The Independent reports that Venezuela has abruptly shifted to a 4 day working week as a result of electricity shortages caused by drought impacting the available supply of hydro-electricity - Venezuelans get Fridays off for two months in emergency plan 'to save energy'.

The Guardian has an article looking at the success of the four day working week in Utah and efforts to promote shorter working hours - Working week should be 21 hours, says New Economic Foundation.

British workers may be toiling hard to ward off unemployment, but the future could bring an average of only 21 hours a week chained to their desk. A report by the influential thinktank, the New Economic Foundation, says over-consumption, rising unemployment, increasing inequality and deteriorating work-life balance can be tackled by radically altering working life.

Reducing the working week could also defuse the pensions time bomb by ensuring employees are healthy enough to work later in life. Citing the example of Utah, the study shows how the US state's decision in 2008 to place all public-sector workers on a four-day week saved energy, reduced absenteeism and increased productivity. The report argues that 21 hours a week is already close to the average length of time spent in paid employment.

Guy Rundle at Crikey has a meandering ramble outlining his thoughts about Montreal - including an interesting passage about the failure to move to a four day working week - Protests, corruption and poutine in sans-serif Montreal. The idea that loading the population up with debt is the capitalist system's way of keeping everyone under control is an interesting one - though I suspect that like its right wing equivalent (working people are lured onto welfare and then become prisoners of the system) its more of a conspiracy theory than a reality - instead just being a side effect of how the system is constructed rather than an explicit goal.

Though many Quebecois of the Left would deny it — having hoped for socialism in the ’70s, they see the current muddle as a social apocalypse — a communal commitment to such values has proved surprisingly resilient. Thus it was that the city surprised the world this year, when a series of student protests, ostensibly at an increase in tuition fees, grew far beyond the usual size of the recent Occupy protests, and then engulfed the entire city, drawing mass social sympathy, a march of 500,000 people in a city of 1.5 million, and bringing down the provincial Liberal government in the September elections.

In keeping with the city’s retro-modernist character, the protests looked forward from a position that, elsewhere, was far in the past. Quebec’s university system has remained substantially unmolested by the “destructive destruction” visited on it elsewhere, and a francophone sense of education as an essential social good survived. The trigger for the protests was a proposed rise in fees from $2000 per year to $3000 per year, both figures a pittance compared to standard North American fees.

The fees are merely part of a more far-reaching reorganisation of the university system on neoliberal lines, and the protests are at least in part a stand against that. Their size and fervour surprised so many across the world, because we have not seen anything like them for 20, or even 40 years, when the last round of protests at the process failed in their aims in other places.

But the Montreal protests were something else as well — a forward defence against the encroachment of capital’s latest technique for domination: life-long debt. Sure twelve grand for a four-year course isn’t in the league of US universities of equal calibre, where one hundred to two hundred grand must be found, or committed to. But it’s a step on the way, and the Occupy movement and whatever comes out of it is increasingly, and rightly so, focused on this shell game, whereby the general level of minimum qualifications for jobs is remorselessly raised, with no great gain in social return, and a debt-monkey degree becomes essential, simply to compete.

The process not only extends capital into new areas, it makes any discussion of shortening the working day impossible — because millions of people are flat chat under a dual education-mortgage debt burden.

Douglas Rushkoff has a column at CNN looking at the future of work - Are jobs obsolete ?

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. …

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 Guardian recently had a column noting that (for those with jobs), the trend towards a shorter working week was rapidly reversed by the arrival of the corporate Blackberry and the “tyranny of technology" - Four-day working week? Three cheers!. Personally I have no trouble ignoring work related email over the weekend, but apparently I’m unusual in that regard.

Oddly enough, the four-day week was once envisaged as the future. As Prime Minister in the 1950s, Winston Churchill saw a time when accelerating technological advancement would enable us to "give the working man what he's never had – four days' work and then three days' fun". This did not seem as improbable then, as it sounds now. After all, the weekend was a comparatively recent and expanding invention. "What's a weekend?" asked the (fictional) Edwardian Dowager Countess of Grantham quite plausibly in Downton Abbey, set at a time when Saturday mornings were still worked.

