Is Work Necessary?

I saw this bouncing around Facebook, and I would like to endorse the underlying philosophy:

bucky

For those of you still using text-based browsers (hey, remember Lynx?), here we have Buckminster Fuller making a point about work and responsibility in a high-tech society. Namely: maybe people don’t have to work. Maybe, if machines become really good at producing the basic necessities of life, rather than bemoaning a loss of jobs we should celebrate our liberation from the toil of labor.

As a practical matter, I recognize that this might be hopelessly utopian. It amounts to saying that we should have fairly high taxes, and redistribute most of the money as a minimal income to every person. Nothing wrong with working and earning additional money, but everyone would get their personal share no matter what, and in principle that might be enough to live on. Maybe John Rawls was pointing toward something like that, but the social will is nowhere near making it happen. I can even imagine a utilitarian argument against it, based on the supposition that letting people learn and loaf and enjoy themselves rather than working for a living would lead to less innovation and competition, which in turn would make the world a less enjoyable place. I’m not sure if that’s right, but it’s at least non-obvious that work should be gradually phased out.

But nevertheless the spirit is admirable, and that’s what I want to endorse. There’s nothing morally wrong with the idea that people should spend their time in non-productive pursuits rather than working to earn extra income. It’s not “socialism,” since we’re not changing the free market or the ownership of the means of production. It would just be nice to live in a world where people did challenging things because they wanted to, not because they were forced to in order to survive. Maybe someday.

58 Comments

58 thoughts on “Is Work Necessary?”

  1. I think over time our culture will progress so that we can replace material wealth as a motivator for work with social status and fulfillment. Once physical needs and comfort are widespread, people will move on to other/higher motivations and will compete over achieving them.

  2. There’s a much more serious aspect of this, which you did not really touched and it is the environmental impact of our current system.

    We have this socioeconomic requirement for perpetual economic growth, which only comes through perpetually increasing consumption of non-renewable resources and perpetually increasing damage to the ecosystems of the planet (despite what economists will, in their typical, reality-free manner, tell you about decoupling of GDP growth from resource usage – in practice it does not work and has never happened on a global scale).

    There can only be one outcome from all of this – another episode of the classical overshoot-and-collapse ecological cycle, this time on a global scale. That’s not going to be pretty and may well be the end of advanced civilization on this planet.

  3. “It would just be nice to live in a world where people did challenging things because they wanted to”. That world, in part, is here now, just look at the internet. Take a very small example – The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Computer users are able to create mods made available to all, that enhance the experience in many many ways. Many of the mods are highly complex and require 10’s or 100’s of hours to make yet will attract no income. Why do people invest so much of their energy for ‘no’ return? Well the question is wrong! There clearly IS a return otherwise it would not happen. It is our human spirit when given the right environment, is unleashed for the benefit of all which is a feedback mechanism that gives the return to the creator. Alas, much like climate change action, we know what is going on but have no idea of how to fix or change it. The free neutral internet shows what we need to do in the wider sphere to free people to do challenging things.

  4. Isn’t this the Star Trek future where no one has need of anything and all diseases have pretty much been eradicated? I can this as a possibility. I’m reading Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels Of Our Nature” and am convinced his thesis that we are living in the most peaceful time in humanity’s existence has merit. If this trend holds and science continues to advance at geometric speed, I really see no other alternative.

  5. This should already be happening to some degree. With the advances in technology and increases in productivity, we could be working less hours, but we aren’t. There will need to be great changes in our society before the average person would be allowed so much “idle” time.

  6. I agree. The combine harvester has taken the place of human reapers and therefore their jobs. The owner of the harverster should somehow compensate for the lost jobs.

  7. Sean, you’re the physicist. Don’t all dynamic systems need work, to work. W = Fd? We need to work if only to swallow, digest, etc. There’s no free lunch? Until it’s all over?

  8. I’m 82 years-old, on “welfare” – in reasonably good health for my age. I hate money for the sake of it. I was not always “poor”. There is not space here for me to tell you how I got from “there” to “here”. Still, I did a lot of things in life some people only dream of doing. Rarely do I post comments, but I’ll give it a go.
    “Underlying philosophy” is one thing; REALITY is quite another. Let’s remember the question. OK? I have a beautiful granddaughter (one of biological twins) who has two BS degrees – Music, and Film Production – now taking her PhD in Cognitive Musicology, a fairly new branch of anthropology. She made the decision to do this last fall at the age of 28, already in debt over student loans, and will probably spend the rest of her life paying for the opportunity to do something worthwhile with her life. Does that tell you anything?

  9. From the picture, I would say he’s a Boltzman’s Brain but doesn’t know it yet (which probably explain the utopian point of view).

