Category Archives: economy

THE “MORE WORK” FALLACY

“…And there are those jobs that are not only boring and unpleasant, but would make little difference to our existence if they were not there, except that someone is earning a living from them…”

Again and again we read it in the papers and hear it on the news; politicians, economists and journalists telling us about the vital need for jobs. This preoccupation with the creation of jobs as a solution to the unemployment problem is at the top of the agenda for pretty much all sides of politics and economic thought. We by and large take the more jobs viewpoint as self-evident truth. Which is understandable – in our world you need a job to earn a living so as to survive. If there is not enough work available for everyone then people suffer.

On the other hand, when I see this world where overproduction seems to be one of our problems – where shops overflow with merchandise, where you can have every little want catered for, where resources are being rapidly depleted and where the environmental results of all this production press for urgent attention, then I can’t help but see an enormous contradiction in being told there is a need to create even more work for us to do.

So why do we need this “more work”?

As I see it there are three main reasons why we work.

The first and most basic of these reasons is to produce the things we need for living. We need food, houses, transport, energy, hospitals, plus a whole host of other things, and work is required to make them possible.

Another reason for working is for personal fulfilment. Whether it is simply to be an active member of the wider community or whether someone is drawn to a particular vocation, most people have a need for some form of activity to occupy their lives with.

The third reason for working is we work to earn a living. Working to earn a living is a crucial part of our economic system. It ensures we all do a fair share of the labour required to produce the stuff we need for living. We need money to gain access to the things necessary for survival and mostly we get that money from a paid job. This inturn ensures that everyone contributes to the general wealth – and it goes on. I know it seems like I am just stating the bleeding obvious here, but I’m attempting to point to something of great import that is usually overlooked in discussions about work and unemployment.

In our world it is essential to have a paid job. When economists and politicians talk about the need to create work it is primarily this third reason for working they are referring to.

In the complex world we live in these three types of work are present in countless variations and combinations. They rarely exist separately. Someone may have a job, a farmer for example; their work not only needs to be done, but also gives them fulfillment and earns them a living – thus combining all three types of work in the one job. As we unfortunately know, there are many jobs that people are only doing to earn a wage but get no satisfaction from and would much rather be somewhere else. And there are those jobs that are not only boring and unpleasant, but would make little difference to our existence if they were not there, except that someone is earning a living from them. More and more in our world the focus is on the third reason for working – working to earn a living.

When looking at these three reasons for working it is important to see that the first two are of a different kind than the third. Working to produce the things we need and working for fulfillment arise directly as a consequence of the physical and mental world we live in. Because we are physical beings we need food and shelter etc and must work to produce them. Because we are psychological/spiritual beings we have a need for a fulfilling life and a need to be part of a wider community.

Working to earn a living on the other hand, is of a different nature. It is a system we have developed to help make our lives more predictable, efficient and fair. Like the rules of the road it only exists because people developed it as a way to deal with a particular situation. Essentially it is a means of fairly distributing the fruits of our combined labour – I do some work, make my contribution to the economy, for which I am given a certain amount of rights, in the form of money, to take what I need from the system. This ensures that everyone does their fair share of the work and no-one abuses the system. Yes it is possible to manipulate things (legally and illegally) so more of the wealth comes my way, but by and large, with a lot of tweaking, the system has served us well. Until now that is.

Something in the working to earn a living system has changed to such an extent that no amount of tweaking is able to keep it operating effectively. In fact trying to keep the system operating as it always has, is resulting in many destructive side effects, such as; overproduction, the marginalised unemployed and soul destroying work lives of large sections of the workforce. It is also preventing a potential worldwide economic utopia from occurring in our lifetimes. No doubt there are many other things that prevent us from having a world where everyone has enough for a fulfilling life, but this is one of the least understood and acknowledged reasons.

What has changed and is causing the system to malfunction is our rising productivity.

