Michael Livermore 0:10
Welcome to the free range podcast. I’m your host, Mike Livermore. This episode is sponsored by the program on law communities and the environment at the University of Virginia School of Law. With me today is Cara Daggett, a professor of political science at Virginia Tech. We’re here to talk about her new book, The birth of energy, fossil fuels, thermodynamics and the politics of work, which was recently published by Duke University Press. Cara, thanks for joining me today.
Cara Daggett 0:39
It’s great to be here.
Michael Livermore 0:41
So the book is really fascinating. And it’s a it’s a totally different perspective on energy politics than, than anything I’ve seen before. So it was really eye opening and really interesting to read. But just to kind of to get us started, what what drew you to this subject? Did you ever- have you had a long standing interest in, in energy or history? How did how did this project come together for you?
Cara Daggett 1:03
No, I did not have a long standing interest in energy. Interestingly, I do have a background in science, I was a biochemistry major, before moving into the social sciences, and really an interest in social justice and global politics. And the book started because I was actually thinking a lot about what carbon meant, and how prominent it had become, because for, you know, a biochemist, or a scientist, carbon is life, it means all kinds of things. But in politics, it was like a big, bad villain. And I was really interested in the history of that, like, when, when and how did carbon come to be and that and then asking that question, I sort of noticed, oh, energy to is like that, where it’s this big word and concept, even beyond science. As a new age, word, or feeling, it’s a poet, poet’s word. But in politics, it means fuel. It’s got a very specific, like, when you say energy, politics, you know, you’re not talking about about, like, gravity. So I, I really wanted to know how that came to be. When did energy start meaning fuel? And, and I really didn’t know where that question was gonna take me, which is always exciting when you do any kind of historical project.
Michael Livermore 2:53
Yeah, it’s, I bet it was an interesting ride. I mean, one of the, one of the things that just struck me in reading the book at some point was, it recalled a memory when I was in high school physics, actually. And, and, you know, we had a little section in thermodynamics. And at some point, the, the, the idea of work, the concept of work as it’s used, in that context came up. And I just thought that was the funniest thing at the time, that the word work, like was in physics, because work just seemed like such a, you know, a human endeavor, you know, something that you do in your, in your life or whatever, it has all this, you know, I wouldn’t have said social meaning at the time. It’s just something that people do, not something that atoms or molecules do. And so I just found that so peculiar and interesting that the word work was to be found in physics. And anyway, I, it sounds like it, even though the book talks quite a bit about work. And the, you know, the social meaning of that and how it intersects with, with with the kinds of work in thermodynamics. It sounds like that was you kind of came to that in your exploration of this other ideas around carbon and energy.
Cara Daggett 4:18
Yes, absolutely. I didn’t know when I started, that it would be a book about work. But like you said, once I started looking really with looking at the history of science. Even though like you I had my memories of high school and college physics, I didn’t really have a strong history of science background at that time. And so I never learned like, I never learned the history of, of the science of energy and so I was a little surprised to see how recent energy is in terms of physics, and also that it was very much a fossil fuel knowledge in the sense that we get the laws of thermodynamics come out of people who are interested in figuring out steam engines called coal fired engines in the 19th century. And as part of that, we get the emergence of the field of engineering and, and definitions of terms like work very much corresponding to this new idea of energy. So that’s exciting, because here we have a problem of energy, which is really connected to industrialization. And then we have a history that tells us that this knowledge we have came out of industrialization. And so it doesn’t- sometimes when I teach students about thinking about the politics of science and technology, you know, we’re so told in popular culture that science is kind of a fact. And to question it is to say, it’s like, it’s either true or not, it’s black and white. And so it’s not to say, to say, there’s a history there, and there’s a set of interests is not to say that these things aren’t true or useful in certain contexts, but more to notice that we come to this knowledge and the way we frame it, and the stories we tell about it, and the metaphors and terms that we use, do have all, like you said, these human meanings and values, that then it becomes a murky terrain, because all science uses metaphor and language to try to explain itself. And so when we start talking about work, then, or power is another term that has a definition in science, but also clearly, actually, I don’t think it has a very good definition ever on purpose in, in politics. So it’s important to think about what these words mean, and whether we bring what values get brought into the discussion. And, then if we think, Oh, this is just a matter of science and technology, therefore, there are no values, we’re missing, that there are lots of ways of thinking about energy that get left out of the picture. We’re kind of importing these values
Michael Livermore 7:42
Subrosa, without, without thinking about them. So this is a bit of a sidetrack and as I want to get back, to the, to the core arguments of the book in a second, but this just puts me in mind of the signs that one will see around town that will say, say the phrase science is real, along with other things. And, you know, and I, you know, my politics are I typically agree with most of the statements around those things. But I often will cringe a little bit at the science is real stuff. I wonder, what is your take on this? Is it okay, in some context, because obviously, people use it to me, like, Hey, pay attention to public health scientists who tell you to wear a mask or get vaccinated, but at the same time, you know, it’s a little uncomfortable if you have a view that science is embedded in social processes and all that kind of stuff.
