One can find the article below:
Kho, Mu-Jeong. (2025, August 23). “Against the Void: Human Nature and the Search for Meaning in Tragedy.” Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@khomujeong_26821/against-the-void-human-nature-and-the-search-for-meaning-in-tragedy-96037c7c5d84 [PDF download].
End.
Work as Life, Life as Work: Rethinking the Limits of Work–Life Balance in the Twenty-First Century
Short Abstract
This study argues that work and life are inseparable under late capitalism. By examining the quantity, intensity, and quality of labour, it critiques the concept of “work-life balance” and reimagines work as a site of dignity, capability, and human flourishing.
1. The Indivisibility of Work and Life
The distinction between work and life is, in reality, far less clear than popular discourse assumes. It is not merely that I cannot divide them neatly; rather, this indivisibility reflects a structural tendency - albeit differentiated across sectors, classes, genders, and regions - within capitalist modernity, where labour increasingly permeates not only the temporal but also the qualitative and affective organisation of everyday existence (Harvey 2005; Standing 2011). Importantly, the issue is not simply one of working hours but also of labour intensity - the pace, pressure, and density of tasks - which often render shorter hours equally, or even more, exhausting. Moreover, the quality of work - best understood through established criteria such as autonomy, skill use, task complexity, and growth opportunities (Hackman & Oldham 1976; Green 2004; Burchell et al. 2002) - cannot be collapsed into the mere quantity of hours. Recent comparative studies confirm that even where working-time reduction has been legislated, intensification has offset much of the intended benefit, leaving subjective well-being stagnant or even declining (Gallie 2013; Eurofound 2021).
As Marx argued in his early theory of alienation, labour under capitalism estranges the worker not only from the product and process of labour but also from their species-being and from other workers (Marx 1975 [1844]); yet in Capital his analysis pivots toward accumulation and surplus value, although the underlying themes of estrangement continue to surface in his account of the degradation of the labour process (Braverman 1974). Weber’s notion of the Beruf (vocation), meanwhile, shows how Protestant asceticism and rationalisation invested labour with moral significance beyond economic necessity (Weber 2002 [1904]), though Weber’s wider analysis also underlined how bureaucratic rationalisation extended globally, embedding work into structures of discipline not confined to Europe. Importantly, both Marx and Weber continue to influence present-day analyses of work. Neo-Marxian critiques highlight how digital platforms replicate alienation by fragmenting control through algorithms (Fuchs 2014), while neo-Weberians emphasise how credentialism and bureaucratic forms still underpin labour markets, constraining mobility and freedom (Collins 1979; Brown 2013). Taken together, these perspectives suggest that alienation and rationalisation are not relics of industrial capitalism but enduring features of contemporary labour regimes, refracted through new technological and organisational forms.
Contemporary debates echo these insights: Sennett (1998; 2006) documents how flexible capitalism corrodes long-term identity, while Standing (2011) argues that precarity defines twenty-first-century work. These dynamics are visible today: platform workers in the gig economy, such as Uber drivers and food-delivery couriers, find themselves unable to ‘switch off’; nurses and care workers carry emotional and unpredictable burdens into private life; and remote working, intensified during COVID-19, has dissolved spatial and temporal boundaries, creating an ‘always-on’ culture where quantity, intensity, and quality blur together. Even if one assumes a six o’clock end to the working day, it is naïve to suppose that a wholly autonomous self, disengaged from labour, suddenly begins. The reality is that surveillance, algorithmic control, and the moral/emotional demands of care have rendered the supposed line between ‘life’ and ‘work’ a conceptual fiction.
2. Labour, Alienation, and the Conditions of Flourishing
Work constitutes the activity to which individuals devote the greatest proportion of their time and the most repetitive part of their daily existence. If one expends a third of life in labour, yet regards it in purely instrumental terms - as a means of earning money, as time to be endured rather than lived - while reserving the remaining third as the sole site of authentic life, then the possibility of flourishing in a eudaimonic sense becomes profoundly compromised. The problem lies not only in how long one works but also in how intensively, and in whether labour affords qualitative enrichment or mere endurance. Clark (2015) finds that workers who enjoy autonomy and recognition of skills report levels of satisfaction equivalent to significant increases in income, suggesting that qualitative dimensions of work may outweigh quantitative measures. Conversely, Eurofound (2021) documents how intensification undermines psychosocial well-being across Europe, even in areas where working hours have declined. Thus, to treat work as expendable time to be endured impoverishes human flourishing and narrows the scope for self-realisation.
