The fundamental premise of economics is that man has an inexhaustible desire for goods and services. And, if responsibly channeled, I think this penchant of ours is actually functional. That's because our ever-growing wants keep an ever-growing population busy working to meet them.
Average Jibraan, however, has a funny idea of how to pursue his wants. He believes being economically intelligent entails saving as much as he can get away with without losing his job first. Well, if you're earning 100k, Jib, how much can you save? Cut a long story short: it can't ever be more than 100k. Consider a better idea: earn more. There is no ceiling.
But, realistically, how can someone earn more when they're already giving work their 100%? Consider the British sociologist Stanley Parker's concept of the 'extension pattern.'
Parker (1976) identified that, for jobs that allow for high involvement and autonomy (freedom to organize and take decisions for one's work) - characteristic of what we refer to as 'white collar' jobs - work is not restricted to the office-place. Rather, it extends into leisure. Appropriately enough, the higher up you move on the socioeconomic scale, the more you find that leisure is spent in activities that complement or are directly connected to work.
What Parker neglected to conceptualize for the ‘extension pattern,’ however, is that as you move up the socioeconomic scale - where ideas increasingly take precedence over labour - work also becomes progressively impressed with knowledge; and so any positive intellectual developments outside of the workplace become increasingly profitable. In other words, for white-collar and higher-up individuals, knowledge can be imported to the workplace.
Enter what I call the 'general theory of human capital.'
Now, there are a range of chores that everyone is modern society has to get done for themselves. I term these the 'routine-manual': cooking, dishwashing, laundry, ironing, house-cleaning, driving etc. Here’s the key: the routine-manual (in theory) demands complete insulation from the workplace, much to the dismay of our aforementioned leisure-knowledge extension patterns.
Consider this: If the average white-collar person e.g. a newspaper editor (who we established earlier should be thinking of earning more) can employ a trio of servants to look after these tasks, it actually liberates them from a massive, given component of their lives that yields no (essentially commoditized) leisure-knowledge – where the latter (knowledge) can now reasonably be viewed in terms of 'intellectual capital.'
Should the editor best work more now? No - we already established that they're giving work 100%.
The leisure-knowledge axis is immeasurably more powerful anyway.
All they have to do is substitute the routine-manual with the appropriate leisure. Any leisure that adds to their educational toolkit - let's say, reading the most in-vogue politician's autobiography - is going to manifestly further the editor’s performance at work.
Consequently, the more exquisitely calibrated the chosen leisure-knowledge pursuit is to their occupational goals, the more ‘intellectual capital’ it yields, and the more pressure it immediately begins to put on blowing the lid off that 100k income 'ceiling.'
And the farther up the socioeconomic scale we go, the more seasoned, amplified, and immediate this knowledge-income reciprocity becomes. So far, so good? Great. Because that's just the half of it.
The reason I call this the 'general theory of human capital' is because the nature of labour being sought after (in servants) is 'general', meaning it can be met virtually from across the entire population. More importantly, since the skills underpinning such labour are either non-existent or superficial, an individual seeking ‘general human capital’ will find that it invokes a demand that can be responded to immediately. Most importantly, the demand at hand is not seasonal or transitory in nature, and instead wholly sustainable, given that the aforementioned ‘routine-manual’ tasks have a perpetual rooting in modern society.
Thus, while the individual pursuit of the 'general theory of human capital' is characterized by a sustained employment of unskilled labour, the collective pursuit of it follows with large-scale changes in the employment structure of the unskilled labour-force.. and in a sequence that can be catered to virtually overnight.
I'm a theoretician - following in the tradition of the Austrian School of Economics - and I don't care for statistics, but even I can surmise that if the middle and affluent classes of Pakistan proceeded to adopt this strategy full-force (with up to dozens of servants in a single home), the demand could be not met from within urban areas, beggar-population included; very likely, the idle masses from rural areas would have to migrate to cities to fill in.
And no, these servants will not eventually overthrow us for our bourgeoisie ways and outsourcing work to them in the form of stable, life-long jobs. Conceivably, they may eventually go Maslow on us and express that they too, like us, wish to phase out these 'educationally vacuous' tasks with their incomes. That would be beautiful, because it would then provide the technological industry the incentive to automate the routine-manual more and more, eventually leading to a society where even the working classes spend a substantial amount of their time free for educationally meaningful pursuits.
Now, Adam Smith taught us that 'the wealth of a nation' does not come from amassing gold and silver, but rather through productive labour. Picture this: 180 million strong. Working from dawn to dusk. Everyone focused only on the 'highest good' their working-leisure hours can yield.
And suddenly, the Frances, Germanys, and Englands of the world just may begin to wonder what they're up against.
Also, please note that keeping servants was a practice of our beloved Prophet (S.A.W.) Servants were found in Hazrat Khadija's (R.A) house, and Muhammad (S.A.W) himself kept a personal boy servant. Don't give self-righteous excuses ('mein apney kaam khud karta/karti hoon') because you're too miserly to employ help and too uninspired to spend the time actually reading something useful.
“..It is We Who portion out between them their livelihood in the life of this world: and We raise some of them above others in ranks, so that some may command work from others..” (Al-Quran, 43:32)
I have said it many times, and I'll say it again. We are the inheritors of the greatest tradition known to man. The West, for all its educational goldmines and cultural sophistication, moves in circles - it's already forgotten Smith, whose philosophy their economic prowess is itself predicated upon. If we're going to indiscriminately copy the West in everything, not only will we too move in circles, we will do so while being two steps behind them.
It would be a matter of days. Only, it’s like someone has poisoned our minds away from it: from our roots, from our glorious past and future. From eradicating the ever-present specter of absolute poverty in Pakistan. In another column, I’ll discuss a theory that has an analogous effect for the semi-skilled and skilled labour forces.
Fight back, affirmative. Make no mistake about it.
n The author runs Scholars by Profession, a local research-initiative. The above is taken from his upcoming book, The Austrian Economist in Post-Industrial Society.
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