A utopian strand of economic thought is making a surprising comeback
A utopian strand of economic thought is making a surprising comeback
It was once normal for economists to imagine a world with less work. What happened?
A few things first of all we have a capitalist system today. That means most workers are in wage jobs, so they can not be forced to work for nothing like slaves. That however turns work time into a commodity. As long as their are too many work hours available, the employers have an advantage, as they can just fire you, not hire you and the like. However work needs to be done and when work hours are scarce, that turns into a workers advantage. So the employers have to compete for workers, which means higher wage so less profit and better working conditions. Hence capitalist want to increase the work week and have a lot of unemployed workers, to run their companies cheaply.
However a few things have changed recently. First of all Western workers have to compete much less with competition from overseas. This is to slower population growth and globalization slowing down and even reversing in parts. Combine that with the baby boomers retiring and you have a local worker shortage. That however means capitalists have to treat the workers better and interestingly for a lot of Western workers, that means less work. Obviously they do not like it, but markets work, so they have to offer it. That is why we see stuff like the four day workweek pop up recently. Most Western workers have enough goods and more free time, is preferable.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For centuries, a lineage of thinkers ranging from Utopia author Thomas More in 1516 to economists like John Maynard Keynes in 1930 homed in on scarcity as both a force and a cultural logic that distorts not only mental bandwidth in the present, but also the potential futures of individuals and society at large.
Sociologist Aaron Benanav, author of Automation and the Future of Work, sees these thinkers as part of the “post-scarcity tradition,” where they imagine what human development would be when liberated from the gravitational, detrimental pull of scarcity.
Rather than focusing on meeting everyone’s basic needs and reducing the workweek, the American economy set course to free the markets with a laissez-faire approach to competition, privatizing public services in the name of efficiency, lowering taxes, avoiding deficits, and fastening work requirements to welfare programs.
Progressive economists today like Mark Paul argue that wealthy economies such as the US have already amassed enough resources to achieve post-scarcity, echoing Bookchin (if all US household wealth were distributed evenly across the population, everyone would have about $450,000).
From Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516 through to Keynes, Bookchin, and Benanav today, post-scarcity has been more modestly focused on unconditionally meeting everyone’s basic needs, which excludes the more expansive, infinite range of human desires.
Whether the growing support for universal basic services, the Green New Deal’s inclusion of economic rights, or the national experiment with unconditional cash transfers for poor children, elements of a post-scarcity agenda are increasingly in play.
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It became doable so it was harshly fought by people who wanted to maintain exploitation.
If you live in a shareholders-owned company, plan to resign in the year to change for a non profit, a workers cooperative or arguably a publicly funded job.