Do we really need jobs?

PK2008

The question might sound a bit condescending if you don't currently have a job and are keeping the wolf from the door, but I'm sure most people have asked themselves at some point 'what the hell am I working for?'

(CNN) -- The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology's slow but steady replacement of working humans. Unless an external source of funding comes in, the post office will have to scale back its operations drastically, or simply shut down altogether. That's 600,000 people who would be out of work, and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms.

We can blame a right wing attempting to undermine labor, or a left wing trying to preserve unions in the face of government and corporate cutbacks. But the real culprit -- at least in this case -- is e-mail. People are sending 22% fewer pieces of mail than they did four years ago, opting for electronic bill payment and other net-enabled means of communication over envelopes and stamps.

New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures -- from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.

We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace.

And so the president goes on television telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs -- as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work. But it seems to me there's something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.

I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks -- or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that's even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.

The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy, who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked. And so they invented the chartered monopoly.
By law, small businesses in most major industries were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned corporations instead. From then on, for most of us, working came to mean getting a "job."

The Industrial Age was largely about making those jobs as menial and unskilled as possible. Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and laborers more replaceable. Now that we're in the digital age, we're using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.

While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, I have to wonder just how truly bad is it for people. Isn't this what all this technology was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with "career" be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.

The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised. The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.

But there might still be another possibility -- something we couldn't really imagine for ourselves until the digital era. As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.

We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.
This sort of work isn't so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another -- all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.

For the time being, as we contend with what appears to be a global economic slowdown by destroying food and demolishing homes, we might want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends

-Douglas Rushkoff
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-09-07/opinion/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete_1_toll-collectors-robots-jobs/3?_s=PM:OPINION

tl;dr Are 'jobs' more about society's expectations in terms of work/reward and our own perceptions of self worth or is all that just intellectual bull cos how else are we going to buy delicious pints??

AH response; Dey tuk ar jebs!!

herosa

No your are certainly not the first person to stand back and look at it that way.An entire tv series called "The good life" was based on that idea(remember Tom and Barbara) and I see the repeats are being shown again. In more recent times a guy who was tired of the whole consumer thing decided to spend a year without money and he is still alive.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/mark-boyle-money
Many previous generations here in Ireland were self sufficient too and just grew enough to live on.I remember people in my area who would never buy drink.They used to pick a fruit called a "sloe"(or that is how they pronounced it) and put it in a bottle with sugar and bury it for a year and that was their alcohol. I would say housing would be your biggest problem to overcome but other than that I would say you could live without a job. I watched a tv program about travellers one night and one guy said his clan didnt believe in working for other people.They just did bits and bobs of whatever came up...but technically speaking that is still a job I suppose. Are you thinking of it?

OutlawPete

Well, there was Christopher McCandless, the guy they made Into The Wild about. Thought that he could survive in the wild and be self sufficient. To some he was a hero, other's a fool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRUGvArWXLk

starviewadams

Don't need jobs but definitely need the money that comes from having one,unfortunately.

orourkeda

Took ur job

PK2008

herosa wrote: »

No your are certainly not the first person to stand back and look at it that way.An entire tv series called "The good life" was based on that idea(remember Tom and Barbara) and I see the repeats are being shown again. In more recent times a guy who was tired of the whole consumer thing decided to spend a year without money and he is still alive.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/mark-boyle-money
Many previous generations here in Ireland were self sufficient too and just grew enough to live on.I remember people in my area who would never buy drink.They used to pick a fruit called a "sloe"(or that is how they pronounced it) and put it in a bottle with sugar and bury it for a year and that was their alcohol. I would say housing would be your biggest problem to overcome but other than that I would say you could live without a job. I watched a tv program about travellers one night and one guy said his clan didnt believe in working for other people.They just did bits and bobs of whatever came up...but technically speaking that is still a job I suppose. Are you thinking of it?

Thinking about it in the philosophical sense. Agree - if I was to write down my expenses that I need- they would be rent and food- and both of these could probably be reduced dramatically from what I currently pay for them, beyond that I pretty much spend my wages (below industrial average) on stuff I dont need or save it.

