One of the biggest views I see in my parents and grandparents: work provides purpose and dignity, and without work, you have no purpose, and therefore, you are a failure. This is really hard to respond to, especially with people who have spent 50 years working with this mindset, because they feel "invalidated" or "worthless" if their life's worth isn't measured by their work output.<p>I don't think that's necessarily a "bad" world view to have, especially if it pushes you to provide some social good that you wouldn't if you thought it was OK to be lazy. But I think it's harmful to impose that view on others. If you have no choice but to work or be discarded, then, when the value you can provide via work is less than that required to maintain your life, you have no choice but to attempt to indenture yourself. And failing that, you're truly, completely fucked. The purpose of entitlements ought to be (though currently aren't) to provide reassurance against a requirement to sell yourself to survive. And I truly believe, if we don't correct this failing of entitlements, then we will see mass indentured servitude (though it won't be called that), in developed countries, in my lifetime, of citizens of said country. Currently, we already see mass indentured servitude, but we say it's not that big a deal because<p>[1] The indentured are immigrants<p>[2] The indentured are in un-developed countries<p>[3] The indentured are "ghetto", "whore", or "gangster", which is seen as pretty equivalent to [2]
The discussion here (<a href="http://libcom.org/library/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-graeber" rel="nofollow">http://libcom.org/library/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-gra...</a>) which is linked from the original post is, imo, more interesting and thought provoking.<p>I think most people can immediately identify with the idea of "working" 40 hours while really only doing 15 hours of hard work and 25 hours of paper pushing and procrastinating. Maybe not in your current job but almost certainly in some job you once held.<p>I think this is a product of work culture. There are, at almost every halfway useful company, a number of truly busy people. These people have 40 hours of things to do every week, or at least need 40 hours to properly instruct their subordinates. However it is often the case that they only really need 15h of hard work from each subordinate. The issue is that it's not culturally acceptable to say to your boss "I just did all you need from me this week in a few hours, I'm going to the beach now". So such a worker faces the choice of either speaking up and asking for more work, or dragging out the minimal work they have to do until it takes an "acceptable" amount of time. Since time is our most valuable asset the culture of a company is considered fair when people are giving relatively equal time sacrifices to the task at hand.<p>I know I have been lucky enough to have a manager that was not offended if I finished all of my work early and left, but 99% of people never have that luxury. It's psychological, most people don't want others to get off easy.
An unconditional basic income[1] would speed up a paradigm shift from the current "work or starve" society. Maybe our grandchildren will look back to this time and make funny jokes about digging and filling holes...<p>[1]: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income</a>
This is a stressful topic that gets overwhelming quickly. Things are shifting but it's a slow shift and one that is going to be extremely painful before it gets better. Some interesting work going on with worker coops, parecon, post-scarcity economics, etc... As one of the linked comments noted "Looks like we've built higher-phase communism accidentally. Ooops."<p>The Keynes article he briefly touches on is fantastic<p><a href="http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1...</a><p>"Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard – those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me – those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties – to solve the problem which has been set them.<p>I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it to-day, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs.<p>For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter – to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! "
Our economies also have this tendency to siphon off surplus and spend it on expensive military projects such as wars. There is the general year in year out expenditure on new military toys, keeping the nuclear 'deterrent' up to date and keeping those boys polishing their boots. We don't get a proper tax breakdown on this expenditure so I would only be guessing as to how much is really spent.<p>On top of this regular expenditure are the billions that have been spent bombing Afghanistan and Iraq to pieces. We have been saddled with debt to pay for that and it won't be the politicians that will be personally paying that off.<p>Although a lot of people don't wish to see it that way, war is a racket. Nobody would bother unless there was money to be made. The waste goes far beyond the lives lost and the taxes diverted, there is also a real loss of valuable materials and energy resources. It is all an incredible waste yet we are always told that 'defence' is good for jobs.<p>Given the default option for siphoning off the 'fruits of capitalist surplus' is more and more bombs and weapons, that is kind of what we all work for in our variously inane jobs. Isn't this a fantastic situation?
