this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Antiwork
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We're trying to reduce the numbers of hours a person has to work.
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We talk about the end of paid work being mandatory for survival.
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It made sense when working meant providing for families, and even in the industrial revolution where it meant making mass goods for large amounts of people to enjoy.
But what happens when we get the ability to produce more than we need with only a relatively small amount of humans to do it? If we have the resources where we can easily give everyone on the planet a cell phone, why not do it?
We are already there with some goods: for example, we currently produce enough food to feed 1.5x the world’s population. We may very well reach a point in the next 20-30 years where we can produce everything market wants with 50% or perhaps even 25% of adult humans actually working. Our solution so far is creating artificial scarcity, but that’s only going to patch the system for so long.
Already we’re eschewing traditional factory jobs for service industry jobs like meal delivery. But we’re not far off from autonomous delivery vehicles automating that away, too. With the rise of AI, we can expect a lot more jobs to be augmented or superseded by automation over time.
Capitalism rests on the premises that we can always produce more and that people’s value is tied to their labor. But in a post-scarcity, heavily automated world, these premises break down, and suddenly this system doesn’t really work anymore.
Short of a communist revolution, I think we are going to need to start trialing measures that divorce benefits from labor. Most of the world already has healthcare coverage separated from labor (USA is the glaring exception,) and the next step would likely be universal basic income.
Not sure which came first though - capitalism or human nature. Capitalism creates artificial scarcity but it also capitalizes on human nature, namely those who want to be 'better' than others.
In some places, people keep telling their kids 'go to college so you'll have a good life and be educated, not like those laborers'. As a consequence, today there might be less skilled electricians, plumbers and the like. And those jobs pay better, and are arguably less boring than, say, working in a bank with a college diploma. Point being, just like a college diploma is a sign of status, so is the iphone and some random brand-name knick-knack or eating caviar.
For society to advance to the stage you're proposing, we first have to get over our inflated egos and our need to be better than the rest, in whatever random field we manage to, be it food, clothes, tech, cars or diplomas. I'd want a world in which the garbage man has it as good as the university professor. Not sure the university professor would, though? But they both provide valuable services to society at large.
Honestly, there aren’t that many changes we’d need to get there. For example, instead of working one person 60 hours we can work two people 30 hours. If we divorce benefits from full time status, companies won’t have to pay all that much to make the system work.
With universal income, people could opt to work part of the year, or work for a few years and take time off, or however else they want to do it. There would still be an incentive to work, just not to work to death.