The Rat Race Is a Forest of Trees That Cannot Agree to Stay Short

Modern life feels like a race with no finish line. People work harder than their grandparents, with better tools and vastly higher productivity, and do not seem to end up with more rest, more security or more time. The usual explanations are moral: greed, consumerism, weak character. I think the explanation is structural, and a forest shows it.

Why Trees Are Tall

Consider a stand of trees. Each one grows tall, at enormous cost, to reach the light above its neighbours. Height is expensive: a tall trunk needs wood, water has to be lifted, wind is a danger. If every tree in the forest were ten metres shorter, each would get exactly the same light it gets now, with a large saving in energy for all of them.

They cannot do it. There is no way for the trees to agree, and no way to enforce the agreement if they could. Any tree that stayed short while the others grew would be shaded out and die. So each grows for itself, the whole forest pours its resources into trunks, and an economist looking at it would see a colossal waste. Evolution does not maximise the efficiency of the group. It maximises the individual, and the group pays.

The same thing happens at a party. Each pair of people raises its voice a little to be heard over the neighbours, so the neighbours raise theirs, and within an hour everyone is shouting to achieve the conversation they could have had at a murmur.

Both processes stop eventually, but not because anyone chose to stop. The trees hit the limit of what a trunk can support; the guests hit the limit of their lungs. The equilibrium is set by exhaustion, not by anyone's preference.

The Economy Is the Forest

Now look at the economy with that picture in mind.

Every firm works its people harder because its competitors do, and it will lose if it does not. Every worker stays later because colleagues do and promotion goes to whoever is seen last at the desk. Every country lowers its taxes, loosens its labour law and lengthens its working week because the country next door has, and capital moves. At each level the logic is the tree's: you cannot afford to be the one who stays short.

The output is real. Trunks do get built; the economy does grow. But the question the tree cannot ask is whether anyone wanted trunks that tall. Would the participants, if they could choose the equilibrium rather than merely compete inside it, choose this one?

I think plainly not. Ask people in any rich country whether they would trade some output for a shorter week, more security and less pressure, and the majority say yes. They say it in surveys, and they say it with their votes wherever a working-time question has actually reached a ballot. What they cannot do is act on it individually, for exactly the reason the tree cannot.

Where the Output Goes

There is a second feature of the race, and it is what makes it feel like chasing your own tail rather than merely running hard.

The extra effort does not return to the people making it. The productivity gains of the last half century were enormous, and the share reaching the median worker was small. The rest went, in the ordinary way I have described elsewhere, to a minority with a claim on the output: owners, executives, and whoever sits where the money passes.

So the majority is divided into firms, sectors and countries and set against itself, each fragment racing the others, and the proceeds of the race accrue to a group that is not racing. The trees grow tall and somebody else sells the timber. That is why harder work does not feel like getting ahead. Mathematically, for most participants, it is not.

Two Ways Out

The race is a coordination failure, and coordination failures have two kinds of remedy.

The first is to reduce the pressure that makes defection fatal. A tree that would survive being shaded could afford to stay short. A worker who would not be ruined by losing a job can afford to refuse the extra hours, and a firm that competes on something other than the exhaustion of its staff can afford to let him. A more even distribution of what the race produces does exactly this: it lowers the penalty for not running flat out, and so lowers the speed of the race for everyone.

The second is to agree the height and enforce it. The trees cannot do this. We can. A society can decide, collectively and with force behind it, that the working week is this long, that this many weeks are holiday, that competing on hours below a floor is not permitted. Every such decision that exists was fought for, and every one holds only because it binds all the trees at once.

Why It Needs a Direct Decision

Notice who cannot make that decision for us. Representative government sits inside the forest. The same actors who profit from the tall trunks fund the campaigns and staff the ministries, and a government that proposed shorter trunks would be told, correctly under the current rules, that capital would leave for the taller forest next door. I have described the mechanism before; it does not need a villain.

The question "how hard is hard enough" is a question about the equilibrium, and only the participants can legitimately answer it, together, in a way that binds them all. The tree has no such option. The worker, under representation, effectively has none either. A direct democracy is the forest acquiring the ability to agree on a height. Whether it would choose a lower one I cannot prove. That it is the only body that could is, I think, clear.