Book Titles

Just as commodities have economic ‘value’ because the can be compared precisely with other commodities, ‘values’ are valuable because they cannot be compared with anything. They are each considered unique, incommensurable – in a word, priceless.

….the most important things one gets out a job are (1) money to pay the bills, and (2) the opportunity to make a positive contribution to the world.

There seems to be a broad consensus not so much even that work is good but that not working is very bad; that anyone who is not slaving away harder than he’d like at something he doesn’t especially enjoy is a bad person…

How have so many humans reached the point where they accept that even miserable, unnecessary work is actually morally superior to no work at all?

…in so many patriarchal social orders, men like to conceive of themselves as doing socially, or culturally, what they like to think of women as doing naturally.

…men see themselves as creating the world from their minds and brawn, and see that as the essence of ‘work,’ leaving to women most of the actual labor of tidying and maintaining things to make this illusion possible.

Underlings have to constantly monitor what the boss is thinking: the boss doesn’t have to care.

…psychological studies regularly find that people of working-class background are more accurate at reading other people’s feelings, are more empathetic and caring, than those of middle-class, let alone wealthy, backgrounds.

…the skill at reading others’ emotions is just an effect of what working-class work actually consists of: rich people don’t have to learn how to interpret labor nearly as well…

…love for others – people, animals, landscapes – regularly requires the maintenance of institutional structures one might otherwise despise.