Tag Archives: shorter work week

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.

WHY “UNEMPLOYMENT IS GOOD” revisited

Here is an edited and expanded version of the post Why Unemployment is Good?

“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”

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 in the recent global financial crisis, work dries up, unemployment rises and people suffer. The usual approach to solving this scarcity of work problem is economic stimulus – that is finding ways to get the economy moving. The idea being, more demand for things results in more production which means more work and a corresponding 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.

When I say “unemployment is good,” I’ve often found a need to qualify the statement. I don’t mean the suffering of those put out of work is good; neither do I mean that lazing around doing nothing or living an unfulfilled life is good. What I am talking about is unemployment as an economic indicator. Usually unemployment is seen as a sign of something wrong in the economy. What I am saying is that in a world of plenty like ours, it is actually a sign of an opportunity so great that it could radically transform the world.

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 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). In the past that excess labour has been used to do things 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. But 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.

…we seem to have lost sight of the fact that reducing working hours is just another way of raising living standards

By simply absorbing the underlying unemployed of 5-10% into the workforce, we could not only reduce our working hours by about the same 5-10%, but end the problem of unemployment once and for all. By giving up the almost obsessive need to create work for employment’s sake, we could stop wasteful and unnecessary production and reduce working hours even more. Some people have estimated that it would be possible to work less than half the hours we do now and still have a similar lifestyle. Really though; the associated lowering of stress, the freeing up of our creative spirits, the ability to direct our attention to things in the world that desperately need doing would not make it a similar lifestyle at all – it would as Robert Anton Wilson says; “make the Renaissance look like a high school science fair or a Greenwich Village art show“.

Many 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.

– Unemployment is not a disease; so it has no cure

I love this extract from Robert Anton Wilson’s essay The Rich Economy

I don’t think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society.

The inevitable direction of any technology, and of any rational species such as Homo sap., is toward what Buckminster Fuller calls ephemeralization, or doing-more-with-less. For instance, a modern computer does more (handles more bits of information) with less hardware than the proto-computers of the late ’40’s and ’50’s. One worker with a modern teletype machine does more in an hour than a thousand medieval monks painstakingly copying scrolls for a century. …

Unemployment is not a disease; so it has no “cure.” …

Unemployment is directly caused by this technological capacity to do more-with-less. Thousands of monks were technologically unemployed by Gutenberg. Thousands of blacksmiths were technologically unemployed by Ford’s Model T. Each device that does-more-with-less makes human labor that much less necessary.

Aristotle said that slavery could only be abolished when machines were built that could operate themselves. Working for wages, the modern equivalent of slavery — very accurately called “wage slavery” by social critics — is in the process of being abolished by just such self-programming machines. In fact, Norbert Wiener, one of the creators of cybernetics, foresaw this as early as 1947 and warned that we would have massive unemployment once the computer revolution really got moving.

It is arguable, and I for one would argue, that the only reason Wiener’s prediction has not totally been realized yet — although we do have ever-increasing unemployment — is that big unions, the corporations, and government have all tacitly agreed to slow down the pace of cybernation, to drag their feet and run the economy with the brakes on. This is because they all, still, regard unemployment as a “disease” and cannot imagine a “cure” for the nearly total unemployment that full cybernation will create.

Suppose, for a moment, we challenge this Calvinistic mind-set. Let us regard wage-work — as most people do, in fact, regard it — as a curse, a drag, a nuisance, a barrier that stands between us and what we really want to do. In that case, your job is the disease, and unemployment is the cure.

“But without working for wages we’ll all starve to death!?! Won’t we?”

Not at all. Many farseeing social thinkers have suggested intelligent and plausible plans for adapting to a society of rising unemployment. Here are some examples.

1. The National Dividend. This was invented by engineer C. H. Douglas and has been revived with some modifications by poet Ezra Pound and designer Buckminster Fuller. The basic idea (although Douglas, Pound, and Fuller differ on the details) is that every citizen should be declared a shareholder in the nation, and should receive dividends on the Gross National Product for the year. …

2. The Guaranteed Annual Income. This has been urged by economist Robert Theobald and others. The government would simply establish an income level above the poverty line and guarantee that no citizen would receive less; if your wages fall below that level, or you have no wages, the government makes up the difference. …

3. The Negative Income Tax. This was first devised by Nobel economist Milton Friedman and is a less radical variation on the above ideas. The Negative Income Tax would establish a minimum income for every citizen; anyone whose income fell below that level would receive the amount necessary to bring them up to that standard. …

What I am proposing, in brief, is that the Work Ethic (find a Master to employ you for wages, or live in squalid poverty) is obsolete. Delivered from the role of things and robots, people will learn to become fully developed persons, in the sense of the Human Potential movement. They will not seek work out of economic necessity, but out of psychological necessity—as an outlet for their creative potential.

