps workers working long after they have satisfied their basic needs, drives entrepreneurs to found new companies and inventors to invent new things, and, in general, generates the surplus that pays for productive investment and social welfare.
Yet, the belief that work is a moral duty rather than an inconvenient necessity is hardly a natural one. In most civilisations, social status has been determined by your distance from productive labour – aristocrats in Naples even lost their patents of nobility if they were caught doing anything useful – while workers abandoned the grindstone for the alehouse at the slightest opportunity.
Education workers rally for higher pay in London.Credit:Getty Images Europe
Today, America is the world’s leading example of the power of the work ethic. Americans work longer hours than Europeans and take significantly shorter vacations. The month-long summer holiday that the French regard as a right strikes many Americans as a form of decadence.
High-earning Americans in law, banking and the executive suite routinely work more than 50 hours a week and some of them work more than 100.
Yet, this commitment to work is eroding at the edges and increasingly at the centre. The US labour force participation rate — the proportion of working-age citizens either working or actively looking for work — has declined from a high of 67.5 per cent at the turn of the century to 62.3 per cent.
The post-work revolution was led by men without college degrees. In Men Without Work, which was first published in 2016 and revised in 2022, Nicholas Eberstadt from the American Enterprise Institute produces some astonishing statistics on the number of prime-age men (25 to 54) who have fallen out of the labour market.
Many US men in the prime of their working lives are unemployed.Credit:Bloomberg
More than 11 per cent of these men, or 7 million, are neither working nor looking for a job. Barely half of native-born prime-age men with no high school degree are in the job market.
The Covid pandemic spread the post-work revolution to new groups, hence all the talk of “the great resignation” and “quiet quitting.” Many older Americans decided to fast-forward their retirement: 1.75 million baby boomers retired in 2021 as compared with a million in the average year.
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