A world without work

I've had friends lose jobs in Amazon warehouses over their aggressive research and development of an all-machine packaging line. They do work now that requires the precision of a human hand and eye, but that job may also go the way of the assembly line. His only hope is that custom carpentry's demand by rich celebrities wanting the "premium" afforded by the work of a Human over the static of a machine.

When I look back at people who invested their lives in the future of mankind, and their predictions in something like the year 1960, it's interesting to note just how incorrect they were. Communication boomed over transportation, for example. Knowing that, I try to think of the ways the future will be so impossibly different than my present. A world without work is one of those, and I hope it angers and confuses every currently living generation enough that we wish we would have made it a reality sooner.

Some interesting points - I would have the following questions for the author (I didn't see them answered)

How many of the ills observed in non-working adults are due (at least in part) to the culture of "your value is based on the job you hold"?

How many people sit around watching TV because that's what they can afford to do, or because their peers are unavailable at the same times?

How many teens revert to crime because they need money, or don't have other affordable opportunities for entertainment available to them?

1977 is a time very different than today; what differences in attitudes and activities can be attributed to the climate of 1977?

What can we learn from these examples to make the coming change in employment levels work out better now than it did 40 years ago?

A general purpose AI/Robot will just do what it does here, there, and much cheaper and better than some guy stuffed into a pressurized suit who can only work x amount of hours per day and is easily injured and in constant need of food/air/medical. If space migration happens it will be with an army or robots per person because of how hostile conditions are for delicate mammals outside of earth. I don't think the futurist visions we imagine happen without a general robotics revolution, the same way we couldn't get to the moon without computers.

What if the new capital is creativity? The new model for "work" is OSS? Replace money with creativity in the definitions of capitalism. Material possessions are socially discounted; creating new designs, new originals the new currency to excel.

If so, the first classes we now cut in schools: advanced mathematics, chorus, art, music, etc. are the areas we need to emphasize the most.

Hi Falcolas, this is Derek Thompson, the author of the piece.

1. The quick answer is that we don't know how much of the misery of not working is from the financial shortfall of unemployment, vs the failure to meet a cultural expectation to work, vs some inherent need to feel productive, because it's just very hard to tease out the difference in reliable studies. How, eg, would you test this for prime-age adults at a time when income is tied to work and there is a cultural expectation that everybody work?

That said, my best guess is that about half of the psychological misery of losing a job and being unemployed comes from the non-money stuff, like being bored and failing to meet a cultural expectation to work. (This is distinct from people who choose to stay home with kids, who have chosen to immerse themselves in an essential activity and often feel great pride -- and stress! -- in these jobs, even though they're not compensated with income). As I said in the piece:

"The post-workists argue that Americans work so hard because their culture has conditioned them to feel guilty when they are not being productive, and that this guilt will fade as work ceases to be the norm. This might prove true, but it’s an untestable hypothesis. When I asked Hunnicutt what sort of modern community most resembles his ideal of a post-work society, he admitted, “I’m not sure that such a place exists.”"

2. The fact that unemployed men seem to be less social overall suggests to me that their rise in leisure is about more than the daytime unavailability of peers. Because otherwise, wouldn't they just go drinking with buddies every night? This suggests, to me, some shame of being unemployed that leads to self-imposed isolation. In any case, the misery of unemployment suggests that we're just not very good, as a culture (and particularly men), at finding non-screen-based things to do with our time when work goes away.

3. Crime has fallen by A LOT in the last few decades so I didn't want to go too deep into predicting a rise in crime at a time when violent crime seems to be in structural decline. That said, for young, less educated black men, there are a variety of barriers to their participation in the labor force including racist bosses not wanting to hire them, an abundance of low-paying service sector jobs that seem feminine (they're in health care, government, and education), and the cultural and economic allure of the black market and gangs in some areas. This is a really short summary, but I think the allure of gangs and crime is very complicated.

4. One of the biggest differences between 1977 and today is certainly the decline in crime. Crime didn't spike during the Great Recession, surprisingly.

5. I thought that's what the piece was about! :) But seriously, the section labeled Government: The Visible Hand tries to address this question (or at least this question as I understand it) head on.