For at least five generations, my ancestors have been working hard to “give their kids a better life.” But, at what point will the goal be to give one’s kids the time and resources to be idle? If I was president of the world, I’d make that Humanity’s moonshot project.
Of course, it may not ever be possible. But, hey, there are 100 million people out there smarter than me. Surely, someone can figure it out.
"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematicks and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, musick, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelaine.” John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780.
As I said, it might not apply to this overall discussion but I've always found it quite poignant. Sadly society is more apt to ridicule those who still pursue liberal arts due to it's economic opportunity costs. While technically correct I believe that should come from the viewpoint that this could be considered a sad failure in humanity's progress.
Hard times create strong men,
Strong men create good times,
Good times create weak men,
Weak men create hard times.
Hard times create hard people and that that can have very unfortunate consequences.
And good times did not necessary created men who create hard times, they often created men wanted to keep things good.
But did they? Looking at the world today, I feel that good times create men who take good times for granted, not understanding what made those good times possible in the first place, and who through inaction or cluelessness work to undo those things. See e.g. our generation working hard to undo all the improvements for the workers, ones which our great-^n-grandparents paid in blood for.
If anything else it sounds a bit like caricature. Past generation fought against others of the past generation. Members of past generations have different interests and some have good life others bad. So maybe it is more about which sub-group of whatever generation is winning and able to effectively push for own interests.
But my point is applicable to pretty much the entire western world; the struggle of our great-^n-grandparents is the one against insanely bad working conditions in the XIX and early XX century. The one that gave us modern employment laws, which both my fellow millennials and gen-X'ers are trying hard to revert.
Overdoing those employment laws will strangle the economy, pushing us around the cycle to hard times. It is the "weak men" who push for this, trying to avoid even the modest amount of suffering that is required to be competitive.
Backing off on those laws will delay collapse.
You really don't want to see the collapse. At that point, employment laws count for nothing. You work illegally or you starve.
The Polish history and current laws have a lot to do with legacy of Communism and how it came to be. Early XX century was more about moving toward war and then being in war and Russian threat.
I think a lot of people equate not working with not doing anything and they imagine massive slums full of unemployed people sitting around being miserable.
I've always felt nearly the opposite. Even doing work like estate planning felt kind of silly in the big picture compared to just spending time with my family, reading, writing, exercising, learning new things.
A person can spend just a couple thousand dollars on a car that works. Or somewhere between ten and twenty thousand dollars on a car that's really reliable. But you can also spend as much as many people earn in a lifetime on a car. Clothes are similar. You can buy decent clothes at Target for cheap, or you can buy similar clothing for hundreds of times as much from designer brands. I'm not saying those goods are all the same quality, but the prices of lots of things can be arbitrarily high based on their social importance.
I think work loses a ton of meaning when so much of the product of your work can be devoured by status goods like these. There will always be another status good to buy.
The end goal can't possibly be for everyone to have a yacht... Even if it were, everyone would just want a bigger yacht. If we don't need more stuff forever, eventually we'll be able to make all the stuff we need with almost no work, and all that will be left is to figure out how to lead fulfilling lives that don't revolve around acquiring yachts.
Well, there is the huge problem. Finding meaning is not only a difficult problem on a personal level, but the entire inertia of the existing system is moving precisely to prevent finding that meaning.
This is cause to be skeptical of any technological solution.
Imho, it is easier to approach from a cultural level. To that end, we seem to be moving backwards: we already had huge cultural apparatuses which (mostly) eschewed material things for a meaning based (somewhat, depending on who you ask...) on humanistic connection. We have been doing our best to dismantle it in the past few generations.
Not necessarily. For some of us work is itself the meaning we need from life. For me, it's not work-work, but it's learning new things.
Idleness is extremely correlated with depression in myself. I can't be idle, or I get bad.
There are demonstrably many people who don't need to work (e.g. anyone with over a few millions dollars), who choose to work anyway.
It gives a sense of purpose, a reason to get up in the morning. Human beings are not well adapted to being idle. It's like a muscle - you don't want to overload it, but it needs some load to thrive. Hormesis.
Humans need stress to grow and thrive.
Even animals need work. Zookeepers don't just feed animals, they put food inside metal boxes with holes in the corners, or hidden in nooks, so the animal has to work to get at it. They understand that it's good for the animal.
Originality takes ... work.
Never gonna happen, someone always going to do the job for less or for more time. That's the grace of globalization.
What exactly do you think would happen if we had a four day working week? Labour would be more evenly distributed. Productivity would go up. We'd all live better and more fulfilling lives. What is good for humans, and for societies, is not to amass as much wealth as possible.
I think UBI (or even better, universal basic services) would be a colossal act of social liberation.
If what you really want is for work to be more evenly distributed on a global basis, this is probably going to mean an increase in the amount of work for places like England and France.
> Strange how we, in the UK, have an eight hour day, weekends, public holidays, sick pay, and maternity and paternity leave, then. Or that France has a legally mandated 35-hour working week.
To make it clear, if France started to decline compared to other countries economically where their competitors have a labor force doing better work and spending more time, something would have to change. Wannabe "productivity" would go up don't show in numbers.
Why? That seems like an extraordinarily implausible claim to me. Presumably you don't think human societies at all times and places are 'optimal', so why would the Western world at the present moment be? And in any case, what is understood to be optimal is historically variable, which is, in part, my point: maybe we should realign our culture.
"Capitalism and Communism, in the form of bartering and tribes exist since the first societies."
Again, I profoundly disagree. Capitalism is a historically specific configuration of social, economic and legal arrangements. It requires that the economy be elevated into an independent sphere of production and exchange, free of direct political control (contrary to feudalism). It requires the creation of a large surplus population, driven out of subsistence agriculture (the historical norm for the last six-thousand years), who come to depend for the means of life on renting themselves out to a small elite with a monopoly on the means of production. It requires this to be at a sufficient scale that large profits can be ploughed back into investment in a cumulative process of self-expansion. This has generally required a certain amount of stability, a powerful military base, and sophisticated trade networks, among much else (as in Northern Italy in the middle of the last millennium, or the Dutch imperial network after that, or the British Empire after that). Similar things can be said about communism - though it's more complicated.
"If France started to decline compared to other countries economically where their competitors have a labor force doing better work and spending more time, something would have to change".
Why would they do 'better work'? Generally, if people do less hours of work, their productivity in the hours they do work goes up. Part of the point of reducing working hours is to redistribute those hours more evenly. So it is not simply a reduction; it is also an addition. But I would assume net working hours would decline, and thus net GDP. I don't see why that's a problem.
"Wannabe "productivity" would go up don't show in numbers".
I don't know what this means.
> Again, I profoundly disagree. Capitalism is a historically specific configuration of social, economic and legal arrangements.
You are just talking about scales here. What I mean is that we basically have two different ways of subsisting: by working individually and trading or by working collectively and be part of a social welfare system. There is no proven third option were a huge chunk of a population's society didn't need to work for it to work. Might happen in the future, but I don't think so.
(1) It is an act of stupefying reduction to claim that every human society, across space and time, can be fitted into one of two models. That is just not very insightful or helpful. I am not talking about 'scales', I am talking about qualitative historical transformations.
(2) I am not suggesting that people do no work, I am suggesting they do less work.
By the way, for those that didn't realise, this article is clearly riffing off Bertrand Russell's well-known essay, 'In Praise of Idleness'.