Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community

"Yes, that’s right. Marienthal is a small village outside Vienna, founded in the 1830s to provide homes for people employed in a flax mill that had been built nearby. And it grew and grew in the decades that followed. But then, in 1929, the Great Depression hit. The next year the factory closed down. In 1932 three-quarters of the 478 families in the village had nobody in work and were relying just upon unemployment payments for an income. And Marie Jahoda, the lead researcher on this project, wanted to know what the impact of such widespread worklessness would be. It’s a fascinating book in part because their methods were remarkably unconventional by today’s standards. They wanted to collect data on residents without the residents realizing that they were being watched. So, they just embedded themselves in everyday life there. They opened a clothes-cleaning and repair service, various sorts of parental support classes, a free medical clinic, courses in gymnastics and pattern design and so on, just to immerse themselves, in as innocuous a way as they could, into everyday life in the town. So it’s an intriguing read, in part because of the peculiar methodology. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . What they found was also very striking: a growing apathy and loss of direction in life, increasing ill-will among the unemployed towards others. People borrowed fewer library books, dropped out of political parties, stopped turning up to cultural events. There were even some more granular things: researchers who stood at street corners supposedly noted physical changes in the way that unemployed people carried themselves. Men without work supposedly walked more slowly in the street and stopped more frequently. The reason these observations matter is because it’s so often said that work is not simply a source of income, but also a source of meaning and purpose in life. And, if that is right, then the threat of technological change isn’t simply that it’s going to hollow out the world of work, but it might also hollow out the sense of direction, purpose, and fulfilment that people have in their lives, too. And this book is an idiosyncratic but insightful account of exactly that problem. This book is, for me, a starting point. I treat it as a provocation for thinking about the relationship between work and meaning. What I argue in my own work is that, actually, as you’re suggesting, that relationship is far murkier than we might commonly suppose. If you look at the data today in the US, almost 70% of workers are either not engaged or actively disengaged from their work; only 50% say they get a sense of identity from their job. In the UK almost 40% of people think their work does not make a meaningful contribution to the world. So, there’s a lot of heterogeneity today; some people get meaning and purpose from their work, but others do not. And it’s also the case that, over time, this relationship between work and meaning has changed tremendously. I’m quite interested in how, in the ancient world, work was often thought of very differently. In Thebes, the ancient Egyptian city, you were banned from seeking office if you had been engaged in trade over the previous ten years. In Sparta, the warrior-city state of Greece, citizens were banned from productive work by law. Both Aristotle and Plato thought that work was a prohibitively grubby affair, and argued that meaning and purpose could only come through certain types of leisure. Again, it goes to this point that the relationship between work and meaning is a murky one. But in a world with less work, the nature of this relationship becomes particularly important, and we need to think more carefully about it. I think we’ve seen evidence of this during the pandemic. Over the last few months, there has been a fairly unfamiliar public conversation about how we ought to best spend our time in the enforced idleness we have found ourselves in under lockdown. The point I am making in my book, and which I think has been borne out by the inconclusiveness of much of this new public conversation, is that while many of us have a sense of what gainful employment looks like, we do not have an equally good sense of what gainful unemployment looks like. This gets at something very important. Take a basic income as an example of a mechanism that disentangles work from income, in the sense that you get an income independent of your status in the labour market. That, as you say, solves the distribution problem, by providing us with a way of sharing prosperity in society. But what it fails to solve is what I call the contribution problem, which is a need to create a shared feeling that everybody is pulling their individual weight and paying into the collective pot. In a world with work, that sense of social solidarity often comes from a feeling that everyone is making an economic contribution to that pot, that everyone is paying in through the work that they do and the taxes that they pay. If they’re not working, but they are able to work, then there is an expectation that they actively look for work or retrain and re-skill and try and find work. My worry about a basic income is that while it solves the distribution problem, it doesn’t engage with the contribution problem. This is particularly true for a ‘universal’ basic income, which is a basic income given to everyone with no strings attached. And that is why I’m interested in the idea of a conditional basic income. It is still a basic income, but it comes with certain conditions attached. What sorts of conditions? Well, as a society, if we take seriously the threat of a world of less work, we need to think about what sorts of non-economic contributions we might ask people to make to the collective pot. What activities do people think are socially valuable and important, but might not necessarily receive a wage in the labour market? In Britain, about 15 million people volunteer regularly, half as many people as there are in paid work. Indeed, the Bank of England estimates that this volunteering is worth £50 billion a year, making it as valuable as the energy industry. We recognise that this work is often hugely socially valuable, even though it doesn’t receive a wage in return. In a world with a basic income, why not recognise it more formally? “My worry about a basic income is that while it solves the distribution problem, it doesn’t engage with the contribution problem” So, when we are thinking about how people might spend their spare time in a world with less work, I imagine that part of it will be spent doing as they see fit. But we will also—just as we do today—expect that people spend some of their time contributing to the collective pot, even if it is in a non-economic way. Yes, or work for the public good. There is an opportunity here. During the pandemic, many people have noted the striking mismatch between the great social value of the work that so many key workers do and the wage that these workers receive. And so, there is a chance here to think together about what activities we want to recognize as being valuable contributions to the collective pot, to hold up some of these activities that, while they might not receive a big return in the labour market, we nevertheless think of as socially vital. I expect so, though what is interesting is that, during the pandemic, this has not really been the case. There has been a strong sense of social solidarity in facing down the virus together. And that is partly why in the UK—quite rightly—there does not seem to be a sense of grievance from those working for a wage towards furloughed colleagues who are receiving a wage without working. The question, though, is whether this sort of arrangement could continue indefinitely in response to the threat of automation instead. My fear is that it is only feasible in the short run. In the longer run, I worry that it would offend some people’s sense of social solidarity, if some people are receiving a wage and not working. And so again, that’s why I think engaging with the contribution problem is so important. So those are the three problems: the problem of inequality, of how to share income in society when we cannot rely on the labour market to do it; the problem of power, of what to do about the growing influence of large technology companies; and the problem of meaning, of how to provide purpose and direction to people in a world where work may no longer sit at the centre of their lives. These three final books are so important because they provide us with a glimpse of these problems, and how they will trouble and test us in decades to come."