When I compare how much I 'need' my job against how much I hate it/do it out of some obscure feeling of obligation to society and my 'future' it really doesn't balance out......

A common goal people cite is 'to have enough money so as not to have to work any more'- but is that really that much?

4leto

Its kind of strange when you think about it, a kind of modern miasmas. Nothing is so alien to the present age then idleness. If we think of resting from our labours it is only to return to them.

In thinking so highly of work we are odd. Few other cultures have ever done this. In nearly all of history work was an indignity. In Christianity only protestant sought salvation through work, but for others it was prayer and meditation. For most cultures its work just for things that need to be done. For the rest of the day doing nothing was the ultimate goal

I am lazy and work to me is a mighty indignity, I certainly would be happy to do nothing constructive, BUT fukcen bills and commitments.

Sometimes it feels like Sisyphus pushing those boulders. Which was a Greek version of hell, a man sentenced to perpetual useless work in exchange for hope of it ending soon.

Matthew23

Who will make all iPods if we don't have Steve Jobs?

herosa

If you had a square of land in the country you could probably put up a mobile home, have a garden out the back for your spuds and veg,gather sticks or maybe peat for your fire,use a tilly lamp for light,make do and mend etc and bring up a brood of rosy cheeked children. Years ago you had a large section of the community doing that but now isolation would be the problem.I bet you there are hundreds out there trapped in years of negative equity who wished they had bought a little square of land from a farmer and thought about it!
Look at what this guy did-all for 3k !!http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2039719/Simon-Dale-How-I-built-hobbit-house-Wales-just-3-000.html

kincsem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqVtM1hax7Y

Yahew

Sure, but poverty is a sh*t way of life. I wouldn't work so hard if I were rich ( I would be a VC for 2-3 days a week) but I am not rich so I work. Which I mostly enjoy. I dont golf. Dont really have hobbies - except a bit of sport and keeping fit, but thats 2 hours a day max - like a few beers, like to read and travel.

With no work, no purpose. Boredom. Ennui. Etc. Even rich idlers are bored senseless.

( As it now stands by the way 40 hours is not a significant part of your waking weekly hours its about 30% - and travel adds a lot to the perceived time people spend in work).

EDIT: also the internet is a hobby, of course. amazing I forgot that while typing on an internet forum.

ItsAWindUp

Nah, employment is overrated.

Yahew

People who eulogise idleness have a utopian view of an idle class producing art, and literature, and historical works. in their spare time. But thats work too. But what you get instead is the kind of destructive behaviour which lead to the London riots. Those rioters were rich by the standards of most of history - meat every day, enough calories to guarantee fatness if they dont's exercise; access to free music, internet, games and entertainment which their parent's generation could not dream off.

They wanted more.

herosa

Dolly had the same idea
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpKAA2VxWY8

as did del http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDVc9NJFrXc

entropi

The thing about needing a job these days, is that the population rely on monetary payment, and have done so for a long time now. Barter is not very existent these days (well in first and possibly second world countries anyway), and could not be relied upon to replace money. Technological advances would tie in with that, and not allow it.

Peetrik

I think it would be very possible to live without money. Our ancestors did for years.

A limiting factors I imagine would be polution, for example I wouldnt drink from the liffey, slurry/pestacide run off into water supplys coupled with the absence of natural game (deer etc) from their natural habitat being destroyed.

Peetrik

(duplicate post)

pq0n1ct4ve8zf5

herosa wrote: »

Look at what this guy did-all for 3k !!http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2039719/Simon-Dale-How-I-built-hobbit-house-Wales-just-3-000.html

:eek: That's the coolest house in the world!

herosa wrote: »

Many previous generations here in Ireland were self sufficient too and just grew enough to live on.I remember people in my area who would never buy drink.They used to pick a fruit called a "sloe"(or that is how they pronounced it) and put it in a bottle with sugar and bury it for a year and that was their alcohol.