Cara Daggett 8:34
Yeah, um, well, science is real, but also. Right. But I think the answer is that it’s very, it’s murky and contextual, meaning that the way we as humans come to knowledge or find things out, is a social process. And it requires institutions and authority and respect for those institutions that make meaning in certain cultural contexts. And again, that’s not to say that anything you say that all truth is relative, and there’s no way of understanding which truth claims might have more weight. It’s just to say, I think it’s a problem when we fall into again, this black and white way of thinking about it, like there’s just truth and not truth because, and I think we’ll probably get to this in the book. I’m really interested in how capitalism and these political economic processes are part of science. And what that means is that these institutions do have political interest in it doesn’t, it doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily true or false. But it means that when we don’t acknowledge socially what’s happening in terms of who’s funding certain projects in which interests are being valued over others, then I think we lose a lot of that trust, we lose some public trust, because there’s a sense, you know, for example, with pharmaceutical companies, they’re not always doing things for the public good. And so I don’t think there’s room in that in a black and white conversation to acknowledge that there might be really good reasons for a lack of public trust in pharmaceutical companies. And that doesn’t mean that they can’t also make a vaccine that is life-saving and important. But you know, I, I live in Appalachia, not too far from you. And I’ve talked to someone who’s from this area, from a small town in this area, who was saying, you know, I, a lot of people around me are very suspicious about the vaccine. And these are the same people who have been affected by the opioid crisis and have watched drug companies purposefully, you know, seek out to make people addicted in their communities and watch the government, in some cases, turn a blind eye to that and allow it. And so this is the same community, then where, you know, to understand that history, and all the things that are going on, there is a much bigger and more complicated story. And so I really cringe a bit when it’s like, oh, it’s just ignorance, or oh, you know, people just need to say science is real, because that, that doesn’t get into the harder questions of who’s funding who, you know, the corporate funding of university research, and it’s a whole- so I would like to do things like increase, you know, public literacy and science. And I want people to believe in climate change, and I want people to be vaccinated. And I think in order to do that, we have to think about what, how we have institutions that seek truth in a way that earns the trust of the public. That was a lot. I’m sorry, I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately.
Michael Livermore 12:37
Yeah, no, it’s, it’s super helpful. And this is, I think, on a lot of our minds these days. You know, the orientation of the book is towards thermodynamics. And one of the I mean, that’s, you know, that’s at least a main organizing principle of the book. And, you know, again, I had never really thought about the political context around physics just more generally, of course, that’s actually not really true. Because you do think about things like the way that the military industrial complex or speak, you know, gets really interested in physics around, you know, the World War Two and, and the Cold War. And obviously, that’s, there’s a big story there. But I never really thought of it in the context of, you know, thermodynamics, and one of the things that helped me, kind of an entry point into the, into the book for me, was, at some point, you make a kind of comparison to evolution, and, and then I just kind of clicked and I thought, well, of course, we’ve thought a lot about evolution, as a scientific discipline, but also as it interacts with society, it just has such clear consequences for you know, there was religious debates, and, you know, social Darwinism and eugenics and, you know, all this stuff gets entangled in evolution. And it was kind of that click that thermodynamics could be something could be akin to that, you know, maybe at a different scale or in different ways, but that there’s this, you know, possibility between what I think of as slippage between scientific concepts and moral political discourse. And also, of course, the social-political context behind knowledge production and scientific inquiry. So, I guess the question that comes out of that is, you know, as you were working through this project, did the, the analogy and then ultimately, you know, you draw together the ways that thermodynamics and evolution kind of worked, operated in tandem in certain respects, but just broadly, this literature and the way that we think about evolution as a kind of cross trans-Science Society kind of thing. Did that affect your thinking about thermodynamics and the possibility of these kinds of trans-Science Society interactions there as well?
Cara Daggett 14:53
Yeah, so I definitely, that’s just the Like, like you I was I hadn’t really thought, you know, how could physics- How might I see its effect? I mean, there was clearly a lot of language that was circulating, like energy and work that had these different meanings and their practices in. So in particular, engineers, I think, are another clear way to see how these concepts travel, because the field of engineering in the late 19th century really coalesces. And engineers become important managers at mines and factories. So that’s another lens. But the one that I was more familiar with was the history of, of science as it fed into empire in the period and generally what Michel Foucault has called Bio politics or the way that life is governed in liberal, modern liberal societies. And that is almost predominantly about the life sciences, obviously, it’s, it’s more easy to see how theory scientific knowledge about life can then be used or be important to politicians and managers who are trying to govern life, everything from counting population, to nutrition, to reproductive health, so on and so forth. So there’s an enormous literature, not just about the human life sciences, but also ecology thing, you know, life more broadly, even beyond the human, including evolution, evolution is probably the king of those. And so I started looking and reading some of these, some of this literature and noticing that energy or conceptualizations, about work. And even directly, metaphors that are coming from thermodynamics ideas about entropy, for example, or, or the tendency for energy to dissipate efficiency, which is very tightly connected to energy. But these are, these are really prominent in ecology, in a lot of evolutionary thinking, not just scientific, but political. But they don’t always say, you know, it’s not like, people studying or doing experiments that lead to thermodynamics, or are as directly involved as, for example, someone studying forestry or tropical health. So in a sense, it’s kind of like, you have to approach the texts want thinking about energy in order to see that a lot of those assumptions are there. And I think that’s a little bit one of the main points of the book is that energy has this capacious set of meanings around it, it feels like this universal thing. But it does have this really particular history that’s connected to Northern European industrialization and Empire, and the interests of those people. So the interest in maximizing work, minimizing waste, more efficiency, and really expanding industrialization and profit making. So there’s lots of other ways of thinking about energy, even within physics that don’t often come into our political conversations around fuel.