Thirty years ago, as a schoolboy, I spent a summer working as a warehouseman in the London district of Moorgate. We had a practice of doing no work after tea-break on a Friday afternoon, sitting around playing word-games until it was time to clock off. "You'll see," the foreman said to me. "Soon, everyone will get Friday afternoons off."

Now the warehouse is a bank with a fleet of chauffeured Mercedes parked outside at all hours. I'm sometimes nostalgic about my conversation with the foreman, as I am about the horse-drawn cart that still delivered beer from the nearby Chiswell Street brewery. So where did it all go wrong? Not only has the concept of the three-day weekend evaporated, but, for many, the two-day weekend is in jeopardy. A survey of 4,000 workers conducted by Premier Inn last November found we don't unwind, on average, until 12.38 on Saturday night; by 3.55 on Sunday afternoon we are beginning to worry about work again and 53% of us are "too tired" to enjoy the weekend fully. Nearly half check our work emails over the weekend. ...

My own research into the use of a BlackBerry, and other smartphones, took workers from all over the world in a variety of organisational sizes and contexts, and measured email behaviours. I compared those that used BlackBerry (or similar "smart" devices with "push" functionality) with those that checked email through other means (an older phone or a laptop). Those with BlackBerrys, or similar, had 13% higher email volumes but spent two and a half times as long as the second group checking their emails outside working hours.

It is as if simply owning a BlackBerry, or similar device, drives this compulsive checking behaviour. Of course, our brains are "wired" to seek out new information – in our ancestral environment information about a food source or the presence of an enemy might have made the difference between life and death. Today, it is more likely to be a mundane email about somebody losing their keys in the office. Yet the vibrating device, with its flashing light, stimulates our brain's dopamine system in much the same way as the flashing lights of a fruit machine do to a gambling addict. The weary jokes about "CrackBerry" and email "addiction" have more than a grain of truth. ...

While the way we work in the 21st century may be long on hours, but short on productivity, there are other ways in which the culture of frenetic activity actually works against us. We are not, after all, production workers like Churchill's "working man" of the 1950s. A far higher proportion of us – men and women – work with our brains doing tasks of cognitive complexity. Our job titles include words such as analysis, knowledge and intelligence; almost all of us are required to do some level of deep thinking.

And yet the unintended result of our busy way of working, straddling evenings and weekends, is that we have crowded out deep thinking. If, even in our time in the car, we are in thrall to the inbox, there is a risk that we simply do not give ourselves the space for problem-solving, reflection and creativity. How often have we stumbled upon the answer to a problem when doing something else altogether such as showering, gardening or taking a walk?

There have been a number of recent advances in the understanding of the way or brain works – or doesn't work. Most of the cognitively complex work we are required to do is highly dependent on the brain's pre-frontal cortex, and neuroscientists, such as Russell Poldrack of the University of Texas, have observed that too much dopamine – perhaps the result of over-stimulation from our flashing BlackBerrys – can cause the functioning of the cortex to falter, leaving us frazzled, forgetful and finding it difficult to focus.

Is it any wonder that attention deficit disorder specialists are observing that we can invoke the symptoms of this malaise simply by the way we work? Worse still, for those in senior positions, the frenetic way we work can affect our leadership capabilities. As we fire from the hip as each email arrives, we risk losing the art of delegation – thereby taking yet more work on our own shoulders – but also start to slip on many of the other pre-frontal cortex functions such as the treatment of people. We lose our sense of decency and courtesy as our 24/7 way of working leads to irascibility.

It has long been recognised among occupational psychologists and physicians that proper rest and recovery is important, not just for long-term health and happiness but also for resilience at work, productivity and performance. The sad truth is, most of us are simply too busy to wake up to the facts.

So while we are further than ever from enjoying a four-day week as a permanent fixture in the calendar, the period about to unfurl before us offers us an opportunity to feel what it might be like. So treat this bounty of bank holidays as a chance to unplug from work and allow time for recovery, reflection and deep thinking. Who knows – we may end up reclaiming the two-day weekend. ...

A short history of shorter working

c.890 King Alfred the Great reputedly proclaims: "Eight hours' work, eight hours' sleep, eight hours' play, make a just and healthy day."

