Snippet

Change

Digital

Work

31 January 2025

4 min read

This weekend, find something better than the busy-busy

Get the life-work balance the right way round.

Jack Nicholson

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He writes, and also works in local government.

Two people. sitting at a street cafe amid empty tables and chairs, are silhoutted.

Krisztina Papp on Unsplash.

It was 9.38pm and I was in the library connected to Pusey House, the Anglo-Catholic Chaplaincy where I have done much of my work over the last five years, when I submitted my pitch to write on ‘work-life balance’.

‘Work-life balance’ has been up for debate recently after British businessman and investor James Watt, co-founder of BrewDog, posted a video on Instagram in which he claimed that the ‘whole concept’ was ‘invented by people who hate the job that they do.’ He went on, ‘if you love what you do, you don’t need work-life balance, you need work-life integration’. Unsurprisingly, trade unions and large swathes of the population who are not multi-million entrepreneurs disagree.

For the record, I am not a multi-millionaire entrepreneur either. Yet I should say, I disagree too, even though lately I have taken on more paid work than I have ever taken on before – possibly, too much – and I am attracted by the notion that work and life should come together in some sense. In my life, they do. And the very fact that I pitched this piece late into the evening, having tended to several competing work commitments throughout the day, and feeling rather tired all told, would suggest that I am out-of-the-running to write a worthy-read about work-life balance traditionally conceived.

I also love what I do. I am in public service.

Nevertheless, I am uneasy about James Watt’s notion of work-life integration, and I certainly object to being told by him what I ‘need’ to thrive. Work-life integration is surely problematic if it suggests that they should be completely blended such that neither work nor leisure are afforded their proper place and given proper parameters. Watt is engaged to be married and, I would suggest, the right relationship between work and life-outside-of-work ought to be more like a marriage in which each is respected and persons involved are lifted onto an altogether higher plain.

Some boundaries are crossed in this process. Others remain. Life is not lost but changed.

This is why I do not work on Sundays. Sunday reminds me that work is surely an opportunity to go out to shape the world around us, serve it, or to ‘subdue it’ (to use a Biblical phrase). However, to subdue the earth is like as to tend the garden, in which we learn to restrain ourselves to produce greater bounty (life). The first man and woman were told by God, it is said, to ‘be fruitful and multiply’. So, multiplication – or integration – is not enough. And relatedly, there are some fruits in the Garden of Eden, in the story, which God tells Adam and Eve emphatically not to eat. Most fruit trees bear more fruit than they can support. They need to be pruned. So too do our working lives from time-to-time. Work-life balance matters in this sense.

Life-work balance, however, may be a more helpful phrase in so far as the ideal life entails work; work is not a distraction from it if approached in the right manner. In the twentieth century, two Christians I admire thought as much. C. S. Lewis wrote, ‘For most men Saturday afternoon is a free time, but I have an invalid old lady to look after [at home]’, a lady called Mrs Moore. He described himself as ‘Nurse, Kennel-maid, Wood-cutter, Butler, Housemaid, and Secretary all in one’. However, C. S. Lewis also wrote that ‘The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things’, the work, ‘as interruptions of one’s “own” or “real” life.’ They nourish it. They change it for the better.

That “great thing” requires serious effort, make no mistake. The writer Thomas Merton made a distinction between a contemplative life and a life of work and wrote this:

“When I speak of the contemplative life [...] I am talking about a special dimension of inner discipline and experience, a certain integrity and fullness of personal development, which are not compatible with a purely external, alienated, busy-busy existence. This does not mean that they are incompatible with action, with creative work, with dedicated love. On the contrary, these all go together.

They go together, but not in the way that Watt would have it because a busy-busy existence is exhausting, not fruitful. A life-work balance is. Life and work in this equation are not multiplied but respected as each offering our souls something they need: the opportunity to be loved and to love in how we engage with the world around us.

I was glad to have an opportunity to reflect on this, however late in the day.

Hating one’s job is certainly not a requisite for understanding this. If anything, I would suggest, it was invented by people, formed by Christian values, in the nineteenth-century who hated the common life they saw around them and went out their way to protect fellow men, women, and children from overwork.

The concept of work-life balance, or life-work balance, rightly conceived, goes to the very fibre of our being, and I for one think that it should stay.

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Explainer

Economics

Culture

16 January 2024

6 min read

How to pick an economic approach that really adds up

Assessing doughnut economics, Paul Williams asks what’s the economy for and who does it really serve?

Paul Williams

Paul Williams, the CEO of Bible Society, worked for over a decade in business in London and then as an academic theologian in Canada.

a round table with empty chairs is seen from above. An orange is the only item on it.

Meina Yin on Unsplash.

“Anyone can see that our economic system is broken.”

This is the conclusion of Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics, and her assessment has garnered positive endorsements from figures as diverse as George Monbiot, Andrew Marr and Sir David Attenborough.

Yet to judge by the discussion surrounding the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, our political class is not included in this broad perspective that Raworth claims. In what is widely understood as the early skirmishes of an election campaign, anticipating the moment when the country’s voters have another opportunity to indicate the direction of travel they hope for, the focus is on who will be better or worse off by this or that tax cut or benefit change. If anything is broken it is not the economic system but something like ‘the government’s economic management’ (Labour) or ‘public sector productivity’ (Conservative).

