Book Review: John Tamny's "The End of Work"
Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job
Thomas Jefferson famously wrote into the Preamble to America’s Declaration of Independence, “Life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” And today, the words roll off the tongue and are well-known throughout the world, but the essence of human life, political liberty, dedicated pursuit and enduring happiness are poorly understood in Western culture today.
Fortunately, John Tamny’s 2018 book The End of Work delivers much needed context and meaning:
Without question. Massive inequality. Inequality is a feature of a growing economy, not a bug. That makes sense if we focus our economic thinking on the individual. As individuals, we’re all in pursuit of inequality. That’s what makes us happy: doing work that elevates us as singular people.
Clearly, “elevates us as singular people” is how Tamny squares “the end of work” with “doing work.” But how does that work?
The point is that your work is an expression of your talent and intelligence, it may be hard but it’s not drudgery. The goal should be to identify what that is and match what you love with extreme effort.
To clarify, Tamny dedicates a chapter to educating his readers how education is most important for government jobs - not private sector skills that are learned by doing.
China’s tremendous economic growth began long before it was educating even a sliver of its population. The tells us that economic freedom trumps education.
That seems to cover liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but leaves open the question: what is holding “us” down? For that, Tammy invokes economics journalist Henry Hazlitt and his singularly important book, Economics in One Lesson,
What is harmful or disastrous to an individual must be equally harmful or disastrous to the collection of individuals that make up a nation.
What is most harmful to the individual and to civilized society is taxation - the income tax being most insidious - as Tamny illustrated many times over. And to understand that taxation and leviathan government are what paralyze our children’s future is where The End of Work really begins,
When we take our economic thinking down to the level of the individual, we discover the secret to roaring economic growth.
This is the passion that drives Tamny’s theme, “everyone is intelligent in his own way . . . everyone has a huge capacity to work if his work is matched with a passion . . . what’s holding us back in not enough robots and, by extension, not enough capital.”
Not enough capital? Yes, there’s not enough inequality going on out there. To imagine the possibilities when capital is not squandered on government redistribution schemes, Tamny shines his spotlight on fame and fortune from knowledge in highly specialized professions that were unimaginable a century ago and names a few: athletics coach, sports journalist, country musician, television producer, celebrity chef, stand-up comic, racquet stringer, golf caddy and professional gamer. But also “nonprofit policy organizations full of talented and passionate people.”
But never forget that nonprofit institutions are an effect of broad prosperity achieved in the private sector. In short, for those who desire a fulfilling life of nonprofit work, extraordinary wealth creation is your best friend . . . Americans are both rich and generous. Profits make nonprofit work possible. Profits and wealth are compassionate.
Not enough robots? Yes, and Tamny’s book was published four years before Chat GPT and today’s augmented intelligence (AI) Boom came to dominate the S & P 500,
When the rich get to hold on to their wealth, that wealth chases new ideas that benefit the rest of us. That’s how the free market works . . . Taxation reduces the amount of capital available for businesses to form and expand.
Yet, there is a great deal of fear about the power of AI. Call it artificial or augmented, but intelligence is a tool. Like money is a tool, its power is derived from your ideas and your ambitions. Like the internet is a tool, its power is derived from your desire for knowledge and connections. And like technology is a tool, it will erase jobs that are ripe for obsolescence and create countless avenues for unimagined new work,
Without technological progress, your odds of finding work that matches your unique skills and intelligence would be greatly reduced . . . It’s clear that workers go to where inequality is steepest because that’s where the opportunity is.
But to become “the beneficiary of the explosion of highly specialized work sparked by immense wealth creation,” you must decide and act with intention to develop “your unique skills and intelligence.”
And it is the spirituality of Ayn Rand’s epic novel Atlas Shrugged that motivates this review of The End of Work seven years after it was published,
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.
Because highly specialized work creates wealth which creates even more specialized work, John Tamny’s The End of Work merely scratches the surface, but more importantly, it will elevate your mind to tomorrow’s possibilities. To pay it forward, please send this book review to every teenager, parent of a teenager, grandparent of a teenager, schoolteacher, arts instructor and athletics coach you know.