Yeah sloe gin, the berries come out around this time and then it should be ready for Christmas, some people still do it, my dad used to but he used to keep it in a press instead of burying it and one year it exploded, stained his antique press purple and kind of soured him on the idea I think :pac:

herosa

(ok. im off sloe hunting in the morning! I think I will stick to the burying idea instead of press based on your Das experience! Then I need a map with an x to mark the spot where I buried it and it will be happy days next year.(I heard a year)

pq0n1ct4ve8zf5

herosa wrote: »

(ok. im off sloe hunting in the morning! I think I will stick to the burying idea instead of press based on your Das experience! Then I need a map with an x to mark the spot where I buried it and it will be happy days next year.(I heard a year)

Hm, well I just googled it and it all seems to involve putting sloes into shop-bought gin for the flavour. I swear I remember people making it with just sugar, sloes and water though, something about that white covering sloes have being yeast or something...argh I can't remember, I'll have to ask people when I go home.

Saila

not everyone wants to scratch their hole up a tree

herosa

Valentina Proud Lace wrote: »

. I swear I remember people making it with just sugar, sloes and water though,.

Yes thats what I remember too.
Well we are going to end up in casualty or we are onto the next big thing. sssshhh!

PK2008

Saila wrote: »

not everyone wants to scratch their hole up a tree

Yeh, but I don't think it necessarily equates to living in the woods or even a major drop in living standards, in fact it may not be about giving up work altogether just the job you're currently in.

Think about your expenses, the ones you absolutely need such as house, food, electricity/heat, clothes etc- If you only had these and even trimmed any waste around them; then look at the surplus of your wages and see if that surplus is converting into anything that is worth the effort being put into getting them.

Calculate the amount of money you absolutely need based on your own living standards ie the minimum living standard you are happy to live at. The surplus then may be traded for other things such as time. For instance, maybe you work a lot in order to make 40k a year- but when you break it down you are able to maintain a living standard you are happy with on about 20k a year, anything after which is kind of a waste in terms of its return on your living standard, (law of diminishing returns and all that).

So you have a kind of surplus you can trade for stuff you do need, and cant necessarily be bought, such as more time/less stress. Example you may be able to go part time, or go to a lower demand job and have more time to pursue a hobby, you aren't really losing the extra money because the extra money was never really being utilised for your needs.....


.....or something...........its all speculation

herosa

No.I get what you are saying.A lot of people do exactly that for the reasons you mentioned.I was in a taxi recently and the driver had his mortgage paid and his kids reared.He didnt want the stress anymore and gave up his job.He was happy just"for the few bob in his pocket" as he put it. Its a reasonable choice and there is no law against it.Its just that unavoidable expenses can sneak up on you eg your boiler/washing machine/toilet breaks then what do you fall back on? I know a lot of couples where only the man works.They have traded the second income for the peace of having someone at home to run the house and to be there when the kids are sick and to do their homework early in the day etc.Its a fine balancing act between not being consumed totally by the rat race and avoiding soul destroying poverty.

4leto

"To have the play boy lifestyle"
If you won the lotto would you work, I wouldn't.

But its true, when countries have managed to reduce the working hours, middle to upper classes have spent more time on cultural endeavours, while the working class have drank more. Not that I believe one is greater then the other.

But what I find curious about work is the western view of it. We gather our esteem from it, its our purpose. When introduced it is usually quickly a topic "what do you do" or Joe Bloggs Mechanic.

I would like to think I would strike a balance I would do more culture and read more, but drink more as well, "work the curse of the drinking classes"

herosa

4leto wrote: »

"To have the play boy lifestyle"
If you won the lotto would you work, I wouldn't.

"

Nope.I would be out of there like a bullet from a gun.Then I would go travelling to some far flung distant land.

Mr.Triffid

Yahew wrote: »

People who eulogise idleness have a utopian view of an idle class producing art, and literature, and historical works. in their spare time. But thats work too. But what you get instead is the kind of destructive behaviour which lead to the London riots. Those rioters were rich by the standards of most of history - meat every day, enough calories to guarantee fatness if they dont's exercise; access to free music, internet, games and entertainment which their parent's generation could not dream off.

They wanted more.

They didn't have purpose or structure in their day, if they were not working that is, If you can find a job that lets you be creative in some way and that you can be passionate about, well there isn't enough hours in the day then because you'd be lovin what you do.