Here are some productivity statistics from the OECD website. Based on GDP per hour worked, Australia’s productivity went from 56.1 in 1970 to 111.3 in 2013. That equates to a doubling of productivity per working person over a period of 43 years. Most industrialised western countries show similar figures to this. For the former eastern European communist countries the increase is even faster. Poland for example went from 55.5 in 1993 to 126.8 in 2013 – more than double the productivity in 20 years. For some of the industrialised Asian countries the figures are astounding. South Korea went from 13.7 in 1970 to 130.3 in 2013 – a tenfold rise in productivity.

productivity

While these sorts of figures are not perfect measurements, they do illustrate some significant trends. You could say that in Australia for example we are now able to produce what we did in 1970 with half the labour we needed then. More likely, as working hours have changed little in the last forty years, we are producing around twice as much as we did back then. No wonder it is so difficult to find more jobs for us to do – we are already so overloaded with stuff.

We have just had a guest staying for a few days who brought with her; the latest iphone, an ipod and a laptop – all loaded with 100’s of movies, games, videos and various ways of connecting to the internet. Add to that working, socialising and the practicalities of life, and there really isn’t room to fit in more things. If anything we need more space to properly enjoy the things we already have.

From this perspective, when we look at our economic system’s need for more jobs, it is clear we don’t want the more jobs because we need to produce more stuff. We rather need the jobs to give people access (through wages earned) to things that would have been produced whether they were working in their newly created jobs or not. And politicians and economists talk about even more productivity increases happening – so the problem can only get worse.

A possible solution to this problem can be seen if we look at this growth in productivity from a radically different perspective.

At the moment, each time there is growth in productivity we are left with two choices; there are less hours of work required for the same amount of production and so someone looses their job, or alternatively we produce even more things to give the newly sidelined workers a means to an income. What we rarely consider is; are there better ways to distribute the fruits of our production, to the displaced workers when improved technology or better organisation result in the need for less labour? In that way we would not be continually chasing more jobs – but could fully welcome all of the gifts that increased productivity gives us – then workers would not be seen to be loosing jobs but rather being freed from unnecessary work.

To go down this path of thought is to enter some very dangerous territory. It means a radical rethink of two of the central tenets of our economic system – work and money. As already shown, working to earn a living is a way we have developed to ensure everyone partakes in both the creation and the consumption of the fruits of our labour. It is not a direct outcome of our needs as the other two types of work are, but a system we have created in response to particular circumstances. So if the circumstances change – such as they have with our increased productivity – we are not compelled to continue with a system that can’t seem to deal with the change. We could if we wanted for example, have a 1970 lifestyle and only work 20 hours a week. Or say we still wanted half of the new inventions that have come post 1970, then the work week would be an average of 30 hours – or an extra 10 weeks off per year.

Some economists who argue against these sorts of ideas, put forward what they call “the lump of labour fallacy” or “the luddite fallacy”. They argue that while there may be short term job losses due to new technologies, in the longer term new jobs are always created to take the lost job’s place and so there is no great increase in unemployment. The mechanism whereby this happens is as follows. A new technology makes workers more productive – thus they earn higher wages. Those workers use their increased income to buy more things, thus creating work for the ones who were recently displaced by that new technology. The argument goes that you only have to look at employment levels since the beginning of the industrial revolution to see there has been no outbreak of mass unemployment due to new technology.

This lump of labour argument conveniently ignores one of the most astounding developments of the industrial revolution. Between 1870 and 1970 the average working week in industrialised countries reduced from around 65 hours to 39 hours (see graph) This is a reduction of 40% off the average working week.

work-hours-graphNow by far the majority of these reductions were made possible by labour saving machines. But say if instead of reducing working hours, we would have maintained a 65 hour work week, there would not be enough work for everyone and there would now be a technological unemployment rate of 40%. Technological unemployment and shorter working hours have a direct relationship – they are both outcomes of the same thing.

The mistake that those who espouse the lump of labour fallacy make is they see unemployment as something bad that needs to be avoided at all costs. Whereas the bulk of the workers who have an extra 25 hours a week to enjoy the fruits of the new technologies know it as a good thing.