1496 Henry VII orders a 14-hour work day for field labourers from March to September (5am-dusk in winter).

1815 Foundation of the Ten Hours Movement, which aims to restrict hours for industrial workers.

1847 Women and children granted 10-hour working day, with a max of 60 hours a week, incorporating a shorter working day on Saturdays.

c.1900 Concept of two-day weekend forms in US as labour movements try to help Jewish workers taking Saturday instead of Sunday as the sabbath.

1926 US car manufacturer Henry Ford (pictured left) shuts down factories on both Saturday and Sunday while paying staff the same rate as before. "The country is ready for the five-day week," he announces.

1953 Winston Churchill foresees end of the Cold War heralding increased production and more leisure time for workers. "A four-day week, then three days' fun," he predicts.

1974 Government introduces three-day week to conserve electricity, in short supply due to miners strikes.

2008 Onset of credit crunch forces many UK manufacturing firms to restrict workers to four-day weeks.

2010 The New Economic Foundation claims a 21-hour working week would reduce power consumption and increase productivity.

Guy Rundle has a prolonged pontification at Crikey on some of the ramifications of automation of the service sector in Western countries, wondering what if the combination of the emergence of a new section of the population without employment prospects and the ability to mechanically produce vast amounts of products at low cost might revive some old left visions of the future (topics I took some notes on in Peak oil and the Tea Party movement and Is it time for a four day working week ?) - The frightening automation of Planet Manchester.

To anyone who started flying more than 10 years ago, this feels very strange indeed. The process used to have such an air of solemn deliberation about it -- handing over the ID, the attendant checking the computer, the slight wrinkled brow, the whish of procedural paranoia ("why isn't she smiling? Have I been mistaken for Sheikh Khalid?") and the eventual relaxing smile and passage through. Now it's the same as getting on a tram (in fact, it's more automated than buying an intercity train ticket, that process apparently having been listed by the National Trust).

But what's even more striking is that the process in Australia is running ahead of airport automation elsewhere. Few airports in Europe have totally automated check-in in that manner, and in the US it's years behind. Yet in other fields it's the reverse.

In the UK, supermarket check-out has been wholly automated with breathtaking rapidity -- indeed Tesco's, the largest chain, has now virtually abolished a seated check-out aisle at all, preferring automated check-out with a few floating staff to assist bewildered oldies and anyone trying to buy booze.

In the US, online shopping for books, ebooks, etc, has left not merely Borders, but bookshops chains per se, teetering on the edge of disappearance. In Europe, they're skipping the Starbucks stage of mass cafes entirely, and going to "Nespresso"-style outfits -- essentially serve yourself cafes (using a sealed process, so no one gets burnt or whatever), with a single staff member on hand in case someone gets burnt or whatever.

Thus, the technological revolution in service delivery is happening -- but so differentially and partially that we are not really noticing how epochal it all is. Yet a moment's thought would realise that this is one of the greatest transformations of economic life in centuries -- as far-reaching as the industrial revolution itself, and as significant as the globalisation of production, and the shift of industry from west/north to east/south from the 1970s onwards.

Presumably the industrial revolution was like this. If you were around Stoke-on-Trent or Dudley in the Midlands round the late 1700s, you would have noticed steam engines, iron bridges, freight trams, etc, being introduced here and there, against a background of horse and human power, wood and sweat.

But at some point such changes gather together, and figure and background swap places -- industry becomes the context within which life is lived. That seems likely to be the process under way here. At some point in the next decade, the different process of service replacement will cross-fuse, and in the space of a year or two, everyone will suddenly noticed that large sections of the Western world have categorically shifted. The texture of the world will have changed -- and more significantly, the structure of employment.

Under some circumstances that would be a good thing. These service occupations are boring and tedious jobs after all, just as the industrial jobs they replaced were frequently boring and exhausting. Were there a process by which the multitudes no longer required for this work could access training, education, more interesting work, etc, etc, then it would be a boon.

The pollyanna-neoclassical theory would be that a whole range of new products, businesses, services will emerge as automation creates greater productivity in existing services, retail, etc, etc -- just as the previous dissolution of labour in one sector has made new economic sectors possible.

