Is FIRE a form of life in which we make good on our obligations to others? Or is it a form of shirking or hoarding? This post continues where the previous one left off, and focuses on whether retiring early from “bullshit work” is a form of shirking.
The premise of FIRE is that by constraining your consumption you can leave the workforce early. Constraining consumption works in two ways: before you retire – by generating relatively high savings – and after you retire – by living frugally on the capital returns from a relatively modest endowment. But is the FIRE-lifestyle a universalizable choice? Or is it possible only for a few, contingent on it not even being an option for the many? Can you liberate yourself from the “bullshit” dimensions of work – as prominent FIRE-devotee Mr. Money Moustache puts it – only because others cannot?
The first defense of the FIRE-person will probably be that the whole point of FIRE is to reallocate time from bullshit to meaningful activity. By definition, that entails a higher degree of productivity. The FIRE-person freely applies their human capital. While it was locked up in a particular (bullshit) job, it was being hoarded – by the capitalist. It’s a powerful argument that could apply in many individual cases. But assuming that capitalists will compete to gain access to human capital not only with a wage, but also with meaningful work, one would at least hope that it would apply less often than not, or in any case, not permanently to any given individual.
[Skippable side note: Junior employees may, understandably but incorrectly, characterize their job as involving a high degree of “bullshit”: getting coffee, etc. It’s true that some of their skills may be going to waste, i.e., be “hoarded” by their employer. But they may, also understandably, underestimate the degree to which they need to learn the ropes – the particulars of their function, their organization, their industry – to live up to their potential. You don’t know what you don’t know. Until you at least know what you don’t know, it may be hard to tell whether what you are doing is bullshit or simply the most efficient way possible to learn. What looks like bullshit might wind up being an investment. Wax on, wax off.]
What is bullshit work? David Graeber has an entire book on the subject (which I have not yet read) based on an earlier essay (which I have). But let’s look at how Mr. Money Moustache (MMM) defines the “bullshit portion of your work. The commute, the politics, the production of inferior products.” The first factor, the commute, has nothing to do with the job per se.
[Skippable side note #2: The commute certainly is a massive waste of time and human capital. Covid and the home office may have reduced it, but whether that is a temporary state of affairs remains to be seen. For my part I have made many important (and cash-costly) life choices to avoid commuting. Although I’m not going into it here, there is a separate question about whether avoiding a commute is a universalizable life plan, or whether it’s possible only for some because others are willing to commute. What would our settlement patterns look like if we all lived a 15-minute bike-ride from our jobs, and would that settlement pattern be less livable than everyone’s current situation?]
The third factor MMM cites is working on inferior products. Having spent time on the production and/or research sides of a business, I have a lot of sympathy for the perspective that producers are sometimes constrained from doing their best work. However, having worked on the sales side as well as in upper management, I’m also aware of how difficult a judgment call it can be to choose a quality level for a viable product, in the sense of “something that someone is willing to buy at a given price.” I have worked in a business that created products that were too “superior” to have a viable long-term market. Producers, understandably, are not always aware of what level of quality the market wants, and hence cannot always tell whether their job is “bullshit” because of the constraints on quality. When that happens, it’s not the fault of producers. The fault lies squarely with management: It’s a failure of communication. But it’s not due to the intrinsic bull-shitiness of the job.
And that points naturally to MMM’s second contributor to bullshit: “politics.” Politics, in the world of business especially, is a dirty word. Has anyone ever used “office politics” with a positive connotation? But check out the subtitle of my favorite book about management: Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy, by Gary J. Miller. Miller makes the case that management is inherently a political act: finding and sustaining a cooperative equilibrium in what otherwise would devolve into game theory’s scary, scary Prisoner’s Dilemma. Hierarchical organizations with central planning can, in principle, unlock efficiencies compared to loose affiliations of free agents. Although thousands of free agents could work together through market forces to build, say, jet engines, the transaction costs of contracting between them would be enormous. Hierarchical organization can avoid those transaction costs, if everyone within the organization contributes to common goals and foregoes opportunities to benefit from others’ contributions while withholding their own. AKA shirking. Both abstract game theory and empirical behavioral economics have shown that people can and do enjoy the fruits of cooperation and forego the individual gains from shirking, if they believe that others will act similarly. Miller argues that the essential task of management is to create and defend that belief. In practice, that’s accomplished through communication, whether explicitly through words and negotiations, or through symbolic acts such as ostentatiously refusing management perks.
That means that there may be two kinds of “politics” going on in the workplace. I assume that MMM uses politics in the sense of individuals using the organization to pursue individual goals – including both monetary and status-oriented – by taking advantage of others’ cooperation (shirking and other forms of defection). But there are also the political efforts – performed by everyone, but for which responsibility lies with management – to sustain the cooperative equilibrium. As a FIRE-devotee, you use your early career to generate savings from a salary that represents your share of the fruits of organizational cooperation – cooperation sustained by the political economy of the hierarchy. Then, in order to avoid more of the “bad” kind of politics, you retire early, presumably at the point where your experience and reputation – regardless of what kind of role you are playing – could maximally contribute to maintaining the “good” kind.
I confess: I like the idea of FIRE. A lot. Enough to flirt with it myself. And it’s awfully tempting to regard it as a virtuous lifestyle, with its emphasis on frugality, which may be both a better way to live and a better way to meet our obligations to others with respect to sustainability. But I worry that “leaving the rat race” is a way of reneging on our obligations to others, a form of shirking. Shirking from the responsibility of sustaining the cooperative ethos whose fruits generated the surplus I, as a FIRE-devotee, hope to live on. And if the lifestyle is only attainable by living off the return on the accumulated surplus – the investors’ share of the fruits of cooperation – then it’s even more worrisome. The capital return is generated by the labor of those who have not yet been – and may never be – able to leave the rat race.
The Ruminathans 