If you are worried, as Raworth is, by “relentless financial crises,” “extreme inequalities in wealth” and “remorseless pressure on the environment” then it seems that both the government and the opposition believe that the solution is more economic growth, albeit with some barely discernible differences in fiscal and regulatory policy.

Our contemporary political discourse is dominated, regardless of party, by the mainstream economic paradigm in which the market generates economic growth and the state functions to keep things on track by taxing and redistributing some of the surplus to those who for whatever reason didn’t do as well as others in the process. It also provides some additional incentives to business and other organisations to act in the public interest, for instance by subsidising green energy or taxing fossil fuels. Both parties, it seems, support this approach. The difference between them concerns how best the state manages the economy to get the most out of it, how the resulting surplus is distributed, and what kind of further incentives are needed.

Visualising doughnut economics

An economics diagram in the shape of a doughnut.

Source: Doughnut Economics Action Lab.

For Raworth, on the other hand, the first thing to ditch is the assumption that economic growth is the right goal to pursue. The ‘doughnut’ of doughnut economics is an alternative to GDP as a measure of progress. It name is derived from the visual depiction of the idea of an economy that operates in the space within two limits – ensuring the human rights of each person on the one hand, and staying within the means of the planet on the other. This concept refuses to conceptualise the economy as a closed system in distinction from the social and environmental systems on which it depends.

Raworth also wants to shift the emphasis away from the individual rational chooser of economic theory toward a more social understanding of human flourishing. And in direct contrast to the mainstream paradigm sketched above, in which the market’s job is to deliver economic wealth and the state’s job is to worry about distribution and regulation, Raworth wants an economic system designed from the outset to ensure a more equal distribution and to actively regenerate the environment.

The economic system itself is like an engine that can be put to whatever purpose you want. It generates wealth and wealth can be put to all kinds of uses, good or bad.

How might we evaluate this? Nobody disagrees that financial crises, extreme inequality and environmental damage occur and are bad. A good number of mainstream economists find Raworth’s aims laudable and worth pursuing, because we do need a better measure of success and improved models of human behaviour and ways to incorporate and limit externalities like carbon emissions. Yet they also find her analysis of economics a caricature, as many of the developments in economics over the last few decades seem to be ignored.

For her harshest critics, Raworth fails to give due credit to our current economic system for the incredible reduction in global poverty that it has already enabled, provides very little by way of actionable policy ideas, and is full of erudite but wishful thinking.

Yet the popularity of Doughnut Economics reflects a deep sense amongst many of us (some mainstream economists included) that something is seriously wrong, alongside an instinctive identification with the kind of values and changes that Raworth seeks.

The vital question is: what is our economy for? If we can get a better sense of what purpose we want the economy to serve, it may prove easier to identify whether it is achieving that, or is in some sense ‘broken.’

But to ask this question is immediately to step away from the mainstream paradigm that dominates our public discourse in framing the economy. For mainstream economics, questions of purpose are ethical questions and those questions are explicitly left to the actors within the economic system and the state acting on their behalf. The economic system itself is like an engine that can be put to whatever purpose you want. It generates wealth and wealth can be put to all kinds of uses, good or bad.

These ancient texts suggest that our mainstream paradigm is seriously adrift if it imagines that our economic system is morally neutral.

For many people the idea that the economy itself can be separated from ethical questions will automatically raise an alarm. Certainly, for Christians it ought to. The Bible firmly resists the idea that wealth and its generation is morally neutral. Even the most superficial reading of the Scripture alerts to the inherently spiritual and moral quality of economic activity. Fruitful work is part of what it means to be made in the image of God in the garden of Eden. The product of work is offered to God in worship. The Law is full of commands to deal justly, use fair weights and measures, consider health and safety in the building of a house, and give yourself, your family and your animals a rest (to name but a few). Jesus tells us that you cannot serve both God and money. The pictures of the New Creation in both Old and New Testaments include economic imagery – The Old Testament book of Micah envisions an end to war with everyone living “under their own vine and fig tree” (a vision of peace and economic flourishing) and the New Testament book of Revelation depicts the product of human work being offered up in worship before the throne of God.

Overall the Bible sees the economic, social and environmental dimensions of life as interwoven and interconnected. Take the Sabbath, for instance. It is not only workers who get (or are commanded to take) a Sabbath once a week. The command extends to the whole community - and even to animals. Every seven years, the Sabbath Year provides a rest for the land and for those struggling with debt – the land must be fallow and allowed to regenerate, and all outstanding debts cancelled. Sabbath and Jubilee are deeply intertwined (the Jubilee was effectively a sabbath of sabbaths, taking place after seven sabbath years) and the Jubilee was the theological paradigm chosen by Jesus to explain his own mission and ministry. Quoting the prophet Isaiah, he said:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the captives, recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

These ancient texts suggest that our mainstream paradigm is seriously adrift if it imagines that our economic system is morally neutral. And Raworth is closely aligned with the biblical vision insofar as she insists on the importance of an economy that exists not for its own sake, in some independent sphere, but explicitly to enable people, communities and creation to flourish together. We need to ask what our economy is for. And this is as good an answer as you might find.