Michael Livermore 19:16
Yeah, so there’s a paragraph in the book that’s kind of get I think, gets at some of the points that you’re making right there, I kind of triple-underlined it. Oh, and something that I thought kind of encapsulated. It felt for me any case that encapsulated a good amount of very interesting stuff. So I thought I’d actually just read it out. Presumably, it’s a paragraph, so I won’t run afoul of any copyright violations. And then maybe we could unpack it a little bit because it’s very, it’s very dense. So would that be okay? Yep. Yeah, so this is on page 111. “It’s worth clarifying that I’m not arguing that thermodynamics is false. But rather the energy work connection cannot claim to be a reflection of the whole truth of energy much less of the cosmos. This is never more obvious than when compared with the multiple interpretations made possible by the new biological sciences. In other words, thermodynamics does not simply describe a pre-existing thing called energy, but rather invents energy as a unit of accounting, and work and waste, thereby offering new governance strategies that were particularly useful to Victorian industry. While energy comes to inhabit the same universal realm as matter what counts is more or less useful forms of energy, whereas useful energy transformations is not given an advanced by nature, but is open to political contestation. The valorization of productive waged work as the highest mode of energy transformation represents a happy marriage of physics, Protestant sensibilities, and the European demand for scientific knowledge with which to address the multifaceted crises of labor resistance in the much the Metropolitan, the metropolis, rather, and the colonies. Okay, so there’s a lot in there, but that’s why I underlined it, because I thought there was, it was, it was quite a bit, and it went might be worth unpacking. So, so maybe I just turned it over to you to start doing some of that unpacking, because I think it really does encapsulate a lot of a lot of the argument that you make.
Cara Daggett 21:24
Oh, yeah, thank you. I think, yeah, what so one of the points in that in that paragraph was this idea that energy doesn’t exist, it’s invented. And I have this great quote elsewhere from Richard Feynman, who is a famous physicist of the 20th century, and he had these lectures at Caltech that are still really influential, but, and he says, energy isn’t a thing. It’s not something out there. And it’s really energy is a set of mathematical calculations. So what I mean by inventing energy is that it’s a way of describing transformation in the cosmos. And a word that helps to understand these increasingly complicated math equations about what is happening when things change in the cosmos, and, frankly, is, is still, you can get pretty quickly into very weird theoretical physics around energy. And so for example, a lot of the most useful ways of thinking about and monitoring energy are make the most sense in a closed system. And that’s a system where energy isn’t entering and leaving. But there are no known closed systems. So that’s just When, when, you know, we kind of assume like, sometimes we sort of mathematically assume a closed system of the earth. But of course, the Earth is not a closed system. It’s that’s the whole point. It’s getting beside us.
Michael Livermore 23:11
That’d be bad. If the Earth was a closed system.
Cara Daggett 23:13
So what that’s trying to say is there’s this vast complexity and, you know, with math and with, with scientific tools, we’re trying to understand better what’s happening, especially across change. And so energy becomes the way to name this observation, that there’s something that we can say that is conserved across change, but the way that we could say energy is conserved. Ultimately, what that meant is we had is we had to kind of multiply, what could what energy was like all the different forms of energy. So at first, the math didn’t even really work. There were these kinds of ancient conservation laws, this notion that there probably is some sort of conservation working. Before there was even really solid experimental evidence for that. Because-
Michael Livermore 24:12
like, old school, when you talk about the ancient conservation laws, you like going back to the Greeks and very early philosophers thinking about what is the nature of the universe and that kind of stuff?