Yet in spite of the evidence and commonsense logic, something compels us to persist with our working to earn a living system. – Money. – The general notion is that if someone loses their job because a machine has been invented that will do it faster and better – we have to ‘find the money’ somewhere for them to have a living – which usually means taking it from somewhere else. So often there ends up being less hospitals, or schools, or help for the needy, in order to pay for the results of our increased productivity. As productivity increases we seem to be running faster and faster just to stay in the same spot. I like the solution to this problem proposed by Alan Watts in his essay ‘Wealth Versus Money’. He says that the wealth generated by work done by machines should go to the general community to solve this problem. That something like this doesn’t happen may be one of the reasons why we see more and more of the wealth in our world being held by fewer and fewer people – usually the owners of the technology.

The majority of this essay has been about the ‘working’ part of working to earn a living. The ‘living’ part – usually meaning money – is of a similar nature. Money, like working to earn a living, is a system we have developed over many years to help us deal with the complexities of producing and distributing the fruits of our labour. It does not possess the degree of reality that the goods and services we produce have. In our world though, money has been given a place of equal if not greater importance than the goods and services it represents. For example, look at the global trade in money which largely has as its aim making profits from non-productive money transactions. The amount of money involved in these non-productive transactions is currently hundreds of times greater than the value of trade in real goods and services. So large are these financial markets that a collapse in any of them has the power to bring down the whole world economy (see the recent GFC). So we put enormous amounts of resources into making sure that a handful of investment banks don’t go bankrupt. The derivatives market has grown so large that there is just not enough money in existence to bail out banks if there was a major collapse.

Another example is world hunger. There is currently more than enough food being produced to feed everyone in the world, but because we put such a high priority on making more money, the priority of feeding the hungry is put in second place – or even further down the list.

There is a growing field called Modern Monetary Theory that points out  that governments can never be short of their own currency as they are the issuers of it. They have the power to issue themselves as much money as is needed to make use of the productive resources of the country. This could help in the transition to a higher productivity, lower working hour world.

To go into this in more detail is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say we have the materials and knowledge to produce enough for us all with far less worry and stress than we do at present and one of the reasons we are not doing this is our belief in the need for more work.

–Unemployment Is A Distribution Problem Not A Production Problem

In current economic thinking unemployment is usually considered to be a production problem. That is when there is not enough production going on to make use of all the available labour you end up with some people left out of the whole economic cycle. The usual response to this is to try to create more work to absorb this excess labour. This is why we are compelled to continuously increase our production so as to keep ahead of the growing pool of unemployed.

But looked at from a broader perspective unemployment is not a problem of production but rather one of distribution.

Even if output goes down a little, as it has over the last year – putting more people out of work, our enormously productive technology still goes on churning out more than enough goods for us all. So we are not looking to find work for the unemployed because we need their labour to ensure we can produce enough. We are trying to find work for them so they can earn an income to gain access to the things that would be produced whether they were working or not. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just give it to them directly rather than go through this complicated process that results in so many negative side effects? (the marginalised unemployed, environmental problems of overproduction, the lack of fulfilment in trying to consume all this stuff, resources not being used where they are really needed – ie in ending hunger and poverty in the world for a start)

When I say – wouldn’t it be simpler to just give it to them directly – I’m not advocating having one section of the community sitting idly by while the rest of us work to support them. What I’m suggesting is that if we are already producing enough, we share the “less work” around equally and all work that much less while still having the same living standard as before. Paradoxically that would be an increase in living standard because the same living standard on less work is an increase in living standard.

-UNEMPLOYMENT IS GOOD #2

In the United States steel industry between 1982 and the year 2002 production rose from 77 million tons a year to 120 million tons. At the same time the number of workers employed in the industry went from 289,000 down to 74,000.

This is not an isolated occurrence. Similar statistics can be found in most industries in all industrialised countries. The reason is not complicated – better machines and greater efficiency means an increasing ability to produce more with less labour.

Surely this is a good thing. The only question is what do we do with it. How do we best realise the great gift our technology is offering us. For example, if the  statistics for steel were more or less representational of productivity increases in all industries, that would mean we could sustain 1982 living standards on a 10 hour work week. I know it’s not as simple as that: there are many post 1982 developments that we would not want to do without and some industries have not had the productivity increases that steel production has (though some have had more). I’m just using this example to indicate the scale of what is happening.

