One such area, seldom questioned, is employment. Work is a fundamental part of what makes us who we are, how we perceive the world around us, and how we act in society. Many of our surnames are reflections on the services provided by our forefathers. “What are you going to be when you grow up?”, is asked of toddlers as soon as they can speak and “what do you do for a living?”, one of the frequently asked questions in the adult ice-breaker lexicon.
Work advances humanity
Individual work was originally the basic act of survival, but as technology and understanding developed we learned the value of teamwork. Through this move from subsistence to societal systems, the concept of government evolved to provide a hierarchy based on merit to control project management, logistics and distribution of resources.
In building organisations and institutions to facilitate this the electoral system developed. Originally, the elected members were tasked with improving infrastructure: building roads, forming an army or developing sanitation systems. Election to positions of influence was allocated by peers with first-hand knowledge to assess who were best suited to oversee the task and manage the appropriate workforce.
At the fundamental level, whether we find employment in the public or private sector, the productivity created should benefit the wider community. In modern times we are led to think of employment differently.
Public and private sector coercion
Work may be perceived as a sense of duty or perhaps time voluntarily given up for others. There may be an instinct that we would not work if we did not want to, and a common refrain is that work is necessary to avoid mental health issues. This is a form of self-deception – a kind of social conditioning – as all work, necessary or otherwise, is coerced from us one way or another.
The government uses taxation to ensure we need to earn the currency they issue. In seeking work to earn the currency to pay the tax liability, we create the productive output that society needs to improve living standards and provide the best environment for nurturing future generations.
On the private sector side, we are encouraged to take on mortgages, loans, private pension schemes, car loans, credit cards and student debt to enhance our lives. Each of these is a claim on our future time. The more debt, the more money must be earned, and time expended on working to improve society.
Debt increases precarity
Over the last few decades, the balance has shifted. In the post-war era, there was a societal desire to save, (debt was almost shameful) and most families had a relatively well-stocked ‘rainy day’ account. Today, most households shoulder a debt burden, fostered by the encouragement to instant gratification of desires through credit availability.
This has resulted in a section of every community living a financially precarious life. These people suffer the mental and physical health implications of the haunting spectre of default in an economy where well-paid and secure employment can never be guaranteed. The outcome is long hours in precarious jobs for many.
So, what is work?
The Essential
It seems that work can be of at least three different types. Firstly, there is the essential job – the work that keeps us healthy, fed, educated, a roof over our head, the lights on and water and waste moving in the correct directions. It gives us communal spaces to meet and interact and transport infrastructure to get us there. It stabilises the present as a foundation to build on. It is the foundation the concept of a living standard is based on, our guaranteed basic services.
The R & D
Secondly, there is the research and development job. This form of work is our contribution to future generations. It can take any form in any sector of the economy. Whatever we find interesting enough to specialise in, to the point where we innovate and drive thinking or development forward. Fundamentally, this is a benefit to humanity.
At the academic level, the information gained through research should be open sourced for universal benefit. All scientific advancement should be available to everyone. With modern technology, it is now not only the academic sphere that can contribute intuitive insights. In previous generations, the subjects interesting the layman was known as a hobby.
The hobbyist could spend decades studying a niche subject and gain expert status in the community. With the development of the internet, each individual has global reach and the ability to form a network of likeminded thinkers for collaborative effort in refining new ideas on any subject. Every human is a cognitive giant in evolutionary terms. As such, every individual should follow the direction their attention focuses on. There is no telling where this will lead but the journey will be worthwhile if the relevant personal effort is applied
The Non-essential
Thirdly, there is the non-essential job, often creating the ‘nice-to-haves’. These are the luxury items and built-in additional comfort. This category could incorporate art and other forms of creativity, but has an obvious partial overlap with the previous types of work. Art and culture will inform the future development of technology, as it always has.
What is categorised as a luxury product today may, through development of process, become an incremental improvement in living standards for all, over time, if production is sustainable. At this point, society will view the improvement as an essential. Thus, living standards will continually improve over time.
Work, coerced and impossible for most of us to avoid, is a sacrifice of the individual. We build on knowledge gained from past generations, to provision ourselves well enough in the present, to allow us to improve the understanding and living standards of those coming after us.
Advanced tech will reduce work
I believe we have lost our way in the last few decades. The working life in western society has evolved as technology has advanced. Just a few hundred years ago, 99% of citizens would be involved in food production. The figure in modern times stands at around 1%. The surplus labour created by agricultural technological advancement found employment in factories and workshops during the industrial revolution. Now only about 8% work in manufacturing.
A majority of the working population in the West are now employed, caring for each other, in often essential service sector jobs, or minimally productive for society, working in huge corporations doing no more than facilitating the continuation of the company infrastructure. David Graeber’s book, Bulls**t Jobs, explores the concept of unproductive work, where he provides case studies of people sinking into nihilism and despair through lack of fulfilling employment. He also highlights the creative ways the urge to be productive manifests itself in many of the volunteer respondents.
Warren Mosler appears to agree, as he intuits that a large percentage of the work carried out today is analogous to teams of people digging holes, followed up by another, refilling them. The examples he cites are the resources and cognitive power tied up in the over-complicated tax infrastructure in each country, and the financial sector built around the tax incentives to saving.
Has humanity evolved to work?
There seems to be an almost religious belief that work is our raison d’etre; the more we work, the more social credit we gain. A metaphor for this style of thinking is that humanity has evolved to work.
I believe this is a fallacy. It is nearer the truth to say that humanity evolved to think and innovate. Work is the necessary sacrifice required to allow each individual to maximise their cognitive potential for the benefit of the future of humanity and the continuation of the process that is life.
This perspective leads to the idea there is a finite amount of work that must be done every day to provide the living standards desired at this time. Everyone should play a role in this type of work.
Sufficiency, not growth, is key
The result of such a concentration on the basic guaranteed standard of living would reduce the duration of overall time at essential work significantly, possibly to two to three days each week. A concept economist John Maynard Keynes proposed almost a century ago when he wrote, “In the 21st century a 15-hour work week will suffice, as we turn instead to how to use freedom from pressing economic cares”, in his essay Economic possibilities for our grandchildren. This would allow adults to work and raise a family without the need to employ childcare services.
The found time can be spent on anything the individual finds most fulfilling. This could be one or a combination of research and development, leisure, education, contemplation, and meditation. As stated before, by following what grabs the attention of the individual, a personal journey begins which could influence future thinking.
Using modern technology, collaboration on a global scale means multiple threads of interest can be followed, overlapping ideas can be interrogated and collated. The internet acting in the form of a global cognitive library and discussion forum, the very purpose for which it was originally developed. The data-organising capacity of Artificial Intelligence can be harnessed to categorise the massive amounts of data such thinking would produce.
A holistic approach will rebuild community
With the essential work, at a local level, with friends and neighbours who contribute and benefit as much as your own family, the sense of purpose to the individual life is maximised. Life becomes meaningful and wholesome, and communities become fully integrated. By building local resilience for procurement of supplies, climate impact is simple to manage and assess.
Living standards are currently badly affected by the amount of forced work we carry out. There is a common perception that we are running flat out, just trying to maintain our position in the world. This is not healthy for anyone and is counterproductive for humanity.
Technological advance will provide increased found time for non-essential and R&D work. Community spirit and pride in the neighbourhood will be enhanced by the knowledge that each person is an integral node in the complex network of relationships striving to form the best society. This relationship is in balance as the town or village will reflect the intensity of the collective spirit and pride, in the beauty and order of its services and infrastructure.
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