Yet the very fact of repetition does not guarantee that the process is indefinitely extendable. Three factors may give the pollyannas pause: the first is that the dissolution of service jobs is occurring barely a generation after they became the main repository for people (or their children) for whom industrial jobs were no longer available.

The second is that rising inequality creates an under-consumption crisis -- a small group of people have more money than they can spend, a larger group have nothing to spend on stuff they need; and the third is that so much of an economic burden is placed on the act of private consumption that it reaches the cultural and existential limits of the human being.

These difficulties are exacerbated by the reduced power -- politically, culturally, procedurally -- of the state to redistribute money in order to overcome under-consumption/overproduction crises. States where it retains that power, such as the northern European social democracies, are in much better shape to shift working populations that are suddenly surplus to requirements into new sectors -- aged and social care, education, science, etc.

The more that economies -- the Anglo-American ones in particular -- have allowed redistributive power to wither, the more this massive technological revolution becomes a dual problem: raising structural unemployment and reducing demand -- essentially sidelining a whole social class from membership of the economy.

This, one suspects, is part of the reason why real recovery in these economies has proved so elusive. The brief, thin sunshine of the post-2008 stimulus had a paradoxical effect -- consolidation and closing down of retail chains, greater automation of existing chains. Now in the UK, ahead of the next quarter of statistics, it seems clear that it has slipped into recession again -- high street shop closures are up, demand is down. Businesses that had been holding on through the bad times hoping that the recovery would refloat them, have found that it couldn't, and given up the unequal fight.

But of course this has all been said before. It's easy to find foolish quotes of "what is there left to invent", "the wheel will never catch on", etc, etc. Experience tells that the one thing you can't anticipate are new ways to carve up and commodify human experience, and sell it back to people.

Indeed one result of the rise of service automation may be a giant step backwards, as the West experiences an enormous downward pressure on wages. Unable to compete with the east/south, and with few other options, the disappearance of work combined with the new inequality may create a new servant class. The ultimate new luxury would be someone's entire attendance -- which we currently buy in portions at the cafe, dry cleaner, etc -- wholly oriented to the needs of the rich.

Nevertheless, such a development would be far from stable, for that new "Guatemalanisation" of social life would occur in the context of our current predicament -- under-consumption, overproduction, inequality, automation -- becoming greater.

It would become obvious to people how much labour is no longer necessary, how much of it had become part of the luxury sector of society -- and increasingly, what resources such new technologies offered for reorganising social life.

For it may be that should automation reach a critical point (presuming the world economy does not slump into depression and war that sets us back decades or centuries) then what it will make clear is what Marx spoke of in the Grundrisse -- that such economies are no longer governed by labour, but by time, and permit vast reductions in the working day.

We have always known that -- we, who think about such things, anyway -- but the implicit assumption has always been that automation would come to industry first, visions of robot factories making bubble cars. Instead, the world as a whole is as capitalist as it has ever been -- the planet resembles one vast Manchester. But in the most advanced (and crisis-ridden) areas of it, the beginnings of post-capitalist forms are beginning to show through.

Mind you, they did lose my luggage.

New Scientist has a look at the propensity people have for apocalyptic predictions and some reasons why to be optimistic - Reasons to be optimistic for the future.

WE HUMANS have a natural tendency to believe that our own generation is living in extraordinary times. The past is littered with apocalyptic predictions, and within living memory dire warnings have been made about nuclear conflagration, communist takeover, a new ice age, global famine, a population crisis, deadly new airborne viruses, the millennium bug, the singularity... The list goes on.

As we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century, apocalyptic thinking is thriving. There seems little doubt that we confront a host of unprecedented problems on an unprecedented scale, from economic meltdown to environmental degradation.

Are we just falling prey to our doomsaying disposition? No. The fact that so many earlier catastrophic predictions did not materialise does not mean that current anxieties are unfounded. The global reach of today's problems means we are truly living in extraordinary times.

That past predictions did not come true wasn't entirely down to dubious forecasting or good luck, however. Humans may tend to make mountains out of molehills, but when confronted by genuine existential threats - which appears to be most of the time - we have the ability to face them down. As a species, we are good at meeting the challenges before us.

When confronted by genuine existential threats, we have the ability to face them down
It is in this spirit that we launch a four-week campaign exploring ways to make the world a better place. It will come as no surprise that our starting point is the power of reason. From that springs an ironclad belief that the world can be made better through the application of science and rational thinking. ...