Cara Daggett 24:23
Yeah, and I think a lot of that sensibility. So one of my favorite stories was that, you know, these scientists of energy, the 19th century, I think, still had this, this feeling that conservation must be true, because Joule, for example, in the experiments, it things still didn’t add up satisfactorily, no matter how much he tried to measure them. And partly, you know, now we can say, well, he didn’t know about all these other kinds of energy that we’re getting, quote-unquote, lost. But those stories are interesting because what they tell us is no matter how hard the math seems, and how you know physics, how hard physics seems, we still are, these still are human-invented categories to try to explain something that’s very complex. And so again, that term energy and this invention that humans have is really useful and helpful and true in a lot of ways. But it’s also what I was noticing, because it comes about among a certain group of people who are really interested in making steam engines efficient, and already have a commitment to a certain faith. This is Anglo Protestantism, and already have a commitment to a work ethic, because of their culture, and already have a set of commercial interests. And already have an allegiance to a certain nation with its own Imperial interests, that this observation about energy, you know, becomes a way to say, aha, this helps us understand what we already think is valuable, which is hard work and minimizing waste. But that’s not what every culture, for example, even if we just think about humans, it’s not what every human culture has thought about change, and has thought about this thing that we might call energy, or, and it’s certainly not what every culture has thought about work. And so what happens then is the science lends this kind of justification or natural truth to the pursuit of work, which is a certain culture, and it could like there’s nothing about the world that says, this is the right way to treat energy, fuel or to do work. But I think in public conversations about energy, there’s this underlying way, there’s a way that physics gives a kind of stamp to what is ultimately a Western culture of work.
Michael Livermore 27:17
So maybe we could just to make this somewhat more concrete is to think of some specific examples. Maybe that you come across and in the book, where, you know, some of the concepts here, and I think that, you know, there’s, for me anyway, to my mind, there’s four that strike me as having this- I’m going to call it a slippage. I’m not sure that’s the right word between the kind of the scientific and the social, assuming we could even disentangle those two things. But in any case, you know, if we think of the concept of work in physics versus work as a broader social, you know, thing that we talked about and have politics about. So there’s work there’s waste that you’ve mentioned, there’s efficiency, and then there’s the way the concept of energy, which again, sounds like a, you know, to be energetic, that is a compliment, right? When, when Donald Trump said that Jeb Bush was low energy, right, that was that was an insult, right? And that he’s now, maybe we can even take that one too. It’s kind of funny is Is there anything about thermodynamics in there? Right. So you could say, Well, wait, he’s, is he recruiting some of these? Some, something that comes with a history with historical leverage or historical meaning when he calls Jeb Bush low energy? Or, you know, can we just say, oh, that’s divorce, it’s like, that’s too tenuous of a connection to say that somehow he’s, he’s drawing from the same well as these, you know, Scottish Presbyterian steam engineers, and that, you know, this is just kind of unrelated to each other.
Cara Daggett 29:03
Um, it’s, I think it’s both, I think, and the way you said it at the end, I think, is the best way to say it, which is not that, that Trump’s statement is, you know, coming from thermodynamics, but that Trump’s statement, and they’re the skirt, the 19th century engineers were drawing from a similar well, and because that 19th century engineering then became so dominant. Is there I do think those are related in the broader sense of privileging dynamism, and sort of and really, I mean, the kind of pro-work sentiment, which is not just on the right in American politics is certainly connected to thermodynamics, but also to fossil fuels. So I wrote a different article about the connection, but on the far right between masculinity, fossil fuels and authoritarianism. And so in particular, I do think there is a connection between this notion of virility, and what it means to be a man and a certain culture of work that is all very tightly connected to fossil fuels. And I think that’s helpful and understanding this support of fossil fuels, even when it might not make economic sense for certain people. You know, because we’re prone to read it only from an economic perspective. And I think that is centrally important to understanding the trillions of dollars at stake in keeping in the fossil fuel industry. But there’s this broader public support for fossil fuels and fossil-fueled lifestyles, that needs to be explained in a way that goes beyond just kind of economic rationality.
Michael Livermore 31:16
Yeah, there’s, again, there’s like so many different ways to go with this conversation.
Cara Daggett 31:22
But I’ll give you another example, a few specifics. And this one is more on proponents of green transition. So in the 19th century, I came across this description of a waterfall as wasteful, like when the waterfall is going over, and not being captured and put to work by human ingenuity. There’s something wasteful about that. So that’s an example. But I see a lot of that language, especially in describing deserts, and particularly in North Africa, like around development of solar farms, as kind of these places on earth that are receiving the sunshine, and it’s kind of otherwise going to quote-unquote, waste, because all this energy that can be captured and it’s just falling uselessly. So there’s this tendency there to think about energy as, as this project for humans, that we need to capture as much as possible and put it to work.
Michael Livermore 32:28
Yeah, that’s fascinating. Great, that’s a great example. And again, kind of the idea being that they’re drawing from the same Well, here that, you know, Donald Trump refers to Jeb Bush as low energy, you know, and the green folk, the green tech folks are talking about, you know, photons falling on the desert and not being captured by photocell excels as waste. And this is, I think, take part of your project is that this, these are inner deeply interconnected discourses that have a long history at the intersection of, of society and science. So I have some questions for you about the interaction of the concept of work in the and some of these concepts in general in your study, and something that I’m interested in which is, which is economics and the way that economics is used to think about environmental law and policy. And, and part I take from part of the argument from the book is that, you know, the science of thermodynamics, and some of this discourse is very influential in structuring, you know, the growth of neoclassical economics and some of the models that are used and, and we’d get statistics out of, you know, some of the, this engineering and, and thinking about things like, you know, temperature as a way of, of as a macroscopic phenomenon that describes lots of microscopic behavior that we can’t keep track of, and we can think about that, you know, similar things happening in the economy, where we think about, you know, macroeconomic variables, like interest rates representing, you know, actually the aggregation or the consequence of lots of individual human decision making. And I think there’s some interesting mapping there, but also some ways that there’s differences that might be I think, I would be interested in exploring with you. So one is I just, if it was anything you wanted to say right up front about the way that you know, the, this discourse around thermodynamics and, and the discourses that it’s that it facilitated, then interacted with the field of economics.
