This is a long article on automation and jobs, but what it boils down to is a reminder that if robot come for our jobs, simply working less and spending time on other things will be an option. This has happened many times in history, and the idea that becoming richer leads to working more is a very recent development. On the other hand, this only works if we share the new wealth.
This article claims that the rise of the entertainment industry explains slowing productivity growth, because not only does entertainment distract us from creative and productive pursuits, but our creative and productive people are pouring their energies into this sector because it is where the profits are. I don’t necessarily buy the former, because it is possible that we could be deciding as a society that we are productive enough and choosing to spend more time on pursuits that do not put ever more monetary wealth in our pockets. I think some people are doing that, perhaps not most. Perhaps in Scandinavia. But the second part does make sense to me, that the smartest and most creative people are not being drawn to the sectors where they could do the most good for society.
Robert Skidelski reminds us that, if a critical mass of people is ever going to enjoy the good life, at least two things have to happen. First, the wealth we are creating has to be shared and not just horded by an elite few. And second, we have to learn to distinguish what we need from what we want, and put some limits on the latter rather than let advertisers and other brainwashers always convince us that we want more and more.
There is little echo in this narrative of the older view that machines offer emancipation from work, opening up a vista of active leisure – a theme going back to the ancient Greeks. Aristotle envisaged a future in which “mechanical slaves” did the work of actual slaves, leaving citizens free for higher pursuits. John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes comforted their readers with the thought that capitalism, by generating the income and wealth needed to abolish poverty, would abolish itself, freeing mankind, as Keynes put it, to live “wisely and agreeably and well.”
Likewise, in his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde claimed that with machinery doing all the “ugly, horrible, uninteresting work,” humans will have “delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvelous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else.” And Bertrand Russell extolled the benefitsof extending leisure from an aristocracy to the whole population…
But the concept of growing abundance, articulated by Keynes and others, has been over-ridden by economists’ commitment to inherent scarcity. People’s wants, they say, are insatiable, so they will never have enough. Supply will always lag behind demand, mandating continuous improvements in efficiency and technology. This will be true even if there is enough to feed, clothe, and house the whole world. Poised between the profusion of their wants and the paucity of their means, humans have no option but to continue to “work for hire” in whatever jobs the market provides. So the day of abundance, when they can choose between work and leisure, will never arrive. They must “race with the machines” forever and ever.
If a bullshit job is defined as one that is unfulfilling but pays well (see my post the other day), where does that leave all the people with unfulfilling jobs that don’t pay well? I recently came across this amusing but not so optimistic letter from Charles Bukowski:
And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.
As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did? …
They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?
So the answer is quit and become a bum? I’m not quite so sure. I’ll have a good look at my fingernails and give it some thought.
In David Graeber’s 2013 essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, a bullshit job is one where the person doing it doesn’t think it is necessary or important. The paradox is that many high-paying corporate jobs seem to fit this mold.
Why did Keynes’ promised utopia—still being eagerly awaited in the ’60s—never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ’20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers…
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones…
This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.
I’m not quite so sure. I think that as we have become wealthier, things our grandparents would have thought of us “wants” are now classified as “needs”. I think air conditioning is one good example. My grandparents would have considered it an unimaginable luxury, but I consider it somewhat of a necessity that improves my life and my family’s life, and I am willing to work a little extra to have it. I can think of a lot more examples that don’t fit this though, starting and ending with all the junk in my house. I would gladly give up most of it in exchange for working a little less. So what is stopping me? That’s actually a hard question to answer. My life style is calibrated to my income and vice versa in an endless cycle that is hard to break, kind of like popping a balloon with your bare hands – how do you get a grip so you can apply pressure? The cable bill might be a start – in fact, I just bought a digital antenna and cancelled my cable. I kept my internet connection though, and somehow Verizon figured out a reason that saves me only a little money (some “discount for bundled services” that no longer applies). So now I could theoretically work maybe 5 minutes less a week, but that would be a weird conversation to have with my employer, and is not going to happen. And of course I am not giving up my internet, because that is a necessity for me and my family, which my grandparents could not even have conceived of existing, but which I am willing to work a little extra to pay for…
A cross-country trip on Amtrak sounds kind of appealing. It would be a big thing to commit to though and find out halfway through that it sucks.
Annuities – I admit they sound like a boring topic. But what is not boring us thinking about you might want to do with your relatively short life of earth, and thinking outside the box about the tools available to you. Annuities are one of those tools.
Fixed SPIAs make retirement planning easier in exactly the same way that traditional pensions do: They’re predictable. If you know that you need $X of income each year in retirement, you can go to an online annuity quote provider, put in $X as the payout, check “yes” for inflation adjustments, and you’ll get an answer: “For $Y, you can purchase an annuity that will pay you $X per year, adjusted for inflation, for the rest of your life — no matter how long you might live.”
