2024 in Books
Published:
We welcomed our first child to the world last December. Consequently, I spent more time at home this year than I have since the pandemic, especially during my paternity leave and over the Summer. Only in the last few months have I regularly commuted to the department. Before, I would have looked to my home office for a quiet place to work; now, I am more likely to find it in the drafty offices of Monroe Hall.
I’ve been thinking about how we choose the physical location and arrangement of our workplace. Is there a trade-off between the short-run convenience of remote work and long-run human capital development? How do workplace inputs affect productivity and creativity? And how does household structure interact with work location? In the spirit of these questions, I present some highlights from my reading this year. Each of these books addresses how where we work shapes what we think.
The Transcendentalists and Their World (Robert Gross, 2021). The physical separation of work and home is a relatively recent phenomenon. What’s new, compared to the 1800s, is the number of people who work alone – that is, in a room by themselves. Thoreau was on the vanguard of this trend, settling down to his solitary stint at Walden pond in 1845. Had he continued his experiment to the year 1850, he would have “raised the number of solitary souls in Concord to four” in a town of 2,000. Ultimately, Thoreau’s choice to live and work alone – a fate most often borne by childless widows – gave his critique of the townspeople’s materialism a moral weight that bears on his readers even today. In Thoreau’s case, more than most, the location of his work is inseparable from the work itself.
The Ladies’ Paradise (Emile Zola, 1883) describes the triumph of the department store over traditional small shops in 19th-century Paris. Despite the suffering caused by this episode of creative destruction, the novel declines to make the department store an easy villain. Its employees – who rely on the store for their housing and food – respond in a variety of ways to their place of employment. Some spend all their wages every weekend, drunk with a sense of freedom; others attempt to emulate the aristocratic customers on a shoestring budget; and still others think only of tearing down the employee above them in the hierarchy, just as the store itself devours the small shops of Paris. I read this book on the recommendation of Jason Furman, who was looking for the rare positive depiction of capitalism in fiction.
Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata, 2018). Non-wage amenities in the workplace, like a health insurance or a pleasant office, can compensate for a lower salary. But the most important workplace amenity is an identity that we use to explain ourselves to the rest of the world. Sometimes, as for nurses or judges, that identity is a valuable social currency; other times, it is not. The protagonist of this novel, Keiko, regulates her life by the demands of her workplace, a convenience store where she has toiled earnestly for 18 years. Keiko’s embrace of her dead-end job – and her complete neglect of her personal life – is incomprehensible to her friends and family. To deflect their scrutiny, Keiko invents a vague “illness” that keeps her from other employment. Identity is also a workplace amenity, but one that is largely determined outside the employer-employee relationship.
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (Seymour Papert, 1980). Papert predicted that “schools as we know them today will have no place in the future” because of computers. Yet despite the fact that many adults spend most of their workdays sitting in front of a computer monitor, school classrooms still contain rows of desks facing a whiteboard. On one hand, this asymmetry could reflect the fact that computers are best at applying human capital, not at developing it. The substantial learning loss caused by remote schooling during the pandemic shows that children need more than a computer and a quiet room to learn. But Papert, writing at the dawn of a golden age of computers, argued that the market for education is dysfunctional and prone to conservatism:
Let us suppose that today I have an idea about how children could learn mathematics more effectively and more humanely. And let us suppose that I have been able to convince a million people that the idea is a good one. For many products such a potential market would guarantee success. Yet in the world of education today this would have little clout: A million people across the nation would still mean a minority in every town’s school system, so there might be no effective channel for the million voices to be expressed. Thus, not only do good educational ideas sit on the shelves, but the process of invention is itself stymied.