So talk of making the world a better place is not starry-eyed idealism. It is about survival - the long-term survival of the civilisation we have built and the lifestyles we have come to enjoy. On pages 30 to 39, we look at just a few of the radical changes we should be considering, from legalising drugs to taking Fridays off work, forever.

The SMH has an article promoting the idea of shorter working weeks - Work four hours, then rest.

Whoever has not two thirds of his day for him self is a slave,’’ declared Friedrich Nietzsche, part of a long tradition of thinkers who thought our lives should contain work, leisure, and sleep in equal balance.

Ancient Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, considered leisure to be constitutive of the good life, in fact, its primary purpose. Having to work was an unfortunate but sometimes necessary diversion from the important activities and experiences that make for a flourishing human existence.

From this perspective, modern Western society has got its work-life priorities topsy-turvy.

Technology now enables us to produce goods and services necessary for a materially comfortable existence with comparatively little manpower and labour time. We live in an age offering unprecedented opportunity for us all to lead the kind of flourishing, leisurely existence of which the ancients could only dream. Yet many work harder and longer than ever before.

Australians work among the longest average weekly hours of any country in the developed world. Despite our laidback facade, as a culture we have somehow managed to create a work ethic that turns thousands of years of pre-modern wisdom on its head.

Working hard has come to be seen as a moral virtue; and prioritising leisure is regarded variously as lazy, selfish, frivolous or irresponsible – unless, of course, the leisure is ‘‘well-earned’’. It seems timely to ask: what for? Is our obsession with work at the price of leisure justified? Is it preventing us from leading happier and more meaningful lives?

Studies show that as Western societies have become richer on the back of technological advances and longer working hours, their citizens, in general, have become no happier and no more satisfied with their lives. Some studies even suggest that happiness and satisfaction have declined.

Work itself is not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, paid work brings income, self-esteem and social ties. However, for most people, working beyond a certain threshold (generally estimated to be between four to six hours a day), brings comparatively small real additional benefits; yet has substantial opportunity costs, including loss of leisure.

Why, then, are so many of us tempted to work ever longer and harder? One reason is that we tend to attach status to high incomes. There is a tendency to envy people who earn more than we do, but not those who have more leisure than we do. The result is that we frequently trade off our leisure time for increased income. However, the benefits of extra income don’t translate efficiently into increased feelings of well-being.

One reason is our deeply psychologically ingrained habit of comparison. How good we feel about our own life depends not simply on its intrinsic quality, but how it compares to the lives of others who we identify with, or are surrounded by. A person who shares your qualifications but earns double your income will leave you feeling like you’re underachieving.

Reverse the situation and you feel pretty good about yourself. Unsavoury though it may be, it makes us feel good when we are doing better than others in our reference group, and bad to be doing less – even when ‘‘less’’ is objectively pretty good. This creates a strong psychological incentive to work harder, and longer, in order to get more income than your compatriots, in order to feel good about your life and achievements.

When everyone else is doing the same, this then becomes self-defeating: everyone has to work harder and harder just to maintain their position relative to others, and those who get left behind feel considerably worse. The result is that everyone is a lot more exhausted, and most are no happier....

The FT (via the Business Spectator) has an article on renewed interest in the four day working week and other schemes to reduce the amount of time we spend at work - Addicted to the daily grind. The author seems pessimistic about the ability of many people to enjoy more leisure time - but he has probably been working too hard to fully appreciate the virtues of sloth...

It took a member of the insouciant Bloomsbury set to suggest, during a depression that had left millions unemployed, that salaried work was a social evil. In 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that rising productivity and living standards would, in a century, allow people in developed countries to toil for just 15 hours a week. They would cultivate “the arts of life” the rest of the time.

The current downturn is giving many Britons a taste of what Keynes was talking about. Voluntary schemes that reduce working hours in return for pay cuts are spreading from their redoubt in manufacturing into professional services. Staff at KPMG have agreed to take sabbaticals or to switch to four-day weeks when demand for their services is low. Norton Rose and Herbert Smith, the law firms, are mulling similar arrangements. The schemes are a sensible way of retaining talent and avoiding redundancies.