Cara Daggett 34:49
Um, yeah, so I, I really was, I learned a lot from a scholar named Philip Moravsky. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with his work. But he wrote this wonderful book about the science of energy as a major precursor or foundation of knowledge for neoclassical economics and so that is what I drew heavily upon myself in thinking about it. And, you know, I didn’t have a chance in the book to kind of take that history forward into the 20th century, but things do change with the the rise of systems theory, the understanding of information as in relation to energy, the so you can see a continuing way that there’s a relationship between how we think about systems and an energy and how it flows through systems, and how we think about economics.
Michael Livermore 36:02
Yeah, so the things that were that that struck me as the where there was a mapping that was you just kind of screaming out is, you know, these ideas, again, about energy waste and work, which just we have in both fields. There’s just- all those things exists, we have, you know, work in work in economics, obviously, the concepts of efficiency maximization. Waste is not maybe so much of a formal concept in economics, but I do think that it is very, an important kind of background norm, that that helps justify efficiency as a concept. Like, that’s what we like about efficiency is that it avoids waste. I do you think there’s an interesting distinction that I would be that would like to hear your thoughts on which is, which is work, actually. So in a standard, could also say welfare economic framework, which is, you know, then kind of the normative side of economics, work is usually thought of as disutility, right? It’s, in some sense, it’s a bad thing, people have a choice between labor and leisure, people would prefer to choose leisure. But, you know, they can choose labor, but we, but we have to compensate them, the reason that people choose labor is that we have to compensate them. So the reason we have to compensate people is because they would prefer to do leisure rather than labor. And so in a kind of very stripped down and basic economic model, we just think of labor as a kind of a necessary evil, something to actually be minimized. Other things being equal. And there are critics of that view, that argue, you know, that it doesn’t capture everything about work that is valuable, actually, that would be the the main line of criticism would be that work serves a social function that people get psychological value from working. They socialize with people they might not otherwise socialize with, you know, there’s a whole kind of theory about, as you, you know, I’m sure you’re familiar with much of it just about the value of work. And that, that is in tension with the way that economic models treat work. And I’m just curious about what your thoughts are on that, do you think that the economists are, are on to something or what it’s because on the other hand, in the in the thermodynamic context, we think of work is valorized. And a great thing, or in I mean, not in thermodynamics strictly, but in the kind of discourses around it that our normative work is good, and we want to maximize work. That’s what have we minimize waste, whereas in, like, again, in a fairly stripped down, basic economic model is you would want to minimize work, other things being equal, it’s consumption that you want to maximize, actually, which is why economists like things like technological change, because it reduces the amount of human labor that’s needed for a given amount of consumption. Yeah, so any case, I’m curious if you have any, any thoughts on this?
Cara Daggett 39:13
Have a lot of thoughts on that? I thought it’s really interesting, though this, like, tension within economics between is we’re good or not. And, you know, one of the puzzles socially is why even like people who, who are wealthy and could afford to, or have the choice to, historically over the last several decades in the US are working more and more and more and more. Yeah. So, but this underlying question, you know, I think what you laid out as, as a welfare economic view is still very historically situated in a wage labor modern capitalist system of where work means selling your labor as a commodity to someone.
Michael Livermore 40:04
That’s right. Just the little interjection that I would offer there is I think that they would that’s probably the that’s the standard. And that’s the paradigm. You know, I think that they would accept, I mean, a fair welfare economist would gladly say, oh, yeah, no, like, if you work around the house, and you build a shed in your backyard, that’s absolutely working, you enjoy the consumption value for it, even if you don’t receive a wage.
Cara Daggett 40:29
Yeah, yeah. But we’re still within, we’re kind of trying to understand how humans think about work within a wage labor system, whether they’re being whether they’re earning a wage or not, we’re still in a certain time in place, and how we think about human activity, and how we organize it. And so I think it one of the, one of the books I draw on in the conclusion, when I think about anti work movements, is really defining work that way, as part of a wage labor system, whether it’s earning a wage or not. And saying that, we can think about purposeful activity in a broader sense, as not being bad or something we always want to avoid. But maybe one of the I’m trying to think of what one of the I think one of the key differences there is the notion of utility. Because you could have purposeful activity, purposeful is different than useful. And so when we think about what’s the meaning of the energy that we expend in the day, I think the question of utility is connected to our, our contemporary system, that things that are useful or better, or that we think about utility as good. And I think the other thing I would say that differentiates our current way of organizing work around wage labor from the many, I mean, frankly, humans have lived in different systems for the bulk of our species’ history. So this is a relatively novel way of organizing activity, is that activity, in other political economic systems is very much embedded in social relations. And then it becomes hard to think about something in terms of is it good or bad, or something an individual wants, because whether I perform a certain activity that I might enjoy or not, or feel neutral about, it might be so, so much a part of other kinship networks and community networks, and there are things that I might gain from that not just in a pure, like, I’m giving something in exchange for something, but also in terms of effect and emotion and care and feelings of dignity and reputation. So it’s hard, I guess, in other words, when I hear work, defined in a certain way, like that, it’s really hard for me to not think about it historically. And understand that’s, there are just other ways of, of organizing activity among humans towards not just survival, but flourishing.
