Free The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers by Michael Perelman

moral or spiritual weakness. 15
     
    Business leaders added that workers actually benefit from long hours because the restriction of leisure makes workers better people.
    One nineteenth-century businessman asserted that the best course is to give men “plenty to do, and a long while to do it in, and you will find them physically and morally better.” 16 Another told the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, “I worked 11, 12, 14 and 15 hours a day, and have as yet felt no bad effects from it, but rather been strengthened. It is not the hours per day that a person works that breaks him down, but the hours spent in dissipation.” 17 A study of business ideology in the 1920s summarized the prevailing view at the time, which was even more damning of shorter hours:
It may be observed at the outset that leisure and idleness are synonymous for the masses. The identification of the idea that the average man might enrich his personality by putting leisure to some constructive use was patently ridiculous. What
unthinking creature
could be ennobled by the fruits of leisure? For such as they, not to work is to loaf. Leisure is idleness.
     
Leisure will … lead to an abuse of time by developing a taste for improper amusements and luxuries; it tends to increase criminality; … and it will eventually bring complete decay to man’s capacities. 18
     
    Debauchery was not really a central concern for economists. If it were, they could just as easily glance up the social ladder rather than concentrating their moral scrutiny on the less fortunate. Economists might be offended by seeing a drunken worker stumbling in the streets. Better that he have a chauffeur to pluck him up before the public catches sight of his drunkenness.
    Even at the height of the struggle about the length of the working day, economists did little to seriously inquire about the subject. Had they done so, they might have taken note of the corrosive consequences of long working hours. Exhaustion took a toll on workers’ health. Excessive hours of work meant that workers rarely saw their families during daylight hours. Such enforced absence had a negative effect on their children. Excessive hours of work were also conducive to a psychology of despair, which people often try to control with drink, the very symptom of debauchery that long hours are supposed to hold in check. How would economists’ subjective evaluation of their own welfare possibly change if they found themselves subjected to the imposition of long hours of grueling physical labor? I think any rational person knows the answer.
    Consider the attitude of W. Michael Cox, chief economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and one of the most prominent cheerleaders for markets. Dr. Cox always finds ways to put markets in the best possible light. When faced with the quandary about essential workers, such as firemen, having to work two jobs to be able to afford to live in New York City, Dr. Cox pontificated, using the language of investment advisors, “I think it’s great…. It gives you portfolio diversification in your income.” 19
    Here Dr. Cox has outdone himself, in justifying the unjustifiable, while implicitly financializing the job market. Going beyond Adam Smith who saw workers as merchants selling their labor, Dr. Cox recasts them as investors. Just as investors profit by diversifying their portfolios, workers would be well advised to hold more than one job. Sophisticated investors divide their funds among many, even hundreds of different stocks. If only the poor, benighted workers could figure out how to extend the day beyond twenty-four hours, they coulddo the same. I wonder how Dr. Cox would feel, however, if groggy but well-diversified firefighters arrived to save his house already so exhausted from their other job that they could not perform their duties effectively.
    Extending the Years of Work
     
    The Procrustean imperative demands that employers attempt to squeeze every