As Adorno and Horkheimer argued, instrumental rationality reduces lived experience to functional survival; while their critique was directed at the culture industry, its extension to the labour process - though interpretive rather than explicit - helps reveal how efficiency logics constrain emancipatory possibilities (Adorno & Horkheimer 2002 [1944]). Likewise, institutional economists remind us that labour is socially embedded, not a mere economic exchange: for Veblen, it expressed both workmanship and pecuniary competition (Veblen 2009 [1899]); for Polanyi, it was a “fictitious commodity” whose commodification threatened the fabric of social life (Polanyi 2001 [1944]). Braverman’s (1974) classic study of scientific management shows how rationalisation stripped labour of skill, reinforcing alienation, while more recent analyses (Thompson and Vincent 2010; Budd 2021) demonstrate how control and surveillance in digital workplaces similarly undermine autonomy. This suggests that alienation today is less about sheer hours than about dispossession of agency, a theme increasingly corroborated by ethnographies of gig and platform labour.
Later theorists expand this: Fraser (2014; 2018) highlights the systemic undervaluation of reproductive labour; Graeber (2018) contends that much contemporary employment consists of “bullshit jobs”; and Gorz (1999) envisioned a post-work society via working-time reduction, though this vision remains contested. Hochschild (1997) shows how emotional labour colonises the private sphere, while Federici (2012) and Weeks (2011) emphasise the politics of unpaid and reproductive labour as central to freedom. In line with Sen and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, the challenge is to treat labour not merely as endurance but as a domain where agency, creativity, and human flourishing can be realised (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2000). Empirical studies show that when organisations integrate participatory decision-making and invest in skills development, workers experience heightened purpose and resilience (Gallie 2013; Budd 2021). Conversely, precarity prevents long-term planning and corrodes social reproduction, particularly along gendered and class lines. Thus, the horizon for flourishing requires reconceiving labour in distributive and qualitative terms - not just a matter of productivity but of justice, recognition, and dignity.
3. Beyond Balance: Capabilities, Policy, and Future Directions
While the modern ideal of work–life balance is important, it cannot alone resolve the deeper dilemma. What matters is not simply separating working hours from personal time but cultivating capabilities and enhancing one’s state of being within, and not merely outside, labour. This requires recognising work not only quantitatively (time spent) but qualitatively (nature, intensity, autonomy). To reimagine labour as more than a commodity is to reclaim it as a sphere of freedom, creativity, and dignity. Here the capabilities approach provides a normative anchor, stressing that labour should be evaluated not only by market productivity but by the substantive freedoms it enables - self-respect, affiliation, imagination, and the capacity to plan one’s life (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2000).
Policy responses illustrate both potential and limits. France’s 2017 “right to disconnect” obliges large firms to negotiate digital disconnection policies - though it constitutes a duty to bargain rather than a direct right to switch off, and enforcement remains uneven (Hopkins 2024; Dima 2020). Germany’s Kurzarbeit subsidises wages during reduced hours, addressing both quantity and intensity - but it is primarily designed for cyclical downturns rather than a structural reorganisation of labour (OECD/IMF 2021; Casey 2023). The EU’s 2019 Work-Life Balance Directive mandates paternity leave, carers’ leave, and flexible working - though transposition varies (EU 2019). Japan’s 2018 Work Style Reform Laws cap overtime and mandate rest intervals to curb karoshi - a culturally specific crisis of death by overwork, though enforcement remains weak (Matsumoto, Kaneita, Itani, Otsuka 2023). Nordic parental leave and care infrastructures valorise reproductive labour, though tied to high-tax, welfare-based regimes not easily generalised globally. These reforms demonstrate partial progress but do not dislodge the deeper commodification of labour that underpins modern capitalism.
