by Chris Hughes
But a parent who stays at home today, takes care of young children, cooks, cleans, and runs errands is no less productive than a factory worker or an entrepreneur. An adult who takes care of an aging loved one—dressing, feeding, and bathing Mom or Dad—has full days of exhausting, socially valuable activity. Students who spend hours and hours a week sitting in classrooms, studying at night, writing papers, and preparing for tests are also working, just not for pay. As long as you’re doing something for your community, we should recognize you as a worker. This would be a bigger and more modern definition of work than what we have used for the past few decades and more in line with the long-term historical view of what work really is.
Thirty million Americans participate in this unrecognized workforce and are barred from many of the government benefits tied to work, causing many of them to live at or near the poverty line. According to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, a quarter of the people who live in poverty do not work in paid jobs because childcare or eldercare would cost more than they would earn. Another fifth of the unemployed people who are below the poverty line are in school. In other words, nearly half of the “nonworking” poor are working to provide care for their families or to improve themselves through education.
All of these examples—childcare, eldercare, and higher education—are already visible on the tax returns that Americans file. We claim dependents and report the tuition that we pay. We do not need to create any new bureaucracy to verify the claims, because they are audited by the Internal Revenue Service each year. A more expansive definition of work should also include community and religious service and artistic work, although these are harder to verify. Over the long term, we should determine how to verify if people are involved in these activities in order to include them in this broader definition of work. But we can start today by including caregiving and education in how we shape our social policy. That way we can begin to recognize the contributions that tens of millions of people in alternative work arrangements are making for their families and communities.
Perhaps counterintuitively, many of these jobs are the jobs of the future. Caregiving in particular is an area of massive job growth. Our country’s fastest-growing demographic is people over age 85, and by 2050, the total number of elderly in need of personal care will number 27 million, more than double the number today. Many people are naturally distrustful of the institutions that house the elderly, seemingly for good reason. The majority of people who end up in nursing homes die within two years, even though nearly half of Medicaid’s entire budget funds the exorbitant fees they require. Many Americans would prefer to take care of their aging loved ones at home, and it seems that it might help them live longer and lower the costs of care.
But the people who take on care and housing responsibilities directly pay a steep personal cost. “Seventy percent of caregivers report making changes such as cutting back on their working hours, changing jobs, stopping work entirely, taking a leave of absence, or other such changes as a result of their caregiving role,” scholar and organizer Ai-Jen Poo notes in her book The Age of Dignity. The amount of income caregivers forfeit is staggering—more than $300,000 per person over the course of a lifetime, according to the AARP. “Often they do this without support for, or even acknowledgment of, the extra work, which diminishes their ability to be present and productive in other arenas of life.”
Our aging parents and grandparents will increasingly need caregiving at home, but our current policies do not recognize this as work. Nor do they recognize the work of the tens of millions of parents of children under the age of five, who demand constant attention from a parent or other relative. Mothers in particular spend enormous amounts of time feeding, washing, cleaning, and cooking, but have never had their work recognized for what it is.
A small group of economists has strived over decades to precisely quantify the value of work that goes uncounted in domestic activities like childcare and eldercare, food preparation, cleaning, and home maintenance. By using the American Time Use Survey, a widely trusted method for quantifying the amount of time Americans spend on different activities, they estimate that America’s GDP would be a full 26 percent higher if we counted domestic labor as work. That means that over $4 trillion of economic activity is going unrecognized because of our outdated definitions of who is working—not to mention the fact that these workers don’t get paid. Historically, the people who do this unrecognized work are disproportionately women and people of color, groups that the law has consistently neglected.
Even these numbers do not recognize the work of the millions of students enrolled in American universities. Students are not paid for their time, because the effort they invest today will pay off in future years. But every student deserves to have basic financial stability to enable them to focus on their studies and help supplement the cost of food or childcare. Wealthy students have the advantage of a kind of “guaranteed income” from parents who want to do everything possible to keep them focused on their studies. Poor and middle-class students deserve the same.
In an ideal world, every person should have the chance to do work they love. The satisfaction my parents got from their jobs showed me at a young age what’s possible when you love your work. The opportunity to advocate for a guaranteed income in my day-to-day work is one of the most fulfilling parts of my life. A few hundred extra dollars a month isn’t going to mean everyone gets to have the job they want overnight, but it is the kind of boost that a person can use to invest in vocational school or to move closer to a job they think fits their skills best. It can be a universal strike fund, which enables someone to quit a job with an abusive manager. It can allow a person to reduce their hours to make more time at home to take care of a young child or aging parent. It can be the seed money to start a small business around the corner or on Etsy. A guaranteed income would give millions more people a little more of a chance to choose the work that is right for them.
