Learning? yes, for me it’s a hard slog and always has been. I do it for the end result.
But why can't relaxation be work?
I’m not sure.
My creative thinking can be many things - productive, useful, pointless, time-consuming, time-wasting, exciting, interesting etc. But at no time do I consider it ‘work’ because it’s the thing I need to stop doing to get on with some work!
(The ‘work’ being housework, garden work, work for Church or work for my charity or learning German)
That's what I was thinking, if we are using 'work' in its fuller, broad meaning. It has developed a more specific meaning - when we talk of going to work, we generally are referring to a specific employment that we do regularly, often (in non-covid times) in a specific place outside of our homes, to earn our living. And because we need to do it, it often has negative associations, so then any other activity we don't like doing but need to do also gets seen as 'like work,' as if the narrow meaning of work is the main one by which other activities get measured.
But the broader meaning is anything involving physical or mental effort that we do to achieve a result. Whether or not we enjoy it, whether or not it feels like effort, isn't really the point.
Authors and artists - driven by their agents. So yes, this is included. Driven by their public wanting them to produce.
OK - so in your picture, an artist producing an artwork to hang in their own home for their own pleasure is not working, even if that artwork is subsequently valued at millions of currency units, and they sell it at some future point? Whereas that same artist producing the same piece of art with the intent to sell it is working?
Even though all the actions the artist takes, and the end result, are identical?
Or someone doing housework - you're saying that if they do housework because they enjoy a clean house, then it's not work, but if they do housework because they will be looked down upon by their community if they don't keep a clean house, then it's work?
But I'm not sure you can decouple someone's love of a clean house from the standards of the community in which they exist - the things we love are shaped by our community and experiences.
If you're talking about the division of labour between members of a household, then I think it's not too bad - the members of a household can mutually agree on the goals (a certain level of cleanliness, garden upkeep, home decor, children cared for appropriately, ...) and those become tasks that the household needs to accomplish, just like "engage in gainful employment to provide money for the household" is a task the household needs to accomplish.
A common source of friction, of course, is that the members of the household do not agree on the goals. If someone likes everything to be gleaming and polished, and someone else just wants it not to smell, I don't think you can have a sensible discussion about household labour without first resolving your disagreement about what the desired standard of cleanliness is.
If anything anyone does is "work", then "work" is a meaningless concept.
Anything anyone does involving effort to achieve a result. So not quite as broad as what you are saying, but still broad. And not necessarily meaningless - just a broad concept, used in a different way from its more specific meaning (which is still used - the two meanings are used in different contexts). There are plenty of things it isn't - words have meaning in what they aren't, what they contrast with. 'Result' is also a very broad word, used for all sorts of things, but it's not meaningless,
The definition of "work" slightly bugs me because it can be so broad, but also because in my mind "work" has a negative connotation (to me - not meaning in general). So "you'll need to work at that" puts me off not because I object to the effort per se but because I don't like anything that is called "work". I guess to me "work" means "things requiring effort which I have to do" as opposed to things I choose to do.
SC is surely talking about a very specific definition of work, where it is constrasted, as a binary opposite, with leisure. So not the broader definition. His specific definition was that of being externally motivated by the demands of others, if I understand correctly from his post. To me - and I don't know if this is part of his definition - this woud include being motivated by a need for money, to pay bills, for instance (which involve an external demand), so, say, an author who is writing without an agent, but is motivated by a need for money, a need to produce something the public would like and pay for, would be working in this definition. Whereas if they were writing for a hobby, for fun, maybe with the thought that this might possibly be published one day, but not aiming their work towards an audience, that would be leisure. Though I can see how the distinction would get messy near the dividing line, with quite a bit of overlap.
Read any academic treatise and you'll see the author, explicitly or implicitly, defining terms as they will use them for their purposes in this specific, well, work.
I mention that because I don't think it's possible to pin down a single, satisfactory definition of "work" that we'll all agree on. It depends on context.
It makes more sense to specify what we mean - for example, instead of just "work," saying, "paid work," "volunteer work," "unpaid work," etc.