In this light, Bauman (2000) on liquid modernity, Boltanski
and Chiapello (2005) on capitalism’s new spirit, and Hardt and Negri (2000;
2004) on immaterial labour - albeit contested - demonstrate how transformations of
work blur boundaries between production and life, making the rethinking of
work-life relations more urgent (Fraser 2014; Weeks 2011). Taken together,
these examples show that policy can mitigate excesses but cannot by itself
overcome structural contradictions: only a normative shift toward capabilities
and human flourishing can achieve a sustainable resolution. Recent
contributions reinforce this claim: Huws (2014) demonstrates how digitalisation
reconfigures value extraction into everyday life, while Srnicek (2017)
highlights platform capitalism’s tendency to colonise personal time. Meanwhile,
De Stefano (2016) argues that the “gig economy” institutionalises dependency
without security, exacerbating precarity. Ultimately, the challenge is not just
managing work-life balance but redefining labour itself as a constitutive
element of life, embedded in human dignity and collective justice.
End.
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Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity
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Capitalism. London: Verso.
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Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
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for Social Mobility’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34(5-6), pp.
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Experiences and Lessons from the COVID-Induced Downturn’, National Institute
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Weeks, K. (2011) The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
One should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form:
Kho, Mu-Jeong. (2025, August 18). Work as Life, Life as Work: Rethinking the Limits of Work–Life Balance in the Twenty-First Century [Blog article]. IPEAD Insights: Letters on Economics, Politics, and Philosophy [online]. Series 2025-04. Retrieved from https://mujeongkho.blogspot.com/2025/08/work-as-life-life-as-work-rethinking.html [PDF download]
© 2025 Mu-Jeong Kho. All Rights Reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). You are free to share this work (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) under the following terms:
- Attribution - You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
- NonCommercial - You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
- NoDerivatives - If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.
License details: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
The Scientific Basis for Belief in Superstition: The Case of Fishermen in the United States
By Mu-Jeong Kho
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4545-8731
Email: khomujeong@yahoo.co.uk
Empirical research has consistently demonstrated that certain occupational groups display a heightened propensity towards superstition. In the United States, one of the most salient examples is found among fishermen - a workforce consistently classified within the most hazardous category in national U.S. fatal injury statistics (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023, Table 1).
Table 1: Fatal work injury rates1 per 100,000
full-time equivalent workers by selected occupations, 2021-23
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2023: 10)
The prevalence of superstition within this community
is striking, encompassing a diverse repertoire of ritualised constraints - here
employed as an analytic umbrella for taboos, proscriptions, and symbolic
prescriptions that carry both normative authority and perceived functional
value, operating simultaneously as codified rules of conduct and as culturally
recognised mechanisms for enhancing safety, solidarity, and morale - through
which occupational norms are codified, reinforced, and legitimised over time
(Douglas, 2003; Hofstede, 2001). These include:
(1) boarding a vessel with a black bag, a practice avoided in fishing communities in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, where ethnographic accounts record a belief that black objects - particularly bags or boxes - bring misfortune (van Ginkel, 2007);
(2) transporting bananas on board, a long-standing prohibition in Atlantic coastal and southern U.S. fisheries, explained in historical and folkloric sources as arising from associations with rapid spoilage, insect infestation, the spread of disease, and symbolic links to bad luck (Kurlansky, 2013);
(3) hanging a mug so that its interior is not visible, documented in maritime ethnographies as part of a broader symbolism attached to the orientation and placement of bowls and cups, which can carry protective or magical significance (Firth, 2013); and
(4) whistling while fishing, believed to summon storms - a conviction deeply embedded in maritime symbolic culture and perpetuated through oral tradition, with examples recorded in both North American and European seafaring traditions (van Ginkel, 2007; Firth, 2013; Kurlansky, 2013; Fishing Booker, 2024).
While each superstition possesses its own culturally or historically contingent rationale, their cumulative prevalence warrants analytical scrutiny, as they collectively constitute an emergent, socially and institutionally reinforced occupational culture of risk mediation rather than a disparate assemblage of irrational acts (Beattie, 2013; Luhrmann, 2012).
