Here's the theory on people who work for a bank and blog for fun. Do they think of themselves as bankers or bloggers?
It boils down to their Ginis. You see, some people have magic lamps inhabited by blue-suited banker Ginis, some people's magic lamps have sailor-suited Ginis... :)
Actually, a Gini coefficient is a measure of statistical dispersion, and is a standard measure of income inequality in a society. My take is that people from more unequal societies are more likely to define their identities in terms of who they are at work.
Why?
Imagine a relatively well-off person living in an obviously unequal country. He needs to make peace with the fact that he lives a comfortable life, but the people from the slum/ favela/ ghetto/ council estate/ inner city live obviously miserable, abysmal lives. The sheer presence of that abyss, the unspoken fear and guilt that that abyss evokes, pulls at the psyche of the comfortably-off like gravity. The psyche protects itself from that pull by believing that privilege and comfort are deserved, earned, by hard work, by education, by qualifications, by seriousness.
In this unequal context, it is hard to think of oneself in purely frivolous terms. It feels like being the surfer on the beach in Apocalypse Now. Its the reason why cricket in India or football in Mexico are not just silly games played for fun, they are about the redemption of national pride.
So what do I expect to observe in the data? I expect people from more unequal societies to wrap their identity ever more tightly around their professional selves.
Here are Ginis for some of the OECD-30. Their rankings are:
1. Mexico: .474
2. Turkey: .430
4. USA: .381
7. Great Britain: .335
8. New Zealand: .335
12. Canada: 0.317
The two most unequal OECD members are Mexico and Turkey. Fortunately, I have friends from Mexico and Turkey who tell me their compatriots unambiguously define who they are in terms of who they are at work.
Also, to my earlier observation, Britain's Gini is the same as New Zealand, and is a lot lower than the USA. Canada is even further away from the USA than is Britain. So if the theory holds, Canadians should be a less likely to derive their identity from work than either Americans or Britons, despite Canada's stereotypical cultural location somewhere in-between the USA and Britain.
India is not in the OECD. So I looked up the World Bank's Ginis metrics, which show that India is better (i.e. more equal) than the USA.
While that is flattering, and says something important about the world's only superpower, the World Bank might be systematically underestimating South Asian inequality. Pakistan looks really good on the same metrics, more equal than the Netherlands, Canada, France or Switzerland. That doesn't ring true. My hunch is that India really is in the mid - 40s pack, along with Mexico, China, Jamaica and Turkey.
A more classical theory, which involves no melodrama about the gravitational pull of the abyss, is the impact of marginal tax rates on labour supply. More equal societies have higher marginal tax rates. People therefore have less reason to work hard to earn money. They therefore invest more of their time, and identity, in leisure rather than labour.
I buy into the conventional theory, but it doesn't quite feel complete. Maybe that is because I remember an India with high marginal tax rates, in Indira Gandhi's time, when people still wrapped their identities around their work, even if they didn't work especially hard. The ways in which people construct their identities change more slowly than tax policy.
4 comments:
Intriguing thought, but I'm afraid I don't buy it - at least not on the data you provide. Some basic data issues first.
Gini is clearly a good way of measuring overall statistical distributions, but as a single number, it hides a multitude of ways of getting there, and for the inference you draw I think it has a big impact. So, for example, both the US and the UK over the last decade or so have had an enormous amount of the income 'earned' by a relatively tiny proportion of the people - especially in investment banking type spaces. This will make the Gini materially higher, but hardly anyone who forms the population being observed will realise it, either directly or by observation (the culture of celebrity alone is likely to give an availability bias to their view of the data). You could summarise this as the Gini is on too large a population ... but the next issue is that the Gini isn't necessarily on the right population at all.
It covers entire countries, and the assumption in your argument is that all context that is used by people is drawn from their entire country ... and also from only their country. I don't think either is likely to be true. On the first, what often matters is keeping up with the next door neighbour ... not some statistically average next door neighbour either - the one that lives next to you, or down the road, or who you meet on the train or at work. In most countries there are distinct sub-populations that are quite different, and in many respects they behave completely differently. By the same token, to the extent that people's context covers the country there is no reason to believe it should stop at the border - I feel extremely lucky to have been born in a Western country, and acutely aware that the standard of living I have simply couldn't be supported by all people in the world. The populations in the real slums of the world concern me more than those who are less well off in the UK.
Moving from the data, and even lacking robust data on how people define themselves, it does feel like there is some kind of correlation ... but I doubt that it is as causal as you imply. More likely, I think, is that economically thriving societies pretty frequently have capitalist underpinnings. That directly drives income disparities and therefore higher Income Gini (the old adage - the poor get richer, and the rich get much much richer). It also drives a tendency to define oneself by ones work.
Lots to respond to Greg. Thanks for the comment. And right up front...the post has served its purpose if it intrigued.
I'm going to have enough to say for this to be another post.
Interesting line of thought - the relation b/w equality or lack thereof in a culture and people's world views in that culture. But I have to disagree on a core element of the argument.
I'm not sure at all whether a country is an appropriate unit of analysis. Am sure you will find plenty people in say Mexico, not defining their identity in terms of work and plenty of people in Scandinavia who are extremely work-driven. So while there are people who tend to be first bankers and people who tend to be first bloggers, not sure their country of origin / residence is the prime explanatory variable for this.
It's like the Indian thought / Western thought argument I keep encountering back here - my standard response is always - there's not Indian and Western thought. Theres only good thinking and poor thinking, some of it happens to be found here, some elsewhere...
To be perfectly honest, I like this theory a lot more than I believe it.
In general, theories that take the form "people in category x behave in way y" have a history of being spectacularly wrong, and dangerous. Skepticism is good.
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