There is a beautiful passage in Anna Karenina (part III, chapters 4 and 5) which describes the pleasure to be found in demanding physical work. Konstantin Lévin, a landowner, spends a day with a group of forty muzhiks – peasants who work for him on his land – harvesting the summer grass. They work in a long row, each man with a regularly sharpened scythe, cutting a swathe through the meadows under the heat of the sun. The day is long and hard, especially for Lévin who is unused to hours of repetitive physical work, but he finds happiness in belonging to this collective endeavour, seeing the large fields of his property transformed around him. At some moments, he loses all sense of time and place, the rhythmical movements of his arms and legs becoming automatic, his mind at ease, as if his blade acted upon its own will: In this hottest time the mowing did not seem so hard to him. The sweat that drenched him cooled him off, and the sun, burning on his back, head and arm with its sleeve rolled to the elbow, gave him firmness and perseverance in his work; more and more often those moments of unconsciousness came, when it was possible for him not to think of what he was doing. The scythe cut by itself. These were happy moments.
Agricultural workers around the world would have cut grass together each year in a similar way for hundreds of years. However, in 1877, when Tolstoy’s novel was published, machines were routinely supplanting human labour: the novel ends – famously – with a woman’s suicide assisted by a train. The process of automation of work has continued ever since. The modern farmer no longer has need of forty men to cut the grass of her fields: instead, she will have a tractor driven perhaps by a computer. She will have other machines to bale the hay and transport it to where it will be stored for the winter. Today, work is more about controlling machines than swinging scythes, which means much less sweat but much greater productivity.
During the nineteenth century, trains replaced horses as the fastest means of travel over land, but the railways themselves were built by gangs of navvies, men tempted by higher pay, better rations, and the camaraderie of a footloose workforce, away from settled agricultural labour to enlist in work parties that travelled the land excavating gullies and raising embankments. Not all manual work is the same: farm work is seasonal and requires only short bursts of intense effort; by contrast, digging ditches and laying tracks is consistently punishing on the joints and muscles all year long. In a short story that tells of the beef-eating English workers who built le chemin de fer, Julian Barnes draws attention to the very different diet required for all-day heavy labour: They were kings of their work, and they knew so. It took a year to harden up a healthy English farm labourer into a navvy, and the transformation was even greater for a French spindle-shank who ate only bread, vegetables and fruit, who needed frequent rest and a supply of kerchiefs to mop his poor face. (‘Junction’, in Cross Channel, 1996.)
Modern workers consume fewer calories than in previous centuries but are far more productive. By harnessing the power of machines – whether trains, tractors, or computers – we achieve much more with far lower expenditure of energy. This in turn leaves us with more time for those leisure activities that we choose to occupy ourselves with. (For example, in my case writing texts for the Essence of Water website). Back in 2004, the economist Robert Fogel estimated the changing balance of time allocations for an average male worker in the US. Assuming that each day we need around 8 hours of sleep, 2 hours for feeding ourselves, and a further 2 hours for chores, he divided the remaining 12 hours between work, travel for work, and hours lost to illness, leaving a residual figure that was time available for leisure. He estimated that in 1880, the male head of household would have worked 8.5 hours, with 1 for travel, and 0.7 for illness, leaving 1.8 for pleasure. By 1990, those figures were 4.7 hours for work, 1 for travel, 0.5 for illness, leaving 5.8 for pleasure; and he forecast that by 2040 the numbers would be 3.8 for work, 0.5 for travel, 0.5 for illness, leaving 7.2 for pleasure (The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100, p. 68). In other words, on average the modern world demands from us much less work and offers us greater opportunity for fun.
As an aside, it is worth noting that in nearly all settled societies whose records we have uncovered, those who were rich regularly complained that if the poor did not have plenty of hard work to occupy them, they would make bad use of their leisure hours, wasting them on gambling, drinking, fighting, and the like. The rich, by contrast, took great pleasure in lives filled with gambling, drinking, fighting and the like. One of the paradoxes of Konstantin Lévin’s character is that he takes pleasure in the work of the poor, whereas most of the poor would have preferred to spend the day enjoying the leisure of the rich. Other people’s grass – both before and after the harvest –always seems preferable to our own.