Pretty easy, right? You now have a specific figure for the minimum amount of savings necessary to retire safely. With a traditional stock and bond portfolio, retirement planning is more of a guessing game.
Fixed SPIAs are also helpful because they allow you to retire on less money than you would need with a typical stock/bond portfolio.
You could work hard and live frugally while you are young, then turn over your savings to an insurance company at some point and continue to live without working hard. People typically do this at retirement age (i.e. when they are old), but you could do it at a younger age and continue to live frugally without working hard, or you could work part time and pursue a passion part time, or you could spend more time with young children than hard working middle aged parents typically do, or you could take the risk of starting a business knowing that failure wouldn’t ruin you. You could turn over part of your savings, continue to work somewhat hard, and pursue some combination of any of the things on my list above. You could make gradual transitions from one mix of activities to another.
Now, do I really practice what I am preaching here? No. I work like a dog to support a family. I’m a conservative person, and I particularly worry about my ability to meet the costs of health care and education in the future. But I also ask myself each day what choices I am making right now that I might regret when I am looking back some day.
Today is the first time I heard of the late David Fleming, but he appears to have been a sort of new age steady state economy theorist. His seminal work is Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It, which is notable for being written in a sort of encyclopedia format that can be read in any order. Here’s the Amazon description:
Lean Logic is David Fleming’s masterpiece, the product of more than thirty years’ work and a testament to the creative brilliance of one of Britain’s most important intellectuals.
A dictionary unlike any other, it leads readers through Fleming’s stimulating exploration of fields as diverse as culture, history, science, art, logic, ethics, myth, economics, and anthropology, being made up of four hundred and four engaging essay-entries covering topics such as Boredom, Community, Debt, Growth, Harmless Lunatics, Land, Lean Thinking, Nanotechnology, Play, Religion, Spirit, Trust, and Utopia.
The threads running through every entry are Fleming’s deft and original analysis of how our present market-based economy is destroying the very foundations―ecological, economic, and cultural― on which it depends, and his core focus: a compelling, grounded vision for a cohesive society that might weather the consequences. A society that provides a satisfying, culturally-rich context for lives well lived, in an economy not reliant on the impossible promise of eternal economic growth. A society worth living in. Worth fighting for. Worth contributing to.
The beauty of the dictionary format is that it allows Fleming to draw connections without detracting from his in-depth exploration of each topic. Each entry carries intriguing links to other entries, inviting the enchanted reader to break free of the imposed order of a conventional book, starting where she will and following the links in the order of her choosing. In combination with Fleming’s refreshing writing style and good-natured humor, it also creates a book perfectly suited to dipping in and out.
The decades Fleming spent honing his life’s work are evident in the lightness and mastery with which Lean Logic draws on an incredible wealth of cultural and historical learning―from Whitman to Whitefield, Dickens to Daly, Kropotkin to Kafka, Keats to Kuhn, Oakeshott to Ostrom, Jung to Jensen, Machiavelli to Mumford, Mauss to Mandelbrot, Leopold to Lakatos, Polanyi to Putnam, Nietzsche to Næss, Keynes to Kumar, Scruton to Shiva, Thoreau to Toynbee, Rabelais to Rogers, Shakespeare to Schumacher, Locke to Lovelock, Homer to Homer-Dixon―in demonstrating that many of the principles it commends have a track-record of success long pre-dating our current society.
Fleming acknowledges, with honesty, the challenges ahead, but rather than inducing despair, Lean Logic is rare in its ability to inspire optimism in the creativity and intelligence of humans to nurse our ecology back to health; to rediscover the importance of place and play, of reciprocity and resilience, and of community and culture.
Reducing the work week to four days would reduce carbon emissions.
Worktime Reduction as a Solution to Climate Change: Five Scenarios Compared for the UK
Reducing working hours in an economy has been discussed as a policy which may have benefits in achieving particular economic, social and environmental goals. This study proposes five different scenarios to reduce the working hours of full-time employees by 20% with the aim of cutting greenhouse gas emissions: a three-day weekend, a free Wednesday, reduced daily hours, increased holiday entitlement and a scenario in which the time reduction is efficiently managed by companies to minimise their office space. We conceptually analyse the effects of each scenario on time use patterns through both business and worker activities, and how these might affect energy consumption in the economy. To assess which of the scenarios may be most effective in reducing carbon emissions, this analytical framework is applied as a case study for the United Kingdom. The results suggest that three of the five scenarios offer similar benefits, and are preferable to the other two, with a difference between the best and worst scenarios of 13.03 MTCO2e. The study concludes that there is a clear preference for switching to a four-day working week over other possible work-reduction policies.
This blog post, which apparently is somewhat famous, is about interviews with people who are dying and what they regret about their lives. Number two on the list caught my eye:
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.
By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.