  10. There is a reason why work is called “occupation” – for work occupies the mind. A mind that can “unoccupy” itself is a mind that measures up to Buckminster Fuller’s measure of work. Yet we are far too occupied by so many things that work becomes the de facto or given reality of existence. When work remains this de facto, it is Ayn Rand’s warnings that speak loudest. Yet when we are able to unshackle ourselves from the tethered existence, whether that be mass markets, personal branding or cognitive bias, then we can entertain the magnificent reality Buckminster Fuller saw – one that ironically we still have to work for, and in so working create as an essential choice.

    v.o.M.

  11. Recall that Buckminster Fuller said this decades ago! Pretty sure the idea in one form or another goes back to the Luddites, except they looked at the issue of technological advance in a slightly less positive way. One of Vonnegut’s novels also addresses this issue. Some form of “socialism” embodying this idea is just a matter of time away. Once AI gets rolling, we should ALL be in “fat city” figuratively, unless the 1% can figure out how to force us to keep slaving away for their perceived (probably illusory) benefit. Whether we start looking like “Wallee’s” will be up to us.

  12. A lovely idea Sean & I do wish it were possible

    I suspect it’s a pipe dream for many decades to come

    We have a surplus of underemployed young people & a corporate culture busily finding ever more imaginative ways to cut costs by tax avoidance & the the active reduction of the largest item on their bottom line ~ people

    Think of all those people employed at shelf stacking, warehouse picking/packing, driving trucks, & retail till check out. These types of unskilled & semi-skilled jobs which are ripe for automation are going to disappear rapidly.

    What positive endeavours will be available to engage the time of the vast numbers of people with no interest [or particular capacity] for intellectual activity? If we rearrange society so there’s no stigma attached to drawing the dole & it’s no longer necessary to work to live… what next for those people who aren’t inspired by abstract ideas?

    Can education re-purpose millions of testosterone-fueled teenage lads who have no prospect of even menial labour? I think that’s a tough call. I can’t see it. People NEED to feel useful & valued in society & those who aren’t self-driven will be left at the bottom of the heap without some impetus from outside to give their lives meaning.

    I would like to see a world where all contributions to the public good are rewarded more evenly. It’s quite the scandal that teachers, medical support staff, social workers, cops, fire fighters & the multitude of other “people facing” workers draw the short straw in terms of pay & conditions while their managers soar into the pay-&-golden-handshake stratosphere.

    – – – Space here for long rant about “casino banking” & the rest of the financial industry – – –

  13. I definitely think that as a practical matter, having a guaranteed base level of income (enough to keep people out of poverty) would increase rather than decrease both innovation and competition.

    My argument for this is thus: having a guaranteed base level of income softens the downside of engaging in risky economic behavior, such as attempting to start a business. The fact that innovation is inherently risky means that softening the downside is likely to dramatically increase the incentive to do this sort of thing.

    You might argue: but what about reducing the upside potential? It is, after all, certainly true that the only way to fund such a thing would be through large progressive income taxes. There’s been quite a bit of research into the impact of taxes on the high end to reduce economic activity, and I would claim that we should set the high-end taxes at the point that tax revenue is maximized (which is typically estimated at above a 70% tax rate). The reason it’s so high is that once you get to incomes above a few hundred thousand dollars a year or so, there really isn’t much lifestyle change to be had in moving to higher incomes. That is to say, if you’re engaging in some new business venture to earn more money, you’re not going to notice much of a difference in lifestyle between $500,000/year and $1,000,000/year, so that $500,000/year is pretty much just as tempting a target.

    Increasing the marginal income taxes at the high end (and improving the safety net at the low end) also increases competition, because it leaves those at the high end with less economic power with which to suppress competition.

    There’s also the added bonus that if a low-income person doesn’t like the kind of work that they can get, they would be able to engage in self-improvement (e.g. education) in order to study for a job they do want. This dramatically increases the economic power of those in crap jobs, because many of those people would suddenly have the option to just leave (likely leading to higher low-end wages). It’s also likely to produce significantly higher economic mobility.

    Finally, there’s this fun little recent study which suggests poverty itself might have a cognitive burden:
    http://thepsychreport.com/research-application/featured-research/the-cognitive-burden-of-poverty/
    If this holds up, it will demonstrate that simply ensuring economic stability will make for a smarter, more effective workforce.

    Honestly, the benefits of going for such a system of guaranteed income are so varied that I think it’s just a no-brainer. The difficulty is finding the political will to do it.

  14. I was thinking about this a while ago actually, and I fully agree that the contrived, socially ingrained idea that work is a fundamental pillar of life is wrong. At least, when work is defined as it typically is today in employment indicators. It seems that people are so obsessed with the idea of job creation and work culture that many have lost sight of whether most of these jobs are even adding any value.

    Even the lucky few who are trust-fund backed at birth and do not financially need to get a paying job are viewed with degradation by society if they do not actively engage in some career or another. Work has become far more than just a means of living, it has become a vehicle around which a social hierarchy can be built.