> Workers in Germany average a little over 35 hours a week, compared to the 42 hours worked in the UK.<p>Flat out wrong as per the source cited. The difference is only 0.7 hours, both for full time employees and for all employees (the numbers above mix the two).<p>> German law guarantees 30 working days of vacation per year (and I am told medical leave for attending a spa resort on top of that).<p>Nope, it's 29 days <i>on average</i>, but only 20 mandated by law (for a 5 day working week). And medical leave is, of course, only available if you actually have medical problems (and paid for by your health insurance or retirement provider).
This article is predicated on the idea that, because we're more efficient today than 1930, we should be able to work less and live the same lifestyle.<p>Well, in fact, we <i>can.</i> But you can't ignore those last three words: you have to live <i>the same lifestyle</i> as a typical 1930s person.<p>* No internet.<p>* No TV.<p>* No air conditioning.<p>* No cell phone.<p>* No car.<p>* Bunk beds for your kids.<p>* One bathroom for the whole house.<p>* No flying, anywhere, ever.<p>* No fancy restaurants.<p>* No organic groceries.<p>The reason we're still working 1930 hours in 2014 is that we prefer it -- that is, we prefer the rich lifestyle those hours provide us.
Great article. One of the things that many people have an aversion to when it comes to this kind of thing is the "socialist" aspect of it. We all agree that it's great, but is it for everybody? I totally see where libertarians come from. They want A LOT of freedom. But why can't we have it both ways? One of the reasons socialism is hard to maintain is because of how spread out things can be, I think we can all agree that with socialism you inevitably have to force people to do certain things so that society can work (for example, live in a certain place), and this is much easier to do in a small location, but what's stopping us from having two sets of laws governing two areas of land?<p>You can fit everyone in the US into an area the size of Jacksonville Fl., so why not just establish "tech-metros" which are open to anyone and provide basic necessities in a socialized fashion, and use automation and digitalization to provide goods and services, while designating certain swaths of land out side these places as under a different set of laws that are more libertarian in nature? I believe ~60% of people would flock to the "tech-metros" while the remaining portion would attempt life in a more privatized fashion out side of them. With a more centralized "sub-government" in charge of these small areas, and with it being easy to come and go as you please, it should be easier to take care of the masses that want to be taken care of and let the masses who don't want to be taken care of take care of themselves.<p>Now that's just a couple paragraphs on a very radical idea, so there are a lot of details being left out, but imho this idea provides the most happiness along with the least destruction.
> Why should we not divert some of our growth into growing our leisure time, rather than growing our physical wealth?<p>Because not everyone was created equal. Some professions are completely worthless (e.g. ad creators) and add nothing net to the society. Others, e.g. doctors, are so valuable, and so few people can do them, that they simply can't afford to work less (educating more doctors so that they can work fewer hours is not an answer - I'm not a doctor, but I imagine it takes a relatively fixed amount of hours of training to actually "become a doctor" (after finishing your education), so if doctors worked less, they would be worse doctors). The social contract then dictates that everyone must work, since doctors have to work.<p>Solution: automate medicine, energy, food.
There is a big fallacy in the article:<p>Namely, that the amount of work that can be done has an upper bound.<p>In fact, the amount of work that can be be done is infinite and with higher productivity other things are done (= can be done economically) than before, for example:<p>Cleaning the streets, painting your house white, keeping your nearby river clean, build tanks & guns, maintaining bureaucracy, helping people you don't know (welfare state).<p>These things are all non-essential (yeah yeah I know but still ...), yet are only done now because only recently we achieved the productivity / wealth of being able to do it.<p>If we stop doing these things we will feel wealthier because individually, we'll have more resources to fulfill our needs. We would maybe still help our neighbours or paint our house white or buy guns but we would (or not) do it because we decided it ourselves.<p>I suppose in the future there will be other things we'll do that now seem insane: maybe even the poorest might have a swimming pool, or we commute a few thousand kilometers to work, or we each carry a wearable computer around without needing it for work (can you imagine???).<p>But there will be work, it is as certain as death and taxes.