Rather than being reducible to the discrete content of individual beliefs, the proliferation of such superstitions can be interpreted as a coherent - albeit informally constituted - system of regulation, emerging through unplanned yet actively reinforced, institutionally anchored, and collectively sustained processes of social reproduction. These processes are not merely the passive inheritance of tradition, but are continually enacted and validated through daily labour, thereby strengthening socially mediated perceptions of agency among individuals working in environments characterised by extreme unpredictability and mortal hazard (Bourdieu, 2020; Giddens, 2023). This interpretation aligns with Malinowski’s (2014/1948) seminal ethnographic observations among the Trobriand Islanders, where magical rituals proliferated in high-risk, low-control activities such as open-sea fishing but were largely absent in safer, lagoon fishing contexts. Similarly, Gmelch’s (1971) analysis of baseball players demonstrated that occupational superstitions frequently operate as ritualised strategies for re-establishing a subjective sense of control when performance outcomes are uncertain.
Veblen’s (1899) conception of “habit” as a socially structured and institutionally reinforced mode of conduct directly explains the persistence of these maritime practices: in the case of fishermen, superstitions function as habituated behavioural patterns sedimented through generations of shared experience in hazardous work. These habits constitute an occupational “habitus” (in a Bourdieusian sense) that governs not only technical routines but also symbolic assurances of safety and competence - both essential to sustaining operational effectiveness and group cohesion in dangerous conditions (Bourdieu, 1990). Equally, Polanyi’s (1944) notion of the economy as “embedded” in social and cultural relations clarifies how such superstitions act as embedded regulatory mechanisms, integrating fishing as an economic activity with communal norms of safety, solidarity, and moral order, thereby ensuring the cultural reproduction of these safety-oriented practices under conditions of uncertainty. Together, Veblen and Polanyi’s insights offer a directly applicable explanatory framework for understanding the fishermen’s occupational culture in this case.
When working at sea - where the possibility of encountering fatal storms is a persistent reality - these ritualised constraints operate as a symbolic-psychological framework for anticipating and managing uncertainty. From a psychological perspective, such practices can be linked to locus of control theory (Rotter, 1966), wherein superstition shifts the perceived locus from uncontrollable external forces (e.g., weather, fate) towards a symbolically controllable social order (Kay et al., 2009). By codifying certain actions as forbidden or inauspicious, fishermen construct an implicit normative system that enables them to confront existential hazards with a heightened - albeit primarily perceived - sense of stability, preparedness, and control.
In this way, superstition (as an informal institution) functions not merely as a vestige of tradition or occupational folklore (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2011), but as a culturally mediated and occupationally embedded mechanism of perceived risk management, sustained through the socio-ecological context of maritime labour.
End.
References
Beattie, J. (2013). Other cultures: Aims, methods and achievements in social anthropology. Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. (2020).
Outline of a Theory of Practice. In The new social theory reader (pp. 80-86). Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford university press.
Douglas, M. (2003). Purity and danger: An
analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Routledge
Firth, R. (2013). Symbols (Routledge Revivals): Public and Private. Routledge.
Fishing Booker
(2024, October 30). Fishing superstitions from around the world (written by Albert).
FishingBooker.com. Retrieved [2025-08-11], from https://fishingbooker.com/blog/fishing-superstitions-bananas/
Giddens, A. (2023).
Modernity and self-identity. In Social theory re-wired (pp. 477-484). Routledge.
Gmelch, G. (1971).
Baseball magic. Transaction, 8(8), 39-41.
Hofstede, G. (2001).
Culture's consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and
organizations across nations. International Educational and Professional.
Kay, A. C., Whitson,
J. A., Gaucher, D., & Galinsky, A. D. (2009). Compensatory control:
Achieving order through the mind, our institutions, and the heavens. Current directions in psychological science, 18(5), 264-268.
Kurlansky, M.
(2013). Cod: A biography of the fish that changed the world. Walker & Co., UK.
Luhrmann, T. M.
(2012). When God talks back: Understanding the American evangelical relationship
with God. Knopf.
Malinowski, B. (2014/1948). Magic, science and religion and other essays. Read Books Ltd.