    I think the core of the issue is that many people are looking at the phrase ‘non-productive’ in a rather parochial manner. Someone sitting at home or on a beach musing about existential philosophy or theoretical physics (whose job happens to have nothing much to do with these two subjects) would be judged as passing their time unproductively compared to some half-asleep guy in a cubicle fixing the margins in a banking pitchbook.

    It would probably make more fundamental sense if the real ‘work’ that every human should strive to achieve is not some arbitrary nine-to-five position but simply to pursue the deepest possible understanding of how our universe works, and how we can make our own world as good as we can.

    Throughout history it’s obvious that work in general has shifted from being more menial and/or physical to more intellectual. I am quite confident that as technology progresses we will one day be able to replace all but the most intellectually demanding jobs at the forefront of creativity, such as physics; to achieve a socioeconomic system where nobody is forced to do anything as systematically unpleasant as a dull job, and where work is largely based on freelance projects on a voluntary basis.

    It is an optimistic view, but such a system could probably be environmentally and economically efficient enough to easily sustain the world’s entire population at a good standard of living. This does not at all have to be some kind of communist system; this is a system for times of highly limited resources. Technology could allow even the poorest person to live a pretty well-educated and healthy life. For example, even a low-income person (~$10,000/yr) in the developed world today has a higher quality of life than a wealthy person, say, a couple hundred years ago in terms of knowledge, life expectancy and health, liberty, entertainment, etc.

  15. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it a little more, it’s a pretty dumb question – like asking does God have any control over the universe? What do you say, Sean? And now I’m outta here………

  16. The amount of people choosing to work in such a society would be way too small to provide for the basic needs of everyone.

    Look around you, all those items where produced by legions of people who only did that because they had to support themselves.

  17. Thanks for posting this, Sean. I suspect the tradition of full-time employment is a cultural anachronism left over from the industrial age, and it’s hurting people. Many would be much happier to simply work less, or work on nontraditional endeavors, but our society has this outdated economic model revolving around jobs. Even our health care is linked to full-time employment, which is ridiculous. We need to shake this old idea that you are your job. This is a new age, with amazing technological progress giving us new abilities and freedom–more should embrace it. Play more. Do great things. As we become more and more socially and technologically interconnected, the cool stuff people do outside of traditional employment will come to be better rewarded. At least, I sure as hell hope so.

  18. There are many science fiction stories built around this utopia, but I don’t buy it. There’ll always be people who’ll have to do things they wouldn’t want to do without compensation for the same reason there’s always a non-zero rate of unemployment. There’s just never a perfect match of what has to be done and what people want to do.

    I do think however that, provided we don’t screw up, we’ll see a gradual shift where more people will be doing things for the prime reason that they want to and not because they have to if they just want to survive. This shift is already happening. Think 300 years ago, most people would work 12 hours a day on the fields just to feed their family. Nowadays there’s people like Sean who spend their days sitting around typing stories about the beginning of the universe and live from that. But, well, somebody still has to clean that pipe when it’s clogged.

  19. I’m skeptical of Fuller’s idea that “we keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because … he must justify his right to exist.” Jobs aren’t “invented.” Every job is comes about because:

    1) Person A needs work done
    2) Person A can’t or won’t do it. So,
    3) Person A convinces Person B to do it by offering payment.

    Even unskilled jobs like burger-flippers don’t exist as some sort of charity make-work program. McDonald’s needs people to flip burgers and will pay them to do so (at least until robots get more advanced and cheaper).

    On the other side of the equation, a person looking for a job is basically asking, “How can I be of use to other people? What problem can I solve for them in exchange for money?” Looked at this way, work is a noble pursuit, no matter what form it takes.

    That the intellectual and artistic pursuits are always held up as the only true way for a person to reach their potential leaves me skeptical for a few reasons, not the least of which because these statements are always made by intellectuals and artists, rather self-serving. The biggest reason is that it devalues and denigrates all other jobs. Should a contractor who builds houses–not designs, but swings a hammer–be looked down upon because he produces a physical good instead of an abstract mental state?

  20. Swiss citizens will actually get to vote about this, possibly already next year. The idea is to provide everybody with a guaranteed income which allows “decent” living.

    Now there is most likely no way that the Swiss will approve this proposition yet, but already that it got to the point of voting is very remarkable. Also compare for example, the first vote to join the UN was rejected by 75% in 1986, while 16 years later the majority approved the joining.

  21. Lots of SF novels, even series based on this idea. If automation does all the work required for society to function, and support peoples’ lives, people can do do anything they want. See Alistair Reynolds and other authors. Some of us want to do stuff that helps others, others just want to do their own thing. There is nothing wrong with either option, if society continues supported by robots, or AI

  22. Seems to me that (in a manner of extension), entropy plays a part in all this. Be it that energy bleeds out to useless heat (like stars burning out and such) or that information is only useful when it is organized and can be found when it is needed. Seems the overall philosophy of (nearly) having a free-lunch society is at its base…faulty.

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