Because on the one hand, work is simply the expenditure of effort and/or energy. There's physical work, intellectual work, and so on. (And, despite my PhD, I honestly think our culture, in general, overvalues / overcompensates intellectual labor and undervalues / undercompensates physical. By "intellectual," I mean not just academic work, but the kind of work that's done at a desk and involves thinking. Not all of it is overvalued / overcompensated; usually just those positions traditionally held by men who sit at desks and think. And, of course, academic work is being valued and compensated more and more poorly.)
That's what I was saying - differing meanings, which depend on context. Context is usually sufficient in everyday usage. If I say I'm going to work, people I know generally know what this means. If I say I've been working on trying to organise my life, or that walking uphill is hard work, I don't need to specify the shades of meaning. People get this from context. We all use the term 'work' in different ways. So in any context-less discussion like this, on 'what is work?', people's answers are going to depend on which meaning they decide to look at, and what they are contrasting it with.
If there's something I know how to do eg jump-start your car or fix your leaking tap then I'm happy to oblige; but if you want me to service your car or re-do all your plumbing -then that's work -and you'll have to pay me!
Anyway, thinking about Breyer’s and Ginsburg’s refusal to retire reminds me of a topic I’ve been wanting to explore, that I hope some LGM commenters have some thoughts about: the distinctions we might draw between labor, work, and leisure.
The classic definition of labor versus leisure in economics is that labor is what people do in order to be able to afford to consume, among other things, leisure. This leads to the income effect versus substitution effect conundrum: When wages rise people can afford more leisure, so rising wages will, all other things being equal, produce less labor, as people substitute leisure for labor. On the other hand, rising wages also mean that the opportunity cost of substituting leisure for labor goes up — rising incomes mean that substituting leisure for labor costs workers more — so that cuts in exactly the opposite direction. This is the income effect.
All this is neat and straightforward and easy to graph. It’s also way too simplistic, sociologically speaking.
Take Stephen Breyer. His current job counts as labor when the BLS is calculating the Labor Force Participation Rate, average weekly wages for labor, etc. But it certainly doesn’t fit the classic definition of labor versus leisure, because as a practical matter Breyer is actually paying to remain in his job rather than getting paid to do it. This is because he could retire from it and maintain exactly the same compensation he’s getting in wages and benefits, but now in the form of a lifetime pension. Since retiring from the SCOTUS would allow him to, if he so chose, greatly enhance his current income in ways that he can’t at present because of his current job, he is in effect paying, in pecuniary terms at least, a whole lot of hypothetical money, in the form of opportunity cost, for the privilege of staying on the Court.
Economists are happy to explain this sort of choice — they’re happy to explain everything — by assuming that Breyer is getting all sorts of non-pecuniary psychic income from staying in the job, which is no doubt true, but again not the whole story.
The whole story involves a distinction between labor and work — or rather a distinction that makes labor a subcategory of work. Clearly being a judge is a form of work: it’s not a leisure activity in any recognizable sense of that term. On the other hand, in the case of Breyer and many other federal judges it’s a form of work that they are doing almost literally for free, or, as in his case, paying for the privilege to do it. I’m not conversant with the economic literature on this point — help me out here — but it does seem to be something of a conceptual problem that there are forms of labor that people do not because they have to in order to get things that they want — goods, leisure — but because they enjoy doing the work for its own sake, quite apart from any pecuniary compensation they get from it. To the extent a job is like that, it doesn’t seem to fit the definition of “labor” in the classic sense at all.
Click over and read the rest if you're so inclined. It seems to get at a lot of things we've been circling around here.
Work surely comes in a whole range of categories.
Work that satisfies the worker by fulfilling his/her special skills such as in the law, medicine or the arts etc..
Work is rarely sweat and tears...unless it provokes pleasure...
Seems to me that people who do unpaid work for a cause (a charity, a religion, a political ideology) often object to this being classified as "leisure".
Tasks can be enjoyable in themselves, or done as a means to an end. That end isn't necessarily economic.
The best jobs to have are the ones where you can enjoy the performing, and get a sense of achievement, and get paid for it too.
Comments
But why can't relaxation be work?
I’m not sure.
