This has been a philosophical concern as well as an economic one for a while now. John Maynard Keynes had some notable thoughts on the future of work leading to a utopia of less work and the same/more reward (and he was incorrect).
But rather than get into the political/economic/philosophical argument, there might be an individual solution: people don't pay for what takes the most work, they pay for what is in the most demand. These are often not the same thing, and you can leverage that.
I don't think I could work any less than I already am, but I agree with you.
I am also convinced that in order to "do more with less" in the future, we will need to actually solve the basic problems that keep prices high on food, clothing, shelter, and knowledge. I'm not sure how to do that when science is a prisoner of copyright, for example, and education costs as much as a house, for example; I just don't see how to solve the physical problems, even for myself, in any big way when we can't collectively solve even the self-inflicted/social ones like copyright (and superstitions, and violence, and, ...). I think working less would be a sign of success, but I'm not sure how to get there from here. People won't do it voluntarily (nor should they be forced to). The government can always tax the wealthy and redistribute, but I'm leery of promoting that and just giving the government more power. (Now they want my guns too.)
It doesn't help that the U.S. defaulted on it's gold debt in the 70's (brilliantly calling it "going off the gold standard") and now U.S. money is just an interest-bearing loan (as opposed to you, the government, just printing paper...), which means people pay interest on public debt, the rich get richer, keeping the pressure on and prices going up. (Most of the world's currencies are U.S. dollar backed, so it's not limited to the U.S..) It's musical chairs: ie, every now and then someone has to lose big (one chair is removed, in the form of interest payments), and the pie gets divided among fewer and fewer (and their children). No one's going to work less with that gun in their back.
That's why, as unpopular as it can be around here (hey, everyone has to make a living), I think we have to fix this idea that we can charge for knowledge (or patent it, or copyright it), because we're really not (IMHO) going to be able to get to the important stuff if we keep fighting over the "how" (most food plants are sterile for goodness sake). I can't justify giving an inventor, even if it's me, a monopoly on an idea if it just means the whole world needs my permission to solve their own problems.
True. The point is that at a personal level leisure is no long term substitute for work.
On organizing work. Chances are that at some point you'll want to work on things beyond the scope of what you can accomplish on your own. Or want to have a larger impact on the world / other people's lives. The big question is how to organize the work of people at society level. The pay per work model has proven to be very effective and gave us the marvels of the modern world.
On the shadow side, the pay per work model has become heavily geared towards exploitation, as in exploration vs. exploitation. We are at a point where worker conditions in a BigTech warehouse, or as a mechanicized Turk, are meticulously quantified exploitation. At the same time, we find it natural to expend the energy budget of a small city to enable machines do large-scale exploration.
You have pretty much agreed to my point. Its not a matter of running out of work, its a matter of reallocating the work.
However, I do not think we will have to force people to work less. If someone has hit the limit of what they want to consume, why are they still working? If there is really nothing more that money can buy, why would they be trying to earn more money?
Well yes. The ultimate goal can and should be to work less. But then we have to get our culture and our socioeconomic system on board with the idea of reducing work instead of venerating it as we currently do.
In my opinion the very ideas propping up the idea of work and the economy are flawed. They are flawed because work is not designed to meet human needs. Instead the output of work is designed to meet human needs. But people are so busy working they have little time to participate in the output of that work. Work itself is the end, because that is what you spend most of your time doing, it is the product in of itself. We should figure out how to produce work that actually improves well being. Not products or services which do that because they all actually fail to do that in the end if the people producing them are miserable. And they all are.
Like let me give you an example. Say a worker produces a widget. They can produce the widget in an hour or in two hours. They feel better if they produce it in two hours. Modern work practices would force you to have them produce it in one hour to lock in that profit of the additional hour of work. At the end to cost of the item would be affected by how much time is given for work. Say the cost is doubled by doing things this way. At the end the worker earns the same, and say we do that with the whole economy and so everything costs twice that much. But workers are generally happier and more relaxed. To me that would be a better out come than goods that cost 1/2 as much. Not so for the economy.
In fact it would be very good if we could use automation to do just this. Make work more pleasurable. But the way the economy is set up, and the logic that goes with it. This is simply not going to happen.
Why should we care about a disincentive to work more? It's like that trope about welfare recipients all being drug addicts. Or that taxing the rich will make them not want to work.
What motivates people to work is MASTERY, AUTONOMY and PURPOSE. This is very different from the profit motive, and is why people contribute to open source and science.
And anyway, why in the 21st century does everyone need to work? Why should wages be the primary mechanism by which living wages trickle down to the plebes?
McDonalds will soon cut its workforce. So will Uber. Thanks to automation.
If you are jealous that someone somewhere is receiving free stuff, realize how much free stuff you have just by being alive in the 21st century!
