Taichi Kogure on the Costs of Staying in the Rat Race

You work hard, get promoted and take home a larger salary. Somehow life still feels squeezed. What changed, and what stayed the same?

Taichi Kogure’s book on escaping the rat race starts with that feeling. It uses a theory of labour to explain why the cycle can be hard to leave, then asks what choices a person in an ordinary job actually has.

Why Hard Work Can Still Leave You Stretched

Kogure looks at pay through the cost of maintaining a worker’s ability to work. In this view, pay reflects the resources needed to come back and do the job again tomorrow, even when the work creates more value than the employee receives.

He distinguishes use value from value. The first is the usefulness something has to the person who uses it.

In the economic framework he borrows, value has to do with the labour required to produce something.

Labour Power as Something You Can Sell

Kogure treats labour power as something a worker sells. His account asks what it costs to keep that capacity available from one day to the next.

Food, housing and clothes are among those costs. The level of support considered sufficient varies across societies. In this account, wages have a connection to the cost of reproducing labour power.

Where the Company’s Surplus Comes From

Kogure then uses the concept of surplus value to look at what the employer gains. His historical example is the exceptionally long working day in industrial Britain.

An employer buys the use of someone’s labour for a period. In the framework of the book, the value produced beyond the cost of that labour is the source of the surplus.

What Could Change if You Left?

If every employer values labour in much the same way, a new employer can lead to a familiar situation. That is the cycle the Korean title calls the rat race.

Kogure’s first suggestion is to think about how to make your labour command a higher price. It matters what your work can do for somebody else and what it takes to produce the kind of work they want.

Much of the book is given over to what a worker can actually change in that equation.

Revenue, Costs and What Is Left Over

The book borrows a simple accounting formula: profit is revenue minus costs. It then uses that formula as an analogy for deciding how much a job gives you.

You can increase what comes back to you or reduce what doing the job costs. Kogure invites you to ask which of the two a given job makes possible.

1. Reduce the cost by choosing work that leaves you less worn out.
2. Increase what the work gives you by choosing work that builds knowledge you can use elsewhere.

The first route puts less stress ahead of the question of what job looks most attractive. Reducing how much recovery the job takes can matter in its own right.

The second route favours work that compounds skills over time. Knowledge from one job can become something you carry to the next.

Which Trade-off Do You Want?

The book is aimed at people who expect to remain employees and want to make a more deliberate choice about how they work.

Some work is demanding and gives you experience you can use elsewhere. Other work leaves more of your life intact and asks less of you when you get home. Kogure wants the reader to notice what each choice is paying back.

The last pages turn to what people think they can do over time.

• We can expect too much from a year and too little from a decade.
• Kogure recalls an observation by the Japanese writer Akihiro Nakatani: many people say they want to do something, fewer start, and fewer still keep at it.

Book Information

Escaping the Office Worker’s Rat Race (Korean title, translated)

Author

Taichi Kogure

Publication

13 May 2013 (Korean edition)

ISBN13

9788992028394

View the book on YES24

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