My creative thinking can be many things - productive, useful, pointless, time-consuming, time-wasting, exciting, interesting etc. But at no time do I consider it ‘work’ because it’s the thing I need to stop doing to get on with some work!
(The ‘work’ being housework, garden work, work for Church or work for my charity or learning German)
That's what I was thinking, if we are using 'work' in its fuller, broad meaning. It has developed a more specific meaning - when we talk of going to work, we generally are referring to a specific employment that we do regularly, often (in non-covid times) in a specific place outside of our homes, to earn our living. And because we need to do it, it often has negative associations, so then any other activity we don't like doing but need to do also gets seen as 'like work,' as if the narrow meaning of work is the main one by which other activities get measured.
But the broader meaning is anything involving physical or mental effort that we do to achieve a result. Whether or not we enjoy it, whether or not it feels like effort, isn't really the point.
OK - so in your picture, an artist producing an artwork to hang in their own home for their own pleasure is not working, even if that artwork is subsequently valued at millions of currency units, and they sell it at some future point? Whereas that same artist producing the same piece of art with the intent to sell it is working?
Even though all the actions the artist takes, and the end result, are identical?
Or someone doing housework - you're saying that if they do housework because they enjoy a clean house, then it's not work, but if they do housework because they will be looked down upon by their community if they don't keep a clean house, then it's work?
But I'm not sure you can decouple someone's love of a clean house from the standards of the community in which they exist - the things we love are shaped by our community and experiences.
If you're talking about the division of labour between members of a household, then I think it's not too bad - the members of a household can mutually agree on the goals (a certain level of cleanliness, garden upkeep, home decor, children cared for appropriately, ...) and those become tasks that the household needs to accomplish, just like "engage in gainful employment to provide money for the household" is a task the household needs to accomplish.
A common source of friction, of course, is that the members of the household do not agree on the goals. If someone likes everything to be gleaming and polished, and someone else just wants it not to smell, I don't think you can have a sensible discussion about household labour without first resolving your disagreement about what the desired standard of cleanliness is.
The obvious corollary is that if you enjoy doing something it doesn't count as "work".
Anything anyone does involving effort to achieve a result. So not quite as broad as what you are saying, but still broad. And not necessarily meaningless - just a broad concept, used in a different way from its more specific meaning (which is still used - the two meanings are used in different contexts). There are plenty of things it isn't - words have meaning in what they aren't, what they contrast with. 'Result' is also a very broad word, used for all sorts of things, but it's not meaningless,
I mention that because I don't think it's possible to pin down a single, satisfactory definition of "work" that we'll all agree on. It depends on context.
It makes more sense to specify what we mean - for example, instead of just "work," saying, "paid work," "volunteer work," "unpaid work," etc.
Because on the one hand, work is simply the expenditure of effort and/or energy. There's physical work, intellectual work, and so on. (And, despite my PhD, I honestly think our culture, in general, overvalues / overcompensates intellectual labor and undervalues / undercompensates physical. By "intellectual," I mean not just academic work, but the kind of work that's done at a desk and involves thinking. Not all of it is overvalued / overcompensated; usually just those positions traditionally held by men who sit at desks and think. And, of course, academic work is being valued and compensated more and more poorly.)
But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work etc
It took the Jews many years to work out what 'Work' meant. It's very complicated and that's why we have different kinds of work.
Click over and read the rest if you're so inclined. It seems to get at a lot of things we've been circling around here.
Work that satisfies the worker by fulfilling his/her special skills such as in the law, medicine or the arts etc..
Work is rarely sweat and tears...unless it provokes pleasure...
but
Work is a means to an end, unless you are in slavery.
Beg to differ
As is your right, but a more detailed reply would be in order?
Explain why enslaved work is not a means to an end.
Tasks can be enjoyable in themselves, or done as a means to an end. That end isn't necessarily economic.
The best jobs to have are the ones where you can enjoy the performing, and get a sense of achievement, and get paid for it too.
I love painting but I hate commissions.
Quite right but surely a generalisation?
I only paint what pleases me/
when commissioned I paint what I am asked to paint regardless of my feelings towards the subject matter.
All work is a means to an end, enslaved or otherwise.