Michael Livermore 43:56
Beyond the concept of work, yeah. So in a sense, what’s the, you know, we have this word, work, that, you know, has all of these different social meanings and even scientific meanings. And so in the field of economics work, you know, there’s the analogy at least to wage earning to wage work paid work. But again, it’s from a normative perspective, at least the idea would be to try to minimize it, that it’s a bad thing that it’s disutility that you need to be compensated for, in the kind of work ethic that you describe that has links to scientific inquiry around thermodynamics, but also obviously, deep cultural resonance and links work is something to be maximized at some level that the way we avoid waste is to go out and put everybody to productive use. And then, and those are both historically contingent, of course. And then there are other ways that I take as part of your, what you’re saying is that, you know, work the these concepts, you know, we could say, describe our kind of contingent ways of describing something else, which is purposeful activity or stuff people do, I guess, like that? Yeah, yeah, life in a way. And that we could just talk about it entirely different ways than that, and maybe there’s something as something bad about either way of thinking about work, perhaps from a work ethic way or from work. Work is disutility way and economics but they’re certainly incomplete. And, and we can think about the things that people do. Now, I guess, maybe the question, sorry, that was a little bit rambling. But the question that would come out of this, does it provide a useful lens to think about our society then? Right, so it’s certainly true that the way we think about work is socially contingent? I mean, it would, what else would it poss-? Okay, what else could it possibly be? Right? But and, you know, these, you know, these scientific and, you know, cultural concepts, we inherit them, and we put them to work, so to speak, in our own way, think about our lives. But yeah, you know, what might a social relations theory of, of human activity, tell us about the world that we live in? That would be eliminated? Do you think?
Cara Daggett 46:41
That’s it’s such a great question, and I’m so happy to talk to someone like an economist or someone interested in this, these economic questions about work, because this, I think, it’s fun to talk about. So thank you for your questions. Here’s what’s at stake, I think your question eliminated this for me, what’s at stake in these so, so just the framework you laid out of like the work ethic that maximizes work, and then the welfare economy where you want to minimize work? I’ll say two things. First, those are, I think those are two sides of the same coin, like work is bad, work is good. And the one where you want to minimize work, you’re still actually maximizing productivism, because, as you said, it’s a good thing when technology can do the work for us. And so what’s at stake is, in this current context, productivity is a good thing. And we always want more of it. And we always want to be doing more things and expanding that there’s kind of this assumption that that’s going to serve well being that that’s the fountain of, of prosperity. But empirically, I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence for that, there’s in specifically in energy consumption terms, there’s, I mean, I don’t some of these metrics, I don’t know, I’m always suspicious of metrics, because it collapses a complex world into a number. But for people who have tried to measure things like well being and happiness, and so on, and so forth, there’s a real plateau in terms of rising energy consumption. And also in terms of income, I’m sure you’re familiar with that, too, where happiness and well-being isn’t just this linear relationship that goes up and up. And also, you know, we have the problem of inequality, and so on, and so forth. So what’s at stake in trying to think about work differently, is in I think, in other ways of arranging human activity, it wasn’t an automatic common sense assumption that more more and more productivity is always better. And so there’s something about the way we’re thinking about work, where underneath that is this assumption that the way the path to goodness is more of it, whether tech, whether robots are doing it, or we are, or money is, or Bitcoins are or someone is someone is expanding something somewhere, and that’s a good thing. And so that’s what’s at stake for me, that’s why I think it matters.
Michael Livermore 49:38
Right? Kind of the growth mindset says, the growth mindset, yeah. People talk about that and feels like Ecological Economics and-
Cara Daggett 49:46
Yeah, and it’s really a religion because there’s, there’s so little empirical support for why, why that makes any sense. So it’s a bit mind-boggling how that belief and faith and growth sort of persists.