As Bucky Fuller says, the first thought of people, once they are delivered from wage slavery, will be, “What was it that I was so interested in as a youth, before I was told I had to earn a living?”

The answer to that question, coming from millions and then billions of persons liberated from mechanical toil, will make the Renaissance look like a high school science fair or a Greenwich Village art show.

-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.

-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

-WOULD KEYNES GRANDCHILDREN PLEASE STAND UP!

“I wish I would have drunk more champagne”
last words of JM Keynes

Nelson Bolles, former priest and author of what colour is your parachute, once said that while he has been with many people at the moment of their death he has yet to hear one person say, “I wish I would have done more work.” Keynes’ parting words reflect a similar sentiment – in the final analysis  quality of life is far more important than facts figures and how much money one has accumulated – though even on his deathbed Keynes manages to say it with his usual dry wit.

If one reads his essay Economic possibilities for our Grandchildren, it is very clear that this was not just some last minute death-bed revelation on Keynes’ part, but that he was well aware of this philosophy in the prime of his life.

Many’s the time during research and readings in the field of alternative economics that I have come across references to this essay. “Remarkable”, I’ve always thought, “here is one of the best known and influential mainsteam economists of all time putting ideas that we in the field of  “new economics” take for granted – things that would make Your average mainstream economist (if there is such a thing) blanche with horror.

Take this often quoted extract for example;

The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

The essay, as its title suggests looks at where economics will be 100 years into the future. As it was written in 1930 we are looking somewhere around the year 2030.

For a person as deeply involved in their vocation as Keynes was in economics, looking that far into the future can be a liberating experience. It allows them to dispense with the day to day cares of their discipline and take a broader viewpoint and, like Keynes has in this essay come to some remarkable conclusions.
The basic gist of the work is that due to the massive accumulation of capital and the rapid advancement of technology, somewhere in the not too distant future the economic problem will be finally solved.

…the economic problem is not-if we look into the future-the permanent problem of the human race.

Why, you may ask, is this so startling? It is startling because-if, instead of looking into the future, we look into the past-we find that the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race-not only of the human race, but of the whole of the biological kingdom from the beginnings of life in its most primitive forms.

Thus we have been expressly evolved by nature-with all our impulses and deepest instincts-for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.

With the economic problem out of the way, Keynes says that humanity will come face to face with its major challenge.

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

Keynes discusses this post economic problem in some detail. Most people he says, cherish the idea of dispensing with work and taking up lives of leisure. But Keynes believes that if it this actually did happen, they would find the reality is not as they expected. People must have something to occupy themselves with – to direct their energies towards. At the moment, he says, work fulfils this function. But when the economic problem is no more … it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.

One way of solving this problem is to share around the ever reducing amount of work. Keynes suggests  a 15 hour working week – three hours work a day being more than enough to satisfy …the old Adam in most of us!

Keynes feels that the process towards this economic utopia would be a gradual one. That … there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed but he warns that until this time arrives we must put up with our economic system and its corrupt practices of avarice, usury and the love of money, for only they, he says can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

This essay was written in 1930 it is now almost eighty years later – approaching the end of his 100 year time frame – and as far as grandchildren go, if Keynes has any they would have been born by now. So how does his vision stack up. Are we well on the path to economic abundance for all, or are there circumstances that he could not have foretold, and do we put his essay into the same category as some of those ‘visionary’ Victorian inventions such as the mechanical hat tipper.

I believe he had a realistic vision as since this time there has been an accelerating development of technology and labour saving machines. But I think that he underestimated how strongly the economic system that he helped construct would bind us to outmoded concepts of economic scarcity thus preventing us from living this vision.

What is perhaps most valuable in this essay is that Keynes makes the distinction between two different types of work. There is work that is done to allow for our physical survival and there is work that is done simply for the sake of having a fulfilling life. He makes the very important point that economics really only need concern itself with the first type ( work for survival). So as technology advances, work for survival becomes less and less important and thus economics becomes less and less important. Then fulfilment in life rather than accumulation of money takes its rightful place as the bottom line.

-unemployment is good

This essay that this blog is named after was written in the early 1990’s and published in a small journal I used to edit called Economics for the Global Good (EGG)


When God kicked Adam out of the garden of Eden, He put the curse of work on him. Up until that time whenever Adam needed any food, shelter or entertainment it was always there for the taking. But from then on he was told he would have to work for his keep. According to the good book, God’s words to Adam were as follows;
…cursed is the ground because of you, in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
For good measure he threw in a few by the sweat of your brows, and that was it for poor old Adam.
Whether you believe the story of Adam and Eve is factual, allegorical or just not true is not important here. The fact is that the ‘curse of Adam’ has become part of our cultural heritage. Throughout history this curse has been taken up by the various churches and governments. You’ve got to work they would tell us, You probably won’t enjoy it, but that’s the way things are. And to a certain extent they were right. In pre-industrial times survival was a labour intensive activity.