A small number of people who are unable to work, particularly the infirm, disabled, or geographically isolated, may be left behind by a guaranteed income tied to a broad definition of work. These people deserve support as well, and programs like Social Security Disability Insurance provide a critical safety net to support them. My uncle suffered from degenerating discs in his spine in his forties, the result of decades of pulling cables in a physically demanding workplace. He had been injured as a child when a tractor ran over him on the family farm, and the workplace injuries compounded the original damage, rendering him disabled for life. Without Social Security disability payments, he never would have been able to support himself or my aunt as he has in the decades since.
This is what the safety net is for—to help those who can’t work. For everyone else who is working in traditional or untraditional jobs but still can’t make ends meet, a guaranteed income is the most efficient way to ensure that they have stability and a chance to find work that’s fulfilling and matches their skills. People want to work. Let’s make sure it pays for them to do so.
7
Untethered Idealism
I arrived at O’Hare International Airport in February 2007, carrying a backpack stuffed with a laptop and a half-dozen books and dragging an oversized roll-aboard suitcase behind me. I had come to Chicago in the midst of one of its worst winters in memory to work for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. My now husband and I had packed up all our possessions in Palo Alto and put them in storage purgatory until we found a new apartment. I hopped on the Blue Line and headed straight for Obama’s temporary campaign offices on the seventeenth floor of a skyscraper in the Loop.
Facebook’s growing popularity—it was up to almost 18 million users—mattered little to the operatives who were setting up shop in Chicago. Eventually the campaign manager, David Plouffe, greeted me, thanked me for being there, and promptly turned his attention back to whatever it was he had been working on. My
new boss, Joe Rospars, wasn’t in the office that day, but he had warned me to quash any talk of Obama as the Facebook candidate. “It’s going to take an extra effort from you to make clear that you’re taking a leave from Facebook to work as an organizer here, and more importantly that this campaign and its energy are not about Facebook at all,” he wrote in an e-mail before I arrived.
I found my way to the sole digital person in the office. Jon Jones was roughly my age and already looked a little haggard and unshaven, even though the campaign had just begun. He and I immediately clicked. He was from Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of working-class parents who had done everything in their power to make it possible for him to go to Tufts. Like me, he joined the campaign for the most idealistic of reasons: he was inspired by Barack Obama’s story and pragmatic idealism. While the rest of the political world thought we were crazy for backing an African American freshman senator with the middle name Hussein, we thought he was a change candidate who had a real shot at upending the Democratic primary, and maybe even winning the White House. All the staffers who took risks to join that campaign in the early days believed that the unexpected could become real.
Those first couple weeks in Chicago were a blur. I found an apartment, started hiring a team, and got to work alongside Jon on a variety of tasks: cutting videos of rallies, setting up landing pages where people could RSVP to future events, editing mass e-mails for clarity and voice, and, inevitably, curating the senator’s Facebook and MySpace pages. One day bled into the next, each busier and more frantic than the last. As our digital team grew, we managed to build a social network of nearly a million members, a platform for supporters to organize groups, host grassroots events, and set their own fund-raising goals.
I didn’t find the technical work of building and managing the network to be nearly as much of a challenge as the human dimension of organizing people. I had to provide activists with enough guidance to help them understand what the campaign needed from them, but not so much that they felt like we were narrowly instructing them on what to think and do. Even more challenging, we had to convince the campaign’s senior management to let go of the typical top-down command-and-control structure, in which headquarters dictates the message and micromanages field operations, and instead embrace a decentralized approach that enabled supporters to self-organize digitally. It seems small in retrospect, but the idea of allowing any supporter, no matter how passionate or unhinged, to write anything they liked on a blog on a campaign website—or to organize events, even if they had no training—was unprecedented. The more freedom we gave supporters, coupled with guidance on what the campaign needed, the stronger the network grew. We were initially the crazy tech guys in the corner, but as the number of dollars donated and volunteers recruited through the platform grew, it was clear we were onto something. Over time we earned more autonomy, and I was able to recruit a team of nearly a dozen people focused exclusively on helping volunteers organize through the campaign’s social network.
Before we hit send on our victory e-mail and text messages on election night, reporters and academics were already writing articles and reports about how we did it. A lot of them paid attention to the idiosyncrasies of the technology we had developed, but our victory didn’t happen because of any flashy features—most of that was off-the-shelf and pretty straightforward. It happened because we were able to convince the people running a traditionally hierarchical institution to work with a different kind of grassroots, digital structure. Activists and volunteers could feel the difference, and they were invigorated by the power we placed in their hands.
Facebook and the Obama campaign, the first two career experiences of my life, both taught me a clear lesson: to aim high and expect the unexpected. Change could happen nearly overnight with the right team and values. Those experiences gave me faith in my ability to buck tradition and to update institutions for a new digital era.