We are not even coming close to taking full advantage of the possibilities that technology opens up. While our great productivity has resulted in large increases in living standards, it has also helped to cause two of our biggest problems. On the one hand we generate unemployment, turning the machine freed workers into the out of work. On the other hand we desperately start producing more and more stuff to create work for the unemployed to do. We have created the twin problem of unemployment and a global and personal smothering in excess stuff, when we could just be having more and more free time.

And please, not free time to drink more beer and watch more television. But free time to give our lives more meaning and transform the world.

-UNEMPLOYMENT AS A POSITIVE ECONOMIC INDICATOR

Over the years whenever I’ve said “unemployment is good,” I’ve found I often need to qualify the statement. I don’t mean the suffering of those put out of work is good, or I don’t mean that lazing around doing nothing or living an unfulfilled life is good. I am talking about unemployment as an economic indicator. Usually unemployment is seen as a sign of something wrong with our economy. What I am saying is that it is a sign of a great opportunity that has the potential to transform our world for the better.

Most of the posts on this blog look at this issue from various perspectives. For me writing about it helps to develop my understanding of the question. I’m beginning to see that there is something here staring us in the face with it’s obviousness yet we remain oblivious. As the saying goes we have eyes but do not see.

– WHY “UNEMPLOYMENT IS GOOD”?

“THE ENORMOUS PRODUCTIVE CAPACITY OF OUR CIVILIZATION MEANS THAT EVEN WHEN LESS PEOPLE ARE INVOLVED IN PRODUCTION (I.E. UNEMPLOYMENT) WE CAN STILL PRODUCE PLENTY.”

Mostly we are told that unemployment is an evil to be avoided at all costs. That our best efforts should be directed to making sure there is enough work available for all. When there is an economic downturn such as the recent global financial crisis, then work dries up, unemployment rises and people suffer. The usual approach to solving this problem is economic stimulus – that is; finding ways to get the economy moving. More demand for things results in more production which means more work and a lowering of unemployment. I seriously question this way of looking at the problem. As the title of this blog suggests, I want to turn the whole idea on its head.

Just say there is an economic downturn, production goes down, there is a shortage of work and people lose jobs. At this point I would ask; is there still enough being produced to support us all? Is food still being produced, are schools and hospitals still operating, are electricity and other utilities still available? The answer to this question in a country like Australia at least, is an obvious yes. The enormous productive capacity of our civilization means that even when less people are involved in production (i.e. unemployment) we can still produce plenty. In fact it’s not hard to argue that much of our production is for the creation of things that are unnecessary or even destructive. We could significantly reduce the amount of stuff we produce and still have enough, except for one small problem – unemployment. We are caught in a double bind. Reducing production increases unemployment, even if the reduced production is desirable.

But turn the whole thing on its head and an incredible opportunity becomes apparent.
Unemployment in a society that is already producing enough is simply a potential for lower working hours. That’s why it is good. It points to the fact we have solved the age old economic problem of survival. As machines do more and more of our work there is obviously less and less work for us to do. We are being freed from work not put out of work.

Each time there is a technological advance it frees up some labour, (or as we mostly say, it puts people out of work). Generally that excess labour has been used to do things that we didn’t have time to do before – to improve our standard of living. This process has been occurring more or less continually since the Industrial Revolution began. It is a process of being able to do more and more with less and less human labour. Gradually over time it has gotten us to the point where material survival is easily taken care of.
Obviously in the early days of our technological development there were plenty of things that needed to be done and so we thrived on the extra labour and productivity that machines gave us. But now after much progress most of the essential things have been taken care of and it is increasingly difficult to find meaningful things for our excess workers to do. At this stage the option of reducing our work hours, rather than producing more comes into its own. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that reducing working hours is just another way of raising living standards. To my mind this is one of the great economic frontiers.

Some people writing on this subject speak about the four day working week, others about the four hour day. My point is that as long as we are driven to create work for employment’s sake rather than work for meeting our needs for living, then none of it will happen.

-CHANGE OF HEART

I’m interested in paradigm shift. That is in seeing with new eyes, or simply being aware of how much our world is shaped by the cultural stories and beliefs we share. Often these world views are so ingrained we are unaware that we hold them. Some paradigms work well, others not so well. Some are just downright destructive.