In the late 20th century this philosophy of work is still with us. Sometimes  known as the Protestant work ethic it is alive and well, living inside the brains of most westerners. If you’re from the west and you’re not working hard it’s almost something to feel embarrassed or guilty about.
But does this curse of Adam have any relevance to our time at all? Or has its day passed. In the past people had to labour and toil simply so they could eat. But that was before the machine age. These days (in the west at least) most of that labouring and toiling has been taken over by machines. Which leaves us free to devote ourselves to whatever takes our fancy. We could be virtually back at the Garden of Eden where the only duty was to enjoy the fruits of the earth. But something has gone wrong For some reason we are not taking full advantage of the extraordinary benefits the age of technology is offering us.

The signs of this reluctance to utilise our technological mastery can be seen all around us. Of these one of the most disturbing is third world poverty and hunger. To be sure hunger and poverty have always been with us. But the difference now is that we have the medical and agricultural know how to completely eradicate them. Meanwhile around 25,000 people die every day as a direct result of not having enough food.

The evidence suggests that inspite of the proliference of labour saving machines many people are finding survival more and more difficult.

To better understand the phenomenon of this outdated curse of Adam it helps to look back and compare our present situation with that of our recent ancestors.
One hundred and fifty years ago in most western countries the poorest half of society had a lifestyle very similar to that of the poorest half of many third world countries today. Getting food was the main occupation of the day. The men would work about 60 hours a week under very tough conditions. Between them the women and children put in at least the same again. All this work got them a simple dwelling and just enough food to get by on. When there was an extra expense such as buying a new pair of shoes or seeing a doctor, someone had to eat less. This someone was usually the mother or the children as their health was considered less important than that of the father who needed the energy for his work. Because there were no mod-cons such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners women worked extremely hard looking after the home and the children. From the age of about ten to the time of her death most of a women’s waking  hours were taken up by this work. In those days many children died in their first few years of life. If you had an average sized family of eight children you could reasonably expect that two of them would die while still young. For those who survived childhood the average life expectancy was around fifty years.

Now all this could easily be a description of life in a poor African country today. But no, that was us in the newly industrialised west. Since then there has been a dramatic change in lifestyles.

These days the pursuit of food occupies a very small part of our time. We certainly never have to worry about going hungry. We now have televisions, telephones, cars, computers, well equipped kitchens and bathrooms and a vastly improved health care that has lifted our life expectancy to eighty years. And we only work about thirty- seven hours a week to get all this.

But that is only part of the picture, because a large portion of those thirty-seven hours we work is taken up in the production of the enormous amounts of excess and waste that we have become so notorious for. Much of our time is now devoted to the creation of an endless flow of excess packaging, excess weaponry and even excess food and buildings. Further time is spent trying to deal with the resultant mess. Just imagine if we stopped producing all that surplus stuff in the first place. We would then be working shorter hours and would be able to compare our situation with that of our struggling forefathers even more favourably.

As far back as the 1930’s Bertrand Russell, in his essay In Praise of Idleness, was of the opinion that it would be possible to get by quite comfortably on a four hour working day. And our productive ability has increased by many times since then. JM Keynes the economist and Einstein – among others – have also looked at this problem and come up with similar conclusions. The question they asked was how much work would we need to do if we got organised, eliminated waste and made full use of our technology. Depending on what sort of assumptions were made, most studies have concluded that we could quite easily maintain a high living standard and only need to work a few days a week.

Now could that be true? Are we really doing twice the amount of work than is needed to support our living standards? And if is this is so why do we constantly hear that one of the biggest problems in our society today is that there is not enough work?

We do have a problem with work. You can’t help hearing about it. Every day on the television, on the radio and in the newspapers, politicians and economists tell us. There’s mass unemployment! People are suffering! Times are tough! There is a desperate search going on for solutions to this great problem of our time.

But why should there be any problem at all? We are blessed with an incredible technology which makes it possible to produce enough for everyone with ease. It isn’t hard to put up an argument that we are producing far too much. Yet people are suffering and times are tough.

It has already been shown that the fact we can afford to spend so much of our time producing waste and excess is really a hidden sign of how far we have advanced. Well it’s exactly the same thing with unemployment.

Unemployment is a sign of our unrealised potential. It simply means we are not making full use of the available work force. Wouldn’t we all be better off if the whole labour-force was being used?