Work is and has always been unevenly distributed. Fogel’s estimates are averages, within which wide ranges will be found. Today, there are many workers who endure long hours of physical labour each week to afford food and shelter, and to enjoy a modest lifestyle; whereas others can indulge in leisure-full lives without having to work that much at all. Some of this is to do with the unequal distribution of capital, but mostly it is to do with uneven levels of productivity. In an country (or an industry) where investment in technology has been historically low, and where management (that is, the organisation of the workforce) is inefficient, then a higher volume of work is required to achieve any given level of productivity than is the case in a country (or industry) that enjoys high levels of investment and good quality management. Output is determined by the quantum of labour multiplied by its effective deployment, from which it follows that those who work in places that are highly effective are likely to enjoy higher wages and greater leisure time than workers in ineffective industries or nations.
Of these two elements, the effectiveness of deployment is by far the more important in most types of work. Lévin, despite being richer and better educated than his muzhiks, was less productive than them because he was unused to physical work and therefore worked more slowly and less precisely, but the gap in output was not huge and with practice he would have improved. However, none of his row of harvesters would have been productive at all if they had not regularly sharpened their scythes. The British navvies building the French railways might have been stronger than the local French farmhands, thanks to their beef-rich diet, but without tools, investment, organisation and political support, nothing much would have been achieved. Productivity can be increased by individual effort and application, with the help of training and practice, but its level is mostly determined by the number of years of investment in machines and the years of improvement of social organisation. Where historic levels of physical capital and social capital are high, there also will be highly levels of productivity (and, therefore, more hours for leisure).
Here in the UK, we are waiting to find out which of two candidates the members of the Conservative Party would like to be their new leader. Whoever they choose will become the next Prime Minister. It’s a ridiculous way of choosing the head of government, but that’s another story. One of the candidates was somewhat embarrassed this week when a recording was published of comments she made a few years ago, while she was a Minister at the Treasury. She said (with slight edits to make the sentences coherent): There’s a fundamental issue within British working culture that needs to change if we’re going to become a richer and more prosperous country. But people in Britain are not that keen to change, preferring easy answers. We say that it’s Europe causing these problems, that it’s all the migrants causing these problems, but what needs to happen is simply more graft. But that’s not a popular message.
I leave aside the puzzling question as to why someone who acknowledges in private that blaming the EU and immigration for low levels of productivity in the UK is a popular but mistaken approach, when she herself has been happy to serve in a government that has made leaving the EU and reducing immigration the centre-pieces of their social and economic policy? I guess easy answers turn out to be easier and more popular than unpopular messages. But I am more puzzled by her thoughts about productivity, which appear to suggest that Britain’s relatively low levels, compared to other Western nations, are somehow the fault of British workers, who are reluctant to graft. Low productivity is “a fundamental issue within British working culture” she says.
It is true that productivity levels in Britain are on average lower than comparable nations. According to one data source, in 2022 the most productive country in the world is Ireland, at just over $99 per hour. The other top ten ranked nations are, in order: Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Germany, US, Denmark, France, Netherlands, and Belgium. Clearly it helps to be situated in north-western Europe where investment in technology and systems of social organisation has been high for centuries. It also helps to have a concentration of technologically driven industries, such as finance, pharmaceuticals, and IT. Despite its reputation as an old farming country, Ireland heads the list because it is home to many multinational companies that are leading players n sectors that require heavy investment in research. Ireland also now benefits from being the largest English-speaking country in the EU. Britain ranks 13 on the list, at just over $55 per hour. But productivity within Britain varies widely: using a different measure of productivity, known as GVA (gross value added) per hour, the Office for National Statistics estimated that in 2018, London achieved £51, the South-East of England £30, the East of England £27, and Scotland £26. Everywhere else in the United Kingdom was at £25 or below, which is less than half the productivity of London.
All of which suggests to me that the productivity problem in modern Britain – just as in Tolstoy’s Russia, or in France during the nineteenth century railway boom – has nothing to do with working culture or lack of graft and has everything to do with historic levels of investment in research, technology, and automation, combined with strong traditions of effective social and economic management. What matters is not working hard but working smart, and this is mostly not within the control of individual workers. It is, however, within the control of government either directly through investment or indirectly through tax and other incentives to attract highly productive businesses (which the Irish have used very successfully).
A couple of years ago, when I was bemoaning the stupidity of current British economic policy, a friend asked me to think of one economic benefit that might arise from Britain leaving the EU. My answer was that Sterling would fall significantly in value, which would mean that British companies would become cheaper acquisitions for businesses that fund themselves in US dollars or the Euro; and this in turn would mean that more of the British economy would soon be run by managers who know how to manage well and investors who understand the importance of introducing modern technology; which in turn would mean that over time, productivity in Britain will improve (because more of our companies would be owned and run by foreigners). I suspect this answer it is not something that the new Prime Minister will ever say – in public or in private – but I think it is true and for many British workers it is now their best hope.