Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)

This seems to work if everyone is peaceful with each other.

What happens when two neighboring countries have a conflict but one of them decides to work less and is comfortable with less economic growth. The other keeps pushing harder and ends up with excess money that they put into their military. Now they can invade their neighbor.

Economic power generally leads to military power. Maybe the world shouldn't be this way but it is.

Humans are great at solving problems we put our minds to. But one of the problems humans often want to resolve is "I would like to have more and better stuff". That's why there's a lot of discussion about "productivity", the term refers to a business's capacity to satisfy that demand.

You can, of course, argue that it's wrong for humans to want that. The author refers approvingly to some hunter-gatherer societies where people do 20-25 hours of what we would call labor tasks a week because they simply don't demand any products or services beyond mere subsistence. But there's a hidden judo move here, where he talks a lot about their subjective enjoyment and satisfaction, in order to avoid squarely confronting the fact that their lack of productivity means their material conditions are much, much worse than ours.

In general, if you keep an eye out in detailed anthropological literature, you'll find a lot of similar alarm bells. I just found this matter-of-fact paragraph from Daniel Everett I was vaguely remembering, which is written in a neutral to approving tone and yet clearly describes the men of the Pirahã hunter-gatherers pushing their wives into prostitution (https://web.archive.org/web/20190808091528/https://www.edge....):

> It depends on the river trader, but sex is also a very common trade item. So you see these foreign babies being raised among the Pirahã. It's mainly the husband who works out the deal. Single women can negotiate on their own; wives wouldn't make that offer unless their husband negotiated it. In their dealings with outsiders, men take the lead, and the women won't usually come around unless they're called by Pirahã men. But promiscuity is not a problem for the Pirahã. It doesn't violate any values that they have.

You're assuming they'd prefer to control more people, but what if they prefer having more control over less people?

The answer, like with all things, lies somewhere in between.

Yes, someone still has to clean toilets (until we have robots for that) and deliver packages (again, robots, eventually). But a fully egalitarian society, or even something like UBI to equalize everyone's living conditions just means no coercion, not no effort. The goal should be a world without bullshit jobs and survival enforced exploitation.

Paving roads and maintaining infrastructure are still necessary tasks. The difference is, in a UBI-backed or egalitarian society, the economics of those jobs would change. Those jobs should be valued more, and those workers paid more because of their grueling and necessary nature. What we shouldn't do is what we do now, which is rely on a desperate underclass to do these jobs for pennies just to survive.

Point is, we don't need authoritarian hierarchy, we could manage just fine with worker owned co-ops. There are still leaders and managers, but they are accountable to the workers, not the other way around.

Humans naturally (most of us, anyway) want to build, solve problems, and contribute when they aren't completely exhausted by survival.

I had a boss like this when I worked at a call center, he would swing a golf club around (he was short and I think he wanted to feel like he had a weapon, he never hit any balls in the place) and he would go out of his way to offer overtime to the poorest and most hard off people and wanted to see how much OT he could get one person to work.

It was his little game to manipulate people that couldn't help but say yes into a situation that left them no time to live a life.

The stats were much worse for such people, and those stats had a direct impact on his pay, but if there was a sadistic option he always took it.

Same guy had a "water drinking contest" so he could watch all his employees throw up for a day off.