Scolding Laziness: Instrumental or Just Mean?

Consider two people.

Eric is intrinsically lazy, but susceptible to being externally motivated. He's not a go-getter. If you just put him in a job and fail to manage him, he'll find where "the line" is and try to get away with as little as possible. He'll play on the internet all day, drag his feet on projects, fail to follow up with colleagues, come in late, and leave early. But if you scold him for the occasional misdeed, he'll straighten up. Just tell him, "I notice what you're doing, so knock it off!" and he'll stop all those bad behaviors. In a world where we are completely non-judgmental, Eric will suffer long bouts of unemployment and underemployment by willfully neglecting his career. In a world where we judge that behavior as "slacking," he anticipates the social stigma, finds himself a job, and works hard at it.

Henry is lazy and is not susceptible to being externally motivated. He exhibits all the bad behaviors that come naturally to Eric, but unlike Eric he does not straighten up when we scold him and does not respond to society's judgment. Judging/stigmatizing "laziness" is just gratuitous. Scolding Henry about  his lifestyle is like whipping a mule that has already decided it isn't going to move; the whipping is just cruel if it has no chance of accomplishing anything. Henry will never find meaningful employment, or assuming he does find employment he will never dedicate himself to his career, no matter how much we try to shame him.

I feel like a lot of political/culture war arguments come down to whether the world is basically full of Erics or full of Henrys. Or maybe it's not even that. I think everyone secretly admits that the world has both kinds of people. Even the most left-wing die-hard socialist treats their own children like they are Erics. They teach their kids that if they behave certain ways, they will be successful, well-liked, etc. If they show some discipline at school, they will learn more. If they show some discipline toward a hobby or sport, they will grow skilled. If they are lazy or take shortcuts, they will not be as successful and not have as many friends. This same exact person, the one who teaches his own children that incentives matter and that hard work is rewarded, might throw a massive fit if you suggest that unsuccessful people had any hand in their own destiny.

Someone on the political/economic right might say, "No, no, the world is full of people like Eric. We need to properly motivate them. You can't just tell them that their problems are society's fault and give them a no-stings-attached income. We need to use all the tools in our tool-kit to motivate them. That includes concrete incentives, like retaining the coupling between work and monetary rewards. It also includes social incentives, like scolding people for laziness."

Someone on the political/economic left might say, "No, no, you can't say that! The world is full of people like Henry. Sure, some of them are just actively choosing not to contribute to society. (Don't ever tell anyone I admitted that to you, by the way.) But some just physically can't, because of a physical or mental disability of some sort. You're just gratuitously heaping scorn on these people and making them feel bad for no good reason."

I'm not quite sure exactly what's going on here. I don't know if I would pass an Ideological Turing Test (and that goes for both of the above paragraphs). I do suspect that the lefties privately admit that scolding and stigmatizing can motivate some kinds of people, but they want to preserve that particular carrot-and-stick for private use. ("Private" here meaning literally private in the colloquial sense: behind closed doors, out of the public eye, not meaning "as opposed to being part of public policy.") And the righties may have a "just deserts" mindset that completely overlooks the economic incentives argument. Maybe they don't particularly care about motivating people to work so much as they want to judge and punish the sin of laziness, incentives being a secondary consideration or not a consideration at all.

I think we have to be realistic and admit that both kinds of people exist. It would be irresponsible to throw away perfectly useful motivational tools when the world is full of under-performing-but-redeemable Erics. But we can do this without gratuitously scolding people who are inactive because they have genuine disabilities. I don't particularly have a soft spot for those people who deliberately opt for laziness when they could find meaningful employment (or something other than employment that's useful), but I acknowledge that heaping scorn on them doesn't help anyone. The problem is that sometimes you don't know who's an Eric and who's a Henry until you try. That's the thing about incentives. People have to feel them for them to work. If the rewards and punishments never actually materialize, they aren't really incentives. If nobody ever actually gets scolded or feels the negative consequences of laziness, nobody will see the need to avoid being lazy. Most people have a built-in anti-laziness scolding norm, but we should think hard about whether this norm is purely retributive or if it's actually instrumental.

There is a long discussion of crime and punishment in Steven Pinker's excellent book The Blank Slate. Pinker discusses a criminal who "can't help himself." Some people are born with less inherent ability to control their impulses. Pinker raises the question: Is it fair to punish these people because a roulette wheel inside their brains an extra green pocket (or perhaps an extra two or three or ten)? Abandoning the concept of personal culpability would bite a huge bullet, and Pinker wisely refuses to bite. He quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes in a hypothetical discussion with a man who is about to be hanged for some atrocity:

I don’t doubt that your act was inevitable for you but to make it more avoidable by others we propose to sacrifice you to the common good. You may regard yourself as a soldier dying for your country if you like. But the law must keep its promises.

 (Re-reading it just now, Pinker does a much better job than this post of explaining these concepts on pages 177-184 of The Blank Slate.)

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Yes, there are legitimate reasons for some people to be permanently out of the labor market. I explicitly mentioned some of them above. And people have important non-career goals in their lives, too. If you read this post as saying something like, "People who don't take a job and work it as hard as possible are lazy," then you missed some important qualifiers and hedges. And the point. Try again more carefully, perhaps? There is a real sense in which deliberate laziness exists and is harmful to the person who exhibits it and the people around him. Apologies to my more careful readers if these ending qualifiers are jarring, but bad-faith criticisms of other bloggers (like what's been happening to Robin Hanson recently) have made me slightly paranoid.

This excellent piece by Scott Alexander reminded me to write this post. No, I don't accept his argument in favor of a universal basic income. Bryan Caplan has argued quite persuasively that a UBI would be fiscally irresponsible, and that aside it's completely unnecessary for the vast majority of people. The failure of UBI advocates to include even a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the costs of such a program is an inexcusable omission. Still, Alexander's piece is very thoughtful. It is more an attack on a "guaranteed jobs" program than it is a defense of a UBI.

The names Eric and Henry were chosen at random. They are not a reference to anyone, real or fictional.