Polanyi, K. (1944). The great transformation:
The political and economic origins of our time. Farrar & Rinehart.
Rotter, J. B.
(1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of
reinforcement. Psychological monographs: General and applied, 80(1), 1-28.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023). National
census of fatal occupational injuries in 2022. U.S. Department of Labor.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf
van
Ginkel, R. (2007). Coastal cultures: An anthropology of fishing and whaling traditions.
Apeldoorn: Het Spinhuis.
Veblen, T. (1899). The theory of the leisure class:
An economic study of institutions. Macmillan.
Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2011). Managing the unexpected: Resilient performance in an age of uncertainty (Vol. 8). John Wiley & Sons.
One should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form:
Kho, Mu-Jeong. (2025, August 14). The scientific basis for belief in superstition: The case of fishermen in the United States [Blog article]. IPEAD Insights: Letters on Economics, Politics, and Philosophy [online]. Series 2025-03. Retrieved from https://mujeongkho.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-scientific-basis-for-belief-in.html [pdf download]
© 2025 Mu-Jeong Kho. All Rights Reserved.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). You are free to share this work (copy and
redistribute the material in any medium or format) under the following terms:
- Attribution - You must give
appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were
made.
- NonCommercial - You may not use
the material for commercial purposes.
- NoDerivatives - If you remix,
transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified
material.
License details:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
The Perils of Certainty
By Mu-Jeong Kho
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4545-8731
Email: khomujeong@yahoo.co.uk
To state my position - and here with deliberate emphasis - I contend that those who most damage the world are the dogmatic monists, the fundamentalists, and the extremists. While philosophical monism, in its abstract and methodological sense, may serve legitimate purposes in metaphysics or epistemology, it becomes corrosive when transposed into a prescriptive exclusivism that brooks no alternative. As Isaiah Berlin’s theory of value pluralism makes clear, human values are irreducibly multiple and often incommensurable; any attempt to collapse them into a single, all-encompassing truth risks authoritarianism and violence (Berlin, 1990). In my view, maturity is defined by the cumulative layering of experience until experience itself becomes a habitual condition of being. From such a vantage point, any individual who insists upon a single idea as though it were the sole truth under heaven must be approached with great caution, however noble or beautiful that idea might appear.
Thomas Aquinas once observed: The most dangerous person is the one who has read only a single book (Aquinas, trans. 1947). John Stuart Mill offered a parallel caution in On Liberty, contending that those who know only their own side of a case know little of that case in its entirety (Mill, 2022). Both Berlin and Mill underscore that intellectual confinement - whether produced by ideological exclusivity or informational isolation - undermines the very capacities required for sound judgement in a pluralistic society (Berlin, 2013; Mill, 2022). In my estimation, it is sometimes preferable not to read at all than to read only one book and thereafter speak of nothing else for a lifetime. The ideal, of course, is the cultivation of intellectual breadth: to read widely, to engage with diverse perspectives, and to remain open to the provisional nature of one’s own conclusions - what contemporary epistemologists term ‘epistemic humility’ (Whitcomb, Battaly, Baehr, & Howard-Snyder, 2017). Yet there are those who declare, “This is my book for life!” or “I place my trust solely in this text”, repeating it endlessly. Here, the “book” functions merely as an illustrative example; the same intellectual closure may manifest in relation to a fixed idea, a single doctrine, or a habitual mode of reasoning.
I regard such a mindset as profoundly dangerous. It should be treated as axiomatic in any genuinely pluralistic society that a value one person holds dear may, to another, be of little significance, and conversely, that a value cherished by another may hold no meaning for oneself. This recognition lies at the heart of Rawls’s conception of “reasonable pluralism” in Political Liberalism, which accepts the inevitability of deep moral and philosophical disagreement in a free society (Rawls, 1993). Without such recognition, constructive communication - in a society where individuals must both compete and collaborate with those possessing a vast range of perspectives - becomes not merely difficult but impossible.