Many of the paradigms that are contained in our world economic outlook are seriously questionable. Here are a few of them;

There is not enough to go around (scarcity) so we must compete for what there is. Most economic texbooks state this as the basic premise of economics. The industrial and technological revolutions have made this scarcity a thing of the past, yet we still persist in acting as if there is not enough.

Increasing production is good, decreasing production is bad. A corollary of this is that recession is bad. At the present time we constantly hear that world consumption and production have gone down, therefore we are in recession (which is bad) and we need to get out of it as fast as possible. Looking at this paradigm through new eyes, it is obvious that we are producing enough to satisfy our needs. If there is a possibility to cut  back on production and still meet our needs this is cause for celebration not hand wringing.

 The phrase ‘the bottom line’ is an accounting derived expression meaning the basic underlying truth or determining factor. In our world there is a paradigm that the bottom line (availability of money) is the bottom line, rather than being things like truth and goodness, or even from an economic perspective, that we have a technologically created abundance which enables everybody to be materially well looked after.

 There is the paradigm of consumerism that advertising so persavisely promotes. You won’t be happy unless you have more things. Brian Swimme goes into this in more detail in a very good essay titled ‘How do our kids get so caught up in consumerism’.

 One of the most powerful and least recognized economic paradigms is; money is a reality, rather than it is an abstract concept we have invented, as a tool to help us distribute the fruits of our labour. It is not a hard and fast reality, so if it has shortcomings it can be reinvented or even dispensed with to suit our needs. What often happens is that we have to detrimentally adjust our lives and the well-being of our world to fit in with the structure of money. I am reminded of the saying; ‘Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money’. Alan Watts’ essay Wealth Versus Money looks at this subject in a refreshing way.

 And of course what the title of this blog refers to. Unemployment is bad, versus unemployment is good. “Unemployment is good” does not mean that the suffering of individuals put out of work is good, but rather that if we can reduce the total amount of work needed to supply our living needs, then surely that is a good thing. This could release enormous amounts of time to do things that could contribute to a flowering of our civilisation – things such as the ending of poverty and hunger in the world.

-AM I AN UNREALISTIC IDEALIST?

When I read all the gloomy articles about our current economic situation, an analogy comes to mind of a well-to-do man who insists on sleeping in the garden shed because he believes he can’t afford to live in his comfortable house. I mean it isn’t as if we’ve suddenly lost our ability to grow food and build houses.

Sometimes the bleeding obvious is the hardest thing to see.

What I’m talking about is uncommonly obvious, common sense and very big. The fact that our technological genius gives us the ability to look after humanity’s material needs with relative ease makes much of our economic thinking obsolete. Something is definitely out of kilter. Either we have lost sight of what of all this buying, selling and producing is for, or our methodology of going about it is seriously flawed.

I believe one of the most important things to be done in solving this problem is to see the simplicity of it’s solution. By simplicity I don’t mean that some complex actions wouldn’t need to be taken to unravel our current way of operating and set-up something new. What I mean is that by putting aside outdated economic paradigms and looking through the eyes of our civilisation and its amazing technological abilities, it is quite simple to see we are potentially at the very threshold of an economic utopia. Once that is seen on a large enough scale the energy to develop appropriate solutions will naturally be there. In fact I believe this is so big, that once seen it would unleash enormous amounts of creative energy and will to cooperate with each other on a scale never seen before.
Am I an unrealistic idealist? Maybe… but why not go for the best possible of all worlds, especially if it is so available.

Some will dispute all this, saying, most people aspire to a life with high levels of consumption that must be struggled for in the marketplace. I would counter that with several points. First, we have a technology that would allow us to have a comfortable survival on much less work than we currently do – perhaps on a two or three day working week. If people were given the choice between vastly more leisure time or more consumption, I think most would go for more leisure.

Second, we need to closely look at what really makes us happy. While there is a widespread belief in our world that more things equals more happiness, most of those who have gone deeply into this have found that is not the case. A simpler life with time to appreciate the world around us is where lasting happiness can be found, while more things offer superficial satisfaction followed by an addict’s desire for more.