When I decided a couple years later to do something similarly unlikely—find a new business model for traditional print media—a lot of people, including myself, thought that it just might be possible. One major success could be a fluke, but two was indicative of some kind of gift, people told me. When rumors began circulating that I was looking to buy The New Republic magazine, a 100-year-old institution of the intellectual left, the Huffington Post made it their big, banner story for a day, with the headline “SAVIOR OF THE REPUBLIC?”
That headline was so ridiculous, and my blind ambition so irrationally bold, that any cool-headed outsider could have seen how the story would end. What went wrong at The New Republic has a direct bearing on my work today. It is the driving reason why I favor a more modest guaranteed income over the universal basic income (UBI) idea that has become increasingly popular over the past two years. I learned how counterproductive unbridled idealism can be if it lacks practical grounding in the here and now.
A few months before I decided to buy the magazine, I went to the basement of the New York Public Library to comb through old issues. The only way I could see and read the earliest ones was to request physical reels from the librarian and fire up a 1970s-vintage microfiche machine that I could hardly believe still functioned. I spun through the issues, reel after reel, year after year, over the course of two or three days. I would roll forward and stop at a random moment and then read through all of the articles on the page. It was a rapid education in the changing sensibilities of the magazine and how much it had driven ideas in liberal politics over the course of the twentieth century.
I had read The New Republic off and on, mostly online, since college, but I did not have a deep appreciation for the historical moment that it was born into in 1914, or for the values of its founding editors. It had been acerbic and contrarian in its recent past, publishing shameful articles like Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve” and cheerleading George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. But for most of its history, I came to understand, it was more in line with values I shared. Confidently liberal and market-oriented, it pressed the need for a strong central government to guarantee the rights and freedoms that the Progressive Era—from which it had emerged—had fought for.
For me, The New Republic was more an institution of American intellectual life than a physical print magazine. It addressed both the political questions of the day and the concerns of literature, philosophy, and culture. What if we could bring the power of its journalism to new, bigger audiences both in print and on the screens people carried everywhere? We could invest in both print and digital in tandem, without sacrificing one for the other.
In the late fall of 2011, I reached out to the owners, a collection of Wall Street investors led by Bill Ackman and Larry Grafstein, who had recently put the magazine on the market. They were surprised that someone with a largely digital background would be interested in a magazine with a circulation of less than 40,000 losing millions of dollars a year. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was the only potential bidder with any real interest. I officially purchased the magazine in March 2012 and headed down to Washington to speak with its staff.
Franklin Foer, who had edited The New Republic for a number of years earlier but was now an editor-at-large (a mostly symbolic title on the masthead), showed up at that first meeting and sat in the back of the room. I ran into him in the hallway afterward, and we connected immediately. Over the next few months, Frank and I met several times to discuss his previous tenure at The New Republic and our shared belief in the power of narrative journalism to shape the dialogue of the country. I liked that he had years of experience already in the editor role but I could see that he might bring a fresh creative energy to the work. The D.C.-born son of an antitrust lawyer, Frank was naturally suspicious of the concentration of power in the hands of elites, yet he also called many powerful people friends. His knowledge and experience were wide-ranging and he exuded a winning charm. I made him an offer, and he began his second stint as editor early that summer.
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Our first order of business was to invest. The magazine had been on a shoestring budget for years, and we believed the lack of investment was the primary thing holding it back. We offered eye-popping sums to bring on new talented journalists and to retain the best we had. We created a deep bench of senior editors who were some of the most talented journalists in Washington. We tried to appeal to a broader audience by publishing cover stories on Chris Christie’s shady backroom deals and the epidemic of unregulated day care centers alongside reviews of television’s Girls and critiques of Ai Weiwei’s “terrible” art.
Frank and I wanted to bring new life to the digital and print pages of the publication. We envisioned a magazine and a website that were at once classy and vibrant, highbrow and accessible. In redesigning the print edition, we tried to meld the look and feel of old literary journals, like The Partisan Review from the 1950s, with the splashy contemporary style of New York magazine. To accomplish this, we hired The New Republic’s first full-time art director, an award-winning designer from Newsweek, and a team of print designers who were qualified to work at institutions several times our size. We invested in engineering and website development alongside our traditional direct mail program. These investments took The New Republic’s annual losses from around $2 million a year up to $6 million nearly overnight.
Everyone on the outside assumed I intended to transform The New Republic into a personal megaphone, or at the very least to use it to advance my own political agenda. But over four years, I wrote only one piece for the website, on the rise of big data, and a short note reflecting on Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post. The journalists and academics who wrote for us were some of the smartest, most sophisticated minds in media, and whatever I happened to think about the Iraqi surge or Mitt Romney’s tax policies felt superficial in comparison. Close friends marveled at how much I talked about the business side of things and how little I had to say about what Frank was planning to put on the cover.