If you are upset that you'd be taxed for the free stuff -- then make sure that we develop systems to tax machines. Yes you heard me, start taxing the machines.
If people were more free to choose what to do with their time, they'd probably spend more time with their family and study more and contribute more knowledge to society. Instead of working a dead-end job at McDonalds.
If you want to read more about the economics of this, I wrote an article:
How about people be allowed to choose for themselves what they do? I know plenty of people who would prefer to do repetitive, unfulfilling tasks and get paid for them versus sitting around broke and waiting for utopia to arrive.
i believe the narrative that everyone has to work for a living, and that the way to help everyone obtain the basic necessities of life is to somehow create jobs for them, is an increasingly dangerous fallacy. there is simply less and less need for everyone to be working in order to produce enough to support everyone, and the ideal producer/consumer ratio is only falling with every increase in automation.
if we weren't trying to cling so desperately to this sort of capitalist setup, we'd all be better off. it's just that the incentives for it aren't yet aligned with the immediate interests of whoever has the power to make changes.
as someone working and leading a middle class lifestyle, i'd be even happier, and feel a lot more productive, if i thought my work was helping other people lead the same lifestyle sans working (or even better, by working on whatever they felt like, without having to care about whether someone valued it enough to pay for it).
I think the best incentive is to just make work more interesting. Even sweeping floors can be interesting if you can listen to your favorite podcasts while doing it. The menial stuff can mostly be automated, and it that will only accelerate in the future, leaving the most interesting jobs. When we have an increasing population with less work to do, the main problem we run into is finding new work and making it meaningful. This is a good problem to have.
If one works in a field where there is already an issue of abundance, which is (nowadays) basically any field that produce information, it's better for the society to produce less, but higher quality, more meaningful work. Of course, it is hard to do so because the incentives are against it.
Capitalism has an answer for that: Getting people to put in the extra effort is a matter of incentives. It’s possible to get people to channel incredible efforts towards your goals, and it isn’t done by bitching how “nobody wants to work”. Name the right price and you’ll have no shortage of willing participants.
I haven’t read the book, so I assume this nugget of info is hidden somewhere in the least-read section, considering how little this seemingly obvious solution gets talked about.
Everyone always asks "why don't well all do this". Well, let me tell you. The system doesn't reward productivity like you imagine it, profit / per time work. It rewards profit / hours. Never mind if working more makes you less productive per the first measure, as long the extra time spent offsets the loss in productivity you will be compelled to do it.
Well, almost. If you are willing to be paid less that helps. But how many people are rich enough to be able make that choice? Enough to change the cultural and mores?
We need UBI or laws to break that. There is no distributed / individual way to escape the baton of the market here.
Sure, but you have to realize there's a trade off there. If you reduce the incentive to work in order to enable more social interaction and leisure, that's going to come at the expense of productivity, resulting in a diminished economic "standard of living" across the board. It also puts you at a competitive disadvantage with other societies which don't implement those reduced incentives.
Now maybe that price is indeed worth it, but I think that's a decision that should be left up to each individual, not imposed at the societal level via UBI or something similar. If any particular person decides it's worth taking the economic hit in order to work less, or on something that's less economically valuable, that's completely up to them.
You're asking the wrong question. Here's the real one:
Who's going to pay for everyone else to have free time?
That's really what you're implying here: It's an underlying theme stemming from the assumption that we must have an economy based solely on the output of individuals.
What if all economic output comes from machines doing all the work? Why would people clean toilets or wash dishes if they didn't have to? Wouldn't their time be better spent on their hobbies (e.g. art)?
I think there's a middle ground to be found here. What if everyone gets the necessities and some basic niceties, and the most productive get the rest? You'd be working for luxury and status, as opposed to necessity, but isn't that motivation enough?
How about..a salary based on the ressources you need/want to survive...so that those who work less (indirectly contributing more to society by sharing their job, childcare, volunteering or just being mentally healthy enough to think of the"next big thing" and directly by ecologically diminishing consumption) get paid more ...? Tax the higher earners and subsidise the "work less" ...then suddenly wages and automation go up as businesses have to compete for a diminishing work pool...
I personally have moved out of the 1st world to avoid the work plague, I help my kids grow up and dig a beautiful garden...my conscience cringes at the "work ethic" which I perceive as government propaganda to help milk peoples time and keep them politically silent... the easiest solution to global warming is to work less, we saw it with covid (at least a whispering) but maybe politicians are avoiding doing anything realistic because...power corrupts...
But rather than get into the political/economic/philosophical argument, there might be an individual solution: people don't pay for what takes the most work, they pay for what is in the most demand. These are often not the same thing, and you can leverage that.
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