And most important is that it is unacceptable to be living in a world where so many live in poverty, struggling even to find food for the day, when we have the ability to end the worst of it with relative ease

-THE POWER OF WORKING TOGETHER

Have you ever contemplated the act of walking? Walking is such a natural part of being human that most of the time we barely notice we’re doing it. You don’t have to tell yourself to  lift one leg and then to move it forward and place it back on the ground; and you don’t have to concentrate on continually maintaining your balance. All you do is think; “I want to be over there,” and your legs do the rest, operating on automatic pilot so to speak.

As well as walking there are thousands of other essential living skills that we possess. A person needs to know how to eat, how to breath and how to speak. To  a lesser degree we must also be able to count, read, build houses, drive cars and operate automatic bank tellers. All these skills and myriads of others are the basis of our civilisation. If we hadn’t learnt them we would probably still be living in trees eating bananas.

Of all of these life skills one of the most fundamental is the ability to cooperate with others. Barely a day passes that a person won’t have to use their expertise in this area. Suppose you have to move a fallen tree trunk. But it proves to be too heavy to carry on your own. So you find someone to help. You lift one end while they lift the other. That’s cooperation. It makes an otherwise impossible job achievable,

Some jobs can be done quite easily by one person on their own, wile others need the effort of two or even more people. There are some very large jobs that can only be done when thousands of people cooperate together,

Take road building for example. To build a road you need designers and planners to assess where it will go and how much traffic it will have to carry. You need surveyors to transfer the plans onto the actual land. You need organisers, excavators, labourers and even humble flagmen. You need suppliers of gravel as well as manufacturers of road-making equipment. And that’s just the start – because while all those people are occupied with building roads, they don’t have the time to look after their other needs. So to get a road built you also need people who will produce food, build houses and supply transport for the workers who are directly involved in road building. This is cooperation on the large scale. Each person concentrates on one part of the job, while that part is coordinated with all of the others.

You wouldn’t think that the flagman you see directing traffic on some roadworks and a farmer growing grain hundreds of kilometers away were cooperating with each other. But they are. The farmer needs that road to get his produce to market and the flagman needs to eat. But it goes far beyond the farmer and the flagman. When you come down to it just about every person in the world is cooperating in some way other with everyone else. Sometimes the links are obvious and direct as when two people carry a load together. Sometimes they are more hidden such as those between the farmer and the flagman, or even between the farmer and the person who cleans the factory where the farmers toothbrush was made.

We are all connected. Our world is enveloped by a vast network of cooperation. If someone so much as uses a ballpoint pen or helps out a neighbour then they are instantly part of  that network.

It’s like a human body – a maze of interconnected parts. Each separate part of our bodies has a function that only it can perform, yet at the same time that part depends on all the others for its existence. A lung can’t survive without the rest of the body. Neither would there be any point to it surviving. Its whole reason for existing is to act in concert with all of the other organs. Similarly a tailor or a teacher or a flagman could not exist without the support of the rest of society. If nothing else they would soon starve.

One thing that fascinates me is the relationship between the concept of cooperation and that of specialisation. Because when you look at them they are really just two different words describing the same thing.

Consider sunglasses for example. In order to make a pair of sunglasses the effort of many specialists is required. From the rigger who drills for the oil that the plastic will eventually made from, to the chemist who concocts its molecular formulas, not to mention the operator of the glasses making machinery, the manufacturer of that machinery and the supervising staff of the sunglasses company. One could continue on listing the people involved, but the point is that this list is of exactly the same kind as the list of people taking part on road building. Both describe a group of people who have divided a job up between them so as to make that job easier to do. Whether one says that a flagman and road engineer are specialising in different parts of a job, or that they are cooperating with each other to get that job done, are really just two different ways of saying the same thing..

Our modern industrial world is founded on specialisation (and thus on cooperation). As Henry Ford discovered when he invented the production line, specialisation is an extremely efficient way to get things done. Imagine if you had to make your own sunglasses. It could take months or even years – if you could do it at all. Yet when a number of people get together pooling their skills to make those glasses, each individual pair can be made in a matter of minutes. Specialisation enables us to have things like sunglasses without needing to over-exert ourselves.