Michael Livermore 50:10
Yeah, absolutely. And like one of the, the, and this is just it’s so interesting to chat with you too, because these are just ways of thinking. Some of the stuff that I just really have not considered before. So like, again, so one of the things that I’ve sometimes will talk about is speaking of inequality, you know, what’s, you know, what is the problem, when you have really, really wealthy people, and you have other people who don’t have very much like, in our world, in our society. And one of the ways that I’ve explained this or described it, and it comes out, you know, out of the literature is that it’s wasteful. Actually, it’s bad, because it’s wasteful, like, when Jeff Bezos, you know, uses just, you know, huge amounts of money to fly his rocket, you know, that those are resources that could have produced a lot of happiness in the world, that, you know, he got a little happiness boost, I’m sure he enjoyed his trip. But if you had taken that money and used it to fund schools, or, you know, mosquito nets, or clean water, or basic health care, or whatever, that the value in terms of human well being would have been much increased. And so that’s bad, in a sense to live in a society that’s so unequal, because it actually leads to a waste of resources. But now I wonder if I’m just recruiting, you know, taking normative ideas from that from that same? Well, I don’t know if it’s a poison well, but it’s certainly a well that lots of people have drawn on it for some unsavory purposes. So I’m curious what you think of that, like recruiting that notion of waste for something? I mean, is that am I not licensed to do that? Or? Or is it you know, is it troubling, or is it okay, I’m curious what your thoughts are?
Cara Daggett 52:03
Oh, um, I guess it depends, because, you know, when if we’re talking about like, what’s the purpose of using that argument, when we’re talking about.. We’re trying to persuade a student from a certain background in the classroom? You know, maybe sometimes, we need a lot of different persuade persuading techniques. So I wouldn’t want to say like, you should never use an example in the classroom or, you know, I don’t know that I have a problem with that. But if we wanted to think about, I think your question was about, is there some sort of underlying philosophy around waste and utility that that’s dangerously skirting then, yes, I do think you know, that, I think there’s, there’s a few things that, that make me uncomfortable with it, one of which is that it kind of erases that- I think I’m used to coming at that argument from a perspective of unfairness and injustice. So not that the money should be distributed because it would do better. But that the money that people are owed things that was that were taken from them, whether that’s in terms of wage theft, or theft from nature, or dumping into nature for free, or, you know, premised upon histories of still Global North exploiting Global South. Jeff Bezos is, has all that wealth in my mind, not- that wealth is not earned in a way that I think socially is, or justice-wise, is supportable. And so to me, that’s the stronger argument because then you don’t have you don’t get into what I call in the book and accounting framework for talking about justice. And I think that’s a dangerous one. Because people can always come back and say, Well, what about all the charities he gives to and isn’t that great? And well, we gave money to pals over there, and it didn’t do that much or, I mean, if you’re, if you’re talking about utility, it’s not. It feels like we can then use math and come to these easier pictures of the world but it’s, it’s never easy. Whereas if you make a justice argument about that, the accumulation of that money is not only owed to people, but I like to think of it not only as historical harm, like that money was gained through unjust means, but also that those means are the motor for the, for the continuation of those harms not just inequity in terms of, of wealth. But in terms of climate change. I very much think the way Amazon operates, and its constant expansion and accumulation and its pursuit of profit above all else is part of the problem that we have to fix in terms of climate change. So, so yeah, I mean, I, again, I don’t know what’s going to be more persuade people in more uncertain context.
Michael Livermore 55:52
Although that might be that’d be the full question. I mean, I think that is a valid question. You know, something we can ask about kind of rhetoric, right, and persuasiveness. Right? You know, my tendency is to think that I at least I’m not well-positioned to answer those kinds of questions. I think I, you know, I’m at a law school, I can think about persuading judges, persuade persuading regular folks, that’s other departments. You know, that’s marketing, that’s communications, you know, and, at some level, what I, what I try to do is clean up my own, my own way of talking, you know, sit down on good terms, so that I’m on good terms with myself, is what I what I shoot for, and, and to offer good arguments and that kind of thing. And, and maybe it will be persuasive, maybe not. But I really, and that’s obviously very audience specific. But I think that’s a very tricky communications question and political communications. And it’s very pragmatic. And, I mean, look, the reality is sometimes, like, really racist messaging is super convincing. And, you know, that’s just, you know, not a good reason, not a sufficient reason to use it. Most of the, you know, it’s hard to imagine a situation, where would where it would be justified, and so on, no matter how persuasive it is. And so it’s, you know, so I think that’s, that’s more of the kind of question to ask is, you know, is it like that as a kind of a, you’re making recourse? You know, maybe it’s persuasive. But it’s, it’s, it’s kind of bad. I mean, one of the I mean, I kind of want to move, I think this takes us naturally to the, the kind of final part of your book, where you talk about that post work and UBI I think that stuff is really interesting. So I do want to get to that. But I will just, maybe note, the interesting question of the status of justice arguments and welfare are kind of arguments and, and they’re, you know, the relative persuasiveness is, I think, a very interesting question both persuasive, just maybe at a higher order level than just what do people if you randomly select folks off the street, find persuasive, but we know, what are better kinds of arguments? I mean, I think that is a absolutely good set of questions. We’re not going to resolve today. But yeah, but that’s a good set of questions.
Cara Daggett 58:10
You know, arguments can be like gateway drugs. Like, sometimes, if people are trained to think, in a certain way, and then you can introduce some doubt. Within that framework, it might, I sometimes, I think of teaching as like water on stone, where, you know, you might not be the person who persuades someone, but you might be the person who shows a new path a new way. And then that student follows that path. And, you know, hopefully, learns critical thinking along the way about these kind of common sense feelings.