If one holds the conviction that one’s own value system is exclusively correct, then what remains but to attempt to impose it upon others? And if those others resist? The inevitable consequence is conflict, if not outright war. What is required, therefore, is the principled recognition of difference: an acknowledgment that disagreement is not merely tolerable but a constitutive element of a healthy democratic order. In this light, pluralism should be understood not as a reluctant concession to diversity but as an affirmative political virtue that sustains the legitimacy and resilience of democratic institutions (Rawls, 1993; Berlin, 2013). The world remains uncertain; we seldom possess absolute clarity as to which value, if any, is ultimately “right”. Accordingly, genuine dialogue and meaningful cooperation must rest on the recognition - deeply and sincerely made - that others may think differently, and that such difference is neither a flaw to be corrected nor an impediment to be removed, but rather a constitutive feature of our shared human condition and the essential precondition for a vibrant, resilient public sphere.
End.
References
Aquinas, T. (1947). Summa Theologica (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). New York: Benziger Brothers. (Original work published ca. 1265–1274)
Berlin, I. (2013). The crooked timber of humanity: Chapters in the history of ideas. Princeton University Press.
Mill, J. S. (2022). The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. DigiCat.
Rawls, J. (1993). Political liberalism. Columbia University Press.
Whitcomb, D., Battaly, H., Baehr, J., & Howard-Snyder, D. (2017). Intellectual humility: Owning our limitations. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 94(3), 509–539.
One should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form:
Kho, Mu-Jeong. (2025, August 14). The perils of certainty [Blog article]. IPEAD Insights: Letters on Economics, Politics, and Philosophy [online]. Series 2025-02. Retrieved from https://mujeongkho.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-perils-of-certainty.html [PDF download]
© 2025 Mu-Jeong Kho. All Rights Reserved.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). You are free to share this work (copy and
redistribute the material in any medium or format) under the following terms:
- Attribution - You must give
appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were
made.
- NonCommercial - You may not use
the material for commercial purposes.
- NoDerivatives - If you remix,
transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified
material.
License details:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Mu-Jeong Kho as an Economist: The Ethic of Work
By Mu-Jeong Kho
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4545-8731
Email: khomujeong@yahoo.co.uk
Among the many passages of Mencius that I hold dear, one in particular often comes to mind. Mencius invites us to imagine two craftsmen: one makes armour, the other makes arrows. The question he poses is simple yet profound: Is the arrow-maker, by nature, any less virtuous than the armour-maker? The answer, of course, is no. And yet, each harbours a different concern - the arrow-maker worries that his arrows may fail to strike, while the armour-maker worries that his armour may fail to protect.
This image keeps returning to me throughout my professional life. Within the same vocation, there are moments when my work resembles the making of armour, and others when it resembles the making of arrows. (Naturally, some professions are by their nature harmful - criminal enterprises, for example - but these lie outside the scope of my reflection here.) The ethical quality of any task is not fixed by the title of the profession; it is shaped by the specific role one occupies, the institutional and historical context in which one operates, and the ultimate purpose that frames the work. In my own field, this means recognising whether a given intervention reinforces protective social capacities or sharpens critical challenges to harmful structures.
In economic analysis and evaluation, to speak critically is not, in itself, to “make arrows.” The duty of an economist certainly includes criticising where criticism is due. Indeed, such criticism can constitute armour-making when it safeguards societal well-being, strengthens institutional resilience, or prevents systemic harm. My concern here is not with the legitimacy of critique, but with the principles of work and the situational context in which that work is embedded - its place, its orientation, and its moral stance.
From this standpoint, the question “Am I now making armour or making arrows?” is inseparable from professional ethics. In my own practice, I am consistently drawn toward the ethic of making armour - producing scholarship and policy analysis that, at its core, seeks to safeguard rather than to harm - thereby aligning methodological rigour and theoretical innovation with a protective and constructive social purpose. For me, as an economist, there is no higher calling than to ensure that the tools I forge serve the common good.
End.
One should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form:
Kho, Mu-Jeong. (2025, August 13). Mu-Jeong Kho as an economist: The ethic of work [Blog article]. IPEAD Insights: Letters on Economics, Politics, and Philosophy [online]. Series 2025-01. Retrieved from https://mujeongkho.blogspot.com/2025/08/blog-post.html [pdf download]
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