Sunglasses of course are just a token example. Of much greater significance are all those other wonders of modern civilisation that specialisation has given us; things such as cars, telephones, ballpoint pens, roads and heart transplants. By dividing a job into small parts, great achievements are made. It’s the power of small actions, multitudes of small actions all working together.

I remember a story that was told to me as a child to illustrate the concept of eternity. The story goes that there is a large mountain made of rock. Once every thousand years a small bird flies to the top of this mountain to sharpen its beak on the rock. Each time this happens a few grains of sand are worn off the peak. The story goes that when the action of the bird’s beak wears the mountain down to nothing then one day in eternity can be said to have passed. As well as helping to convey the idea of eternity this story also illustrates the power of small actions. A bird’s beak rubbing on a rock is on its own fairly insignificant, but when combined with many other similar actions it literally has the power to move mountains.

Of course there is the problem of time. As people living in the twenty-first with relatively short lifespans and continuous day to day needs, we don’t have time to wait around for eternity to move our mountains. Specialisation/cooperation allows us to overcome this problem and reap the benefits of that power more or less immediately. With our large populations, our tremendous organisational abilities and our bounteous technology we are able to simultaneously direct many people’s effort onto the one job. So instead of all those small actions being stretched out over eternity, they can be compressed into virtually one moment. When we work together like this it puts an immense power at our disposal. It is the power to make a pair of sunglasses in minutes rather than months. It is the power to put a person on the moon, the power to end world poverty. It is also the power to rape the earth and blow up whole cities.

There is no doubt that specialisation – and therefore cooperation – is at the heart of western economic success. But there is a contradiction here. If you ask an economist to tell you about some of the basic principles of economics, most of them will very quickly get around to the subject of competition. Competition they will tell you, makes the economic world go round – it is one of the great driving forces behind our economic prosperity. But how can that be? Aren’t competition and cooperation opposites of each other? Cooperation is when people are working together, while competition is when they are working against each other. How is it that the two can coexist as central operating principles in the same world? Isn’t it a case of united we stand, divided we fall?

In modern economics competition is seen as an evolutionary force – like Darwin’s theory of evolution – a case of the survival of the fittest.

Say you and I were both manufacturers of sunglasses. We would be in competition with each other. And say that one day you came up with a new method of producing glasses which enabled you to make  a better quality, cheaper pair than me. Soon everybody would start buying their glasses from you; and unless I improved mine, I would quickly go out of business. So the end result of competition is that everybody gets better sunglasses (or better whatever the product happens to be) – and the lot of humankind improves. Of course the weaker party (me in this case) goes through a lot of trauma; but this just drives them to do even better next time. Sportspeople use competition like this as a motivational force. The desire to win spurs them on to better performances. And if they don’t win then that only makes them try that much harder the next time

The problem as I see it is that economics is not sport. It deals with providing the necessities of life and thus, while there is no reason why it shouldn’t be fun, it is not a game. There may be some justification for competition when there is not enough to go around. If say there is a shortage of food and therefore someone is going to go hungry, then I will do what I can to make sure that someone is not me. But if there is an abundance of food, or even a potential abundance of food, then it is absurd to be competing for it. It would be wasting energy and resources that could be used somewhere else. That absurdity is reflected in the fact that these days most of the competition in food production is in who is going to produce the food rather than who is going to eat it.

Specialisation/ cooperation has helped to bring us into an age of abundance in which the idea of competition in anything but game-playing is totally obsolete.

But there are many people who enjoy competition. The adrenalin thrill of the battle and the even greater thrill of winning is almost addictive. But cooperation can be just as enjoyable if not more so. Cooperation is aligned with the deepest most powerful part of ourselves. It is thus potentially one of the most fulfilling pastimes possible.

So in many ways, to create an economic utopia we need to rediscover the joy of cooperation. It’s not so much a need to start cooperating, because as we have seen, through specialisation we are already doing that. All we need to do is to start finding fulfilment in what we are already doing.

Maybe it’s the very simplicity of the solution that makes it so difficult to achieve.