Michael Livermore 58:51
Yeah. Right. What I always what I often tell my students is my goal is to confuse them. Yes, exactly. They never like that. They hate that, as you know, they’re like they’re coming to you, they want to learn something, they don’t want to leave more confused. And they enter and I said, Look, if you leave my class more confused than when you walked in, I’m completely happy. That’s a great outcome. From my perspective. Yes. Okay, great. So let’s, maybe we could just spend a couple of minutes, I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me, but to you know, I think that the modern debate on jobs and the environment and you know, how work interacts with environmental protection, you know, this is, you know, we’ve been talking very abstractly, but these are super, you know, very much on the ground, grist of the mill of political discourse. And both of us have actually entered this a little bit. So in the, in the chapter, the last chapter, your book, you, you talk a little bit about kind of a post-work perspective and the value of adopting that for building a political movement that could, you know, really be important in addressing climate change. And have the kind of energy so to speak the political energy that could, you know, overcome the bad energy politics that we have right now they’re leading to really nasty outcomes. I’ll just really quickly the way that I’ve intervened on this is there was a big debate about jobs in the environment, during the Obama administration were that every time the Obama administration did anything to, you know, protect the environment, they would get clobbered for job-killing regulations, I don’t remember job killing regulations. So the work that I did was basically, to kind of show and argue that actually, environmental regulations have very little net impact on employment, there’s no reason to think that that’s actually a lever, it was just a rhetorical device that was used, but actually, the environmental regulation and jobs are mostly not linked together. So we have, you know, we’ve just intervened in those somewhat different ways. But I want to hear and I’m sure listeners want to hear more about the post work perspective. And, and, and what you know, what it could usefully add to the climate politics these days.
Cara Daggett 1:01:14
Yeah, so like you said, the job-killing regulations, that is fossil fuel PR. And it is the central in sometimes the only plank in the defense of fossil fuels and the opposition to environmental regulation, and it’s very effective. And it’s still like, jobs, jobs, jobs. Even Biden’s recent climate legislation was called the American jobs plan. So it’s, it’s so important work like yours to show that these arguments about jobs are disconnected from the reality of what’s happening to work in America. And so for example, people losing their jobs in the coal industry is not something that President Trump is going to fix. He’s not able to resuscitate the coal industry, and also the coal industry has moved on its own towards other ways of, you know, mountaintop coal removal, other kinds of things that require a different and less labor. So where I’m going with the move to post work is seeing and I guess this gets back a little bit to the idea of political persuasion, and mobilization is that the debate about like, oh, there’ll be more green jobs, or it won’t really hurt jobs, I don’t think gets to the heart of why the job, PR is so effective. And it’s so effective, because it’s set within the bigger context of the problem of work, since I mean, how far you want to go back, but at least we can go back to the 70s, when the last time that wages really kept track with productivity and, and wealth, you know, about then is whenever since then, if you account for inflation, wages have remained, on average, pretty flat, for working-class people.
Michael Livermore 1:03:09
Certainly for working-class people.
Cara Daggett 1:03:13
And so there’s this bigger sense in working-class America, or in America, or generally, even among my students in you know, this, our youngest generation, that the system is broken. And this idea of the American dream, and the job and the picket fence of the house is very out of reach for a lot of people. And so this job killing message, whether it’s true or not, it resonates because people feel like there is a problem with work. And so where I would like to see the environmental movement go is one to recognize that the commitment to productivism is part of the problem. And then two to connect that to the way that our current system of work is hurting people. Because in environmental movements, things that connect to people’s everyday lives and needs are often the most effective. And I think public health is the best example of that when we connect the environment to children’s asthma and people’s health it resonates and people are very passionate about that. And that’s understandable. And I think work is another way where people don’t need to be told that things are going in the wrong way. And I think there’s a lot of opportunity there to connect these two things. And so to think about policies that aren’t just expanding jobs, but to ask those kind of deeper questions about is it true that in order to be worthy of a life of dignity, you have to have a full-time wage laborer job. And one example in terms of examples we give our students one thing, one example I give my students is like, you know, we venerate like you have to work to be a good citizen, but people who own investments that pay them passive income that’s not doing work in the traditional sense. And yet, that seems to be, you know, an okay. Access to citizenship and dignity. So I think we need to start asking these questions about work that go deeper than that accounting framework of like, how many jobs is each kind of field providing us? Because that feels a bit like a dead end to me politically.
Michael Livermore 1:05:52
Yeah. Well, I would I completely agree with the last point for sure. You know, the green jobs, arguments, I think, are they’re playing on the wrong terrain, for good politics, and then, and certainly a broader question about the role of work in our, in our society and in our lives is, is desperately needed. And, you know, thank you very much for your contribution in informing that important conversation. So thanks very much for taking the time to chat with me today. It was a really super interesting conversation here.
Cara Daggett 1:06:34
Thank you. It was my pleasure.
Free Range Podcast 