To illustrate this; say there is a big pile of rock that has to be carried to the top of a hill. There are a hundred people available to do this work. Unemployment is like saying we will only use ninety-five of these people for the job. The other five are not allowed to help. They must remain idle. Not only that but they are penalised for their enforced idleness. Under a system like this everyone suffers. Wouldn’t the job be much easier to do if there were five extra people to help? With five additional pairs of hands, the rock would be at the top of the hill much faster’ no-one would be redundant and everyone’s work load would be less.

But this is exactly what happens in our society. Ninety-five percent of the work force do all of the work while the other five percent (through no choice of their own) don’t contribute at all. Isn’t it logical that if the unused five percent (the unemployed) were to help with the work it would all get done that much faster. Then there would be no unemployment, everybody could work less and we’d still be producing just as much as we do now, which is more than enough for everyone.

But what about money? We are told that if there is not enough of it around then we can’t afford to make use of our excess labour. We are told that if we were to share the workload more equally then everybody would earn less and thus have a lower living standard. Money, – those bits of paper and metal with numbers written on them – has become of such importance that the matter of whether or not we are producing enough is now a secondary issue. Surely one of the main reasons we work is to get whatever needs to be done, completed as quickly and enjoyably as possible. And surely one of the main reasons we have money is to make it easier to distribute the fruits of that labour amongst one another. The real question should be not whether there is enough money but whether there is enough stuff being produced. And it’s obvious there’s enough stuff. Our current technological and organisational abilities mean we can now produce an abundance with ease.

Economists can write volumes giving all sorts of complicated reasons for unemployment, but isn’t the reality that it is an illogical and absurd concept? We have been persuaded to believe in it as a necessary evil. Woe is us, we tell each other, there’s not enough work.

But how on earth can there be such a thing as not enough work? There is only as much work as needs to be done. Either we are producing enough to satisfy all our requirements, in which case we don’t need to do any more work, or, we aren’t producing enough, in which case we do need to do more. The common wisdom is that if we increase the amount of work that has to be done, then we’re better off. To my way of thinking, as long as all the work that needs to be done, is getting done, then the less work the better.

Unemployment in a society that is already producing enough is simply a potential for lower working hours. To illustrate this I’d like to go back to the example of the 95 people carting rocks up a hill. Just say in order to complete the job each one of those 95 people has to carry rocks for 37 hours. In that case the total number of hours worked would be 3515. (95 x 37 = 3515) but if they subsequently got their 5 idle companions to help then that 3515 hours of work could be divided between 100 workers instead of 95. (3515 – 100 = 35.15) each worker would then only have to lug rocks for 35.1 hours – a saving of about 2 hours.

These figures show that in Australia for example where the unemployment rate is around 5%, there is scope for a reduction of about 2 hours from the average working week. But for some reason we always seem to be looking for ways to increase the amount of work that is done. We are told about the need for increased exports, increased retail sales and economic activity – and about impending disaster if there is ever any decrease. My argument is the exact opposite to that. It’s about reducing economic activity – about less work. Once a certain level of comfort and ease has been achieved in our lives then there should be no need to produce any more. From that point on we ought to be freed from having to work.

This statement, freed from having to work, doesn’t mean that people have to stop working or that they can’t produce more stuff if that’s what they want to do. It’s not a pretext for lazing around and vegetating. It rather means that survival no longer be the main purpose for working. Once all the work that needs to be done has been completed, people ought to be able to spend their time doing whatever pleases and fulfils them; whether it be rock climbing, stamp collecting or brain surgery. And the less work we could get by on, the more possibility there would be for people to devote themselves to the things they enjoy. This is not to say that that work which needs to be done can’t also be fulfilling. Many of us could think of nothing better than to be a farmer, a doctor or a teacher. Even a job like collecting the garbage could be rewarding if you didn’t have to do it all the time.

But that’s not all if we were to reduce the amount of stuff that we produce and at the same time equally share round the work load, we could go a long way to solving the environmental crisis. Because our current level of production is not sustainable – our environment is being destroyed in the pursuit of production at any cost. Making major  cuts to production would help solve that urgent problem.

Our present situation reminds me of the golden age of Greece – a civilisation that gave us so many great ideas in philosophy, politics, sport, science and art. But there was a downside to the civilisation;- slavery. The reason that all those philosophers and artists had time to excel as they did was because of the vast army of slaves that looked after them. At that time about 50% of the population were slaves. People have struggled with the question – was the enslavement of fellow human beings worth the great intellectual advances that were attained? In many ways we live in a parallel situation today, only we have solved the slavery problem – because the machines are our slaves. So one could say that we are now at the very threshold of a new golden age, we just haven’t realised that we’re there yet.

As things stand all this talk about increased leisure is just a dream. As long as our present attitude to work persists, we will continue along this path of over-production till our planet bursts at the seams – all the time worrying that we need to produce even more. In order to realise the economic utopia that has all but arrived, we need to understand that less work is desirable – that unemployment is good.