by It's been called The Post-Work Society (Adam Lee blog entry).
However, it’s always been taken for granted that most people had to work to produce the total quantity of goods and services that society demanded. Even when we became more productive, our wants increased to match, so there was a balance. What would happen if that were no longer the case? What will happen if we become so productive that, say, 50% or 25% or 10% of people working is all that’s necessary to satisfy everyone’s material desires?
That may well be possible: High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being at PNAS. Emotional well-being levels off at $75,000 for typical Americans, meaning that satiation may well be possible at a present-day upper-middle-class income. However, reported life satisfaction continues to incerase as one's income increases.
Adam Lee is skeptical about a Universal Basic Income, though he thinks that working less would be a good solution. I tend to agree in principle, though I think that it has limits. A UBI has the problem that the sources of its money may feel that they are makers being exploited to support all those takers around them.
A World Without Work - The Atlantic
Describes Youngstown OH's economic collapse from its steel industry shutting down. "Depression, spousal abuse, and suicide all became much more prevalent; the caseload of the area’s mental-health center tripled within a decade."
What does the “end of work” mean, exactly? It does not mean the imminence of total unemployment, nor is the United States remotely likely to face, say, 30 or 50 percent unemployment within the next decade. Rather, technology could exert a slow but continual downward pressure on the value and availability of work—that is, on wages and on the share of prime-age workers with full-time jobs. Eventually, by degrees, that could create a new normal, where the expectation that work will be a central feature of adult life dissipates for a significant portion of society.
But something more positive may happen.
But Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, sees the next wave of automation returning us to an age of craftsmanship and artistry. In particular, he looks forward to the ramifications of 3‑D printing, whereby machines construct complex objects from digital designs. ...
The Columbus Idea Foundry is the country’s largest such space, a cavernous converted shoe factory stocked with industrial-age machinery. Several hundred members pay a monthly fee to use its arsenal of machines to make gifts and jewelry; weld, finish, and paint; play with plasma cutters and work an angle grinder; or operate a lathe with a machinist.
Living in a “post-work” society - Salon.com
He concludes:
Although it’s pitched in a kindlier, New York Times-friendly tone, Douthat’s argument is reminiscent of Charles Murray’s argument that the working class needs the discipline and control provided by working for the boss, lest they come socially unglued altogether. Good moralistic scold that he is, Douthat sees the decline of work as part of “the broader turn away from community in America—from family breakdown and declining churchgoing to the retreat into the virtual forms of sport and sex and friendship.” It seems more plausible that it is neoliberal economic conditions themselves—a scaled back social safety net, precarious employment, rising debts and uncertain incomes—that have produced whatever increase in anomie and isolation we experience. The answer to that is not more work but more protection from the life’s unpredictable risks, more income, more equality, more democracy—and more time beyond work to take advantage of all of it.
Good idea, though it may take a big struggle to make it happen.
Fully automated luxury communism | Guardian Sustainable Business | The Guardian
At a time when robots crowd factory lines, algorithms steer cars and smart screens litter the checkout aisles, automation is the new spectre. The robots, they say, are coming for our jobs.
Let them, reply the luxury communists.
...
“The demand would be a 10- or 12-hour working week, a guaranteed social wage, universally guaranteed housing, education, healthcare and so on,” he says. “There may be some work that will still need to be done by humans, like quality control, but it would be minimal.” Humanity would get its cybernetic meadow, tended to by machines of loving grace.
I agree on the increasing feasibility of "luxury communism". Those who crave individual ownership may want to consider a similar solution, what I call the "Solaria solution", after the inhabitants of planet Solaria in Isaac Asimov's novel The Naked Sun. In it, everybody has their own army of robots to take care of them.
My main problem with that is that it's likely to be grotesquely duplicative, so there will have to be some way of sharing some of the production facilities. Joint ownership may do it, but it is a departure from the principle of individual ownership in the direction of collectivism.
