Here's a novel idea: if your company can make more profits by automating certain tasks and needing less workers, maybe instead of laying off the unnecessary workers you could keep all of them by making them work less hours while paying them the same wages.
source: Flickr
That's how progression should work. Sure, you would make less profits, but you've increased the well being of a lot of people and you didn't suddenly became poor yourself. What else is scientific and technological progression for, if not to enable us all to devote less time on work and more time on leisure and personal interests, like hobbies, the family and sports? Unfortunately we've been told another story. We've been told that work is the only way to measure one's worth or dignity. Libertarians like to point out that everyone needs to work to survive, that this has been the case forever; even primitive man had to hunt and gather food. That's true. The only difference is that primitive man rarely "worked" for more than 15 hours per week, and modern homo economicus is told that a side hustle is needed. Billionaires claim that to become a member of their exclusive club, 80 to 100 hour workweeks are the bare minimum, creating and maintaining the false idea that the harder you work, the more you'll earn.
I've written about this subject many times before, but somehow the same old message is repeated over and over again in the mainstream media. When millions refused to go back to work after most of the restrictions related to the pandemic were lifted, we were told that we are lazy bums, that we'd rather stay home and live on government-handouts. This is simply not true. Most people have had some time to think about their jobs, how shitty they are and how shitty the wages are. Others have proven that their job can be done from home and refuse to go back to the old schedule of having to commute every day, burning gas and losing time.
But that's not even important. What is important is that work is overrated and that we'd all be much better off, and so would the planet, if we'd only stop working so much and producing way too much. The economy and material possessions are the only ways in which we're told the success or well being of an individual, a country or the world can be measured. Well, this GDP is in no way related to the success or well being of a society. Or the planet. So screw the GDP. Economist John Maynard Keynes, among many, many others predicted that by 2030:
capital accumulation, improvements in productivity and technological advances would have solved the “economic problem” and ushered in an age in which no one besides a few “purposive moneymakers” worked more than 15 hours in a week.
source: Financial Times
Which would take us back to the ancient work-ethic of the hunter-gatherers of old:
The most famous of these studies dealt with the Ju/’hoansi, a society descended from a continuous line of hunter-gatherers who have been living largely isolated in southern Africa since the dawn of our species. And it turned established ideas of social evolution on their head by showing that our hunter-gatherer ancestors almost certainly did not endure “nasty, brutish and short” lives. The Ju/’hoansi were revealed to be well fed, content and longer-lived than people in many agricultural societies, and by rarely having to work more than 15 hours per week had plenty of time and energy to devote to leisure.
source: Financial Times
If they could do it, why can't we? I'm sure you know the answer already, but I want to invite you to watch the below linked video nonetheless; it covers the past, present and future of work in a much more detailed and entertaining way than I ever could.
The Past, Present, And Future Of Work - SOME MORE NEWS
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