‘The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country’s politics, economics, and social interactions. What might happen if work goes away?’ – Derek Thompson in The Atlantic
—
Work wakes up our AGENCY, cuing the articulation of PURPOSE(S) that enable us to GROW, CONNECT and CONTRIBUTE to something that feels MEANINGFUL.
For much of human history, work has been necessary for physical survival because in most places there wasn’t enough stuff to go around. For the past few decades this has been changing. There seems to be enough stuff; we just don’t know how to get the minimum amounts of it to everyone who needs it.
If the current trend toward material abundance continues – liberating more people from fear for personal survival – might the purpose of work evolve from individual/family/in-group survival (work in exchange for wages) toward something that feels more social, even it doesn’t look anything like statist socialism…
Also from the 2015 article:
‘This fear is not new. The hope that machines might free us from toil has always been intertwined with the fear that they will rob us of our agency. In the midst of the Great Depression, the economist John Maynard Keynes forecast that technological progress might allow a 15-hour workweek, and abundant leisure, by 2030. But around the same time, President Herbert Hoover received a letter warning that industrial technology was a “Frankenstein monster” that threatened to upend manufacturing, “devouring our civilization.” (The letter came from the mayor of Palo Alto, of all places.) In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, “If men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.” But two years later, a committee of scientists and social activists sent an open letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson arguing that “the cybernation revolution” would create “a separate nation of the poor, the unskilled, the jobless,” who would be unable either to find work or to afford life’s necessities…
The end-of-work argument has often been dismissed as the “Luddite fallacy,” an allusion to the 19th-century British brutes who smashed textile-making machines at the dawn of the industrial revolution, fearing the machines would put hand-weavers out of work. But some of the most sober economists are beginning to worry that the Luddites weren’t wrong, just premature.
When former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers was an MIT undergraduate in the early 1970s, many economists disdained “the stupid people [who] thought that automation was going to make all the jobs go away,” he said at the National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute in July 2013. “Until a few years ago, I didn’t think this was a very complicated subject: the Luddites were wrong, and the believers in technology and technological progress were right. I’m not so completely certain now.”’
—
Agency
Purpose Growth
Connection Contribution Meaning
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work
© Dana Cogan, 2024, all rights reserved.