The author points out that it's <i>possible</i> in some sense to have a world with less work, OK material standards, more leisure and less unhappiness. People would still work, social/technological advancement would still occur, but people would be more content and maybe many would move to jobs that would make more of their talents.<p>This, however, is looking only at big numbers on a macro level. It ignores all the things which have prevented this outcome from actually happening. These include (1) incentives (2) ideology.<p>1. If employer A allows less than 40 hour work weeks, or more vacation, he can be beaten out in the market by employer B which mandates longer hours and produces more per time period. Employees might prefer A over B, but they have so little bargaining power that this will not stop B. If the same requirements are imposed on all employers, then the country will be out-competed by others.<p>2. Conservatives criticize any such proposal with an argument like this: "You should be free to use your property as you wish, including by having people work as long as you can get them to agree to. And everything is already owned, so the only way to provide more for one person is to take away from another, and it's wrong to take money or other values from people who have earned them, to give to others who have not earned them."<p>Regardless of the merits of the argument, it is effective with the public, and politicians use it effectively to protect the owners. This can never change unless someone can present a contrary view that can be stated in equally pithy sound-bites and which is equally convincing for large numbers of voters (in democratic countries, basically W. Europe and parts of S. America) or unless a large enough segment commit to a revolution (in the rest of the countries which are not democratic).
I left a job where I was basically paid to be the other guy with a heartbeat who knows Smalltalk. I did nothing but browse all day, and it was soul crushing. (Also responsible for a significant chunk of my HN karma.)<p><a href="http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-06-02/" rel="nofollow">http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-06-02/</a>
If you're feeling unbiased enough to try and ignore what certain words mean to use today, you may want to ready Oscar Wilde's take on these things from a 19th century point of view.<p>If the words "Socialist" or "Marxist" mean something much more livid to you than " Romanticism" or "Postmodernism," you are not allowed to read the linked article^<p><a href="http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/" rel="nofollow">http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-m...</a><p>^I was considering banning Americans from reading this article. I'm allowing it for now, but please behave.
funny i was talking about something similar with a friend last night. think about this:<p>in a lot of professions it's common to study about up to 10 years before you start working. that's after 12-13 years of school(unless you're a professional athlete)<p>you study for a quarter century. think about it. a quarter of a century. that's the height of your youth. then you're allowed to work for 40 years so you can "enjoy" your retirement(provided you still get any retirement at that time).<p>that's by the way the time when you have pain all over your body, wake up at 4 am and go to bed at 9.<p>who's winning here? who are we kidding?
Here's a thought experiment.<p>Mr. Myne has invented an extraordinary machine. This one machine can, using polluted air and brackish water as material inputs, produce a nutritious food substitute and potable water for one person for one entire day with less than $1.30 of grid power. The 2000 kcal daily diet uses about 8000 kcal of electricity and 10 L of dirty water. With this machine, a person can avoid starvation and dehydration for less than $500 per year.<p>But Mr. Myne owns the machines. He will lease them out for the low, low price of $8 per day. That's cheap for 100% of your daily nutrition! You still have to pay for the electricity and water yourself, which is about $1.50 a day.<p>There's the hypothetical. Now here's the experiment. What happens if people decide to stop paying Mr. Myne to use his machines?
A free-market society would never average a 15 hour work week unless there's no incentive to <i>pay</i> for the work anymore. This could happen if we find a limitless energy source and real artificial intelligence. As long as someone is willing to pay for hours of work, people will be willing to work more than 15 hours a week to get ahead.
This looks like a lot of words to disguise the fact it's neo-luddism.<p>With technological progress worker roles are eliminated, but the idea is that the market has demand for new currently non-existent things and as the progress enables those things to come into existence creating new jobs as it goes.<p>The much larger problem is people are genuinely getting conditioned to receiving a lot for nothing, and this has distorted the market in terms of what activities are most highly rewarded. For example, easy credit means selling to people that don't have the money (or the means) is actually very lucrative, so you get a lot of otherwise smart people engaged in activities to extract money from those with easy credit as opposed to applying their talents to contributing more positively to the system as a whole.