Sharon Baynham, a senior tax adviser at KPMG, has just spent a six-week sabbatical working on her debut novel. This promises to be “a saga about relationships” of the searingly-honest school exemplified by the works of Lionel Shriver. On her first day back at work, Ms Baynham told me she was grateful “for the chance to explore writing in a [financially] safe environment”. Which beats journalism, at any rate. The experience had been “far more positive than expected”, Ms Baynham said, before recommencing the Herculean task of emptying her email inbox.

Could the shorter hours forced on some workers by recession become a positive choice, easing progress towards the elevated lifestyle envisaged by Keynes? After all, one school of thought associates purposeful leisure with nobility and humdrum work with brutality. This began with the Ancient Greeks and continued with the snobbish Bloomsburys. The work ethic is arguably the invention of thin-lipped Calvinists. As the poet and grumpy old man Philip Larkin once rhetorically asked: “Why should I let the toad Work squat on my life?”

The answer is that without the toad Work squatting on one’s life, one feels curiously exposed. In his playful essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Keynes predicted that the standard of living in developed countries would rise by four to eight times in 100 years. The lower limit has already been surpassed. But working hours have fallen by far less. It is most unlikely that by 2030 we will graft for only two days a week.

Keynes, according to Professor Alan Manning of the London School of Economics, “underestimated the appeal of materialism”. In part, this was because he failed to anticipate the ingenuity of business in supplying unnecessary but desirable new products and services, from video games to spa treatments. Had the great thinker ever had the chance to battle fellow Bloomsburyite Virginia Woolf at Wii Frisbee, he might have been more bullish about acquisitiveness. Financial competition is the other element. People work hard in order to be better off than their peers, or if that fails, to keep pace with them.

There is another snag with Keynes’ prediction. He presciently argued that advanced societies would solve what he called “the economic problem” by abolishing serious want. But he largely ignored the existential problem that troubles the leisured. The challenge is to formulate a personal raison d’être if you are not occupied in syndicating bonds for Goldman Sachs or stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s. Most people need to be needed. Salaried employment suggests to them that they are. Moreover, work outside the confines of minimum-waged drudgery is increasingly complicated and difficult. Which makes it a lot more interesting than sitting at home with a book of Sudoku puzzles. ...

Modern Britons work much harder than Keynes expected but far less than they themselves believe. As reflected in the never-ending spat over the 48-hour week promoted by Brussels, we tend to look down on the working practices of Continentals. We suspect them of squandering valuable office time by engaging in elegant love affairs and eating long, delicious lunches. But John Philpott says that the UK average working week of around 36 hours is nothing special. Perhaps we downplay our latitude for pursuing “the arts of life” because, if truth were told, we are not very good at them. A 15-hour week could merely highlight our inadequacies.

The Sydney Morning Herald recently had an editorial calling for consideration of a 4 day working week as a response to economic contraction and alternative to making employees redundant.

DECIMATE. This word used to have a highly specific meaning: the killing of every 10th person, chosen by lot, as punishment by the Roman army for mutinous legions. The same concept comes to mind in the present economic contraction, as one in every 10 people employed by the private sector could lose their jobs as companies cut costs to survive in a credit freeze.

Private enterprises are the lifeblood of the Australian economy but are also the least insulated from the rolling shocks of the highest single-year decline ever recorded on the Australian sharemarket, and the sharpest downturn in Australian wealth ever recorded. The number of job ads is in free-fall. Anecdotal evidence is pouring in that job ads are generally being swamped by job applicants.

Each day brings new bad tidings on the employment front. Yesterday it was the International Monetary Fund announcing it may cut its growth forecast for Australia to zero for 2009. Mighty Microsoft announced it would cut 5000 jobs worldwide, although the cuts would not extend to Australia. The day before, the nation's largest private employer, Wesfarmers, which has a mostly casual workforce of 200,000, announced it expected to cut the hours worked by staff. BHP announced more than 3000 job cuts in Australia. David Jones said it would decimate its administrative staff, that is, cut one in 10 back-office jobs.

The spectre of unemployment is casting the longest and darkest shadow over the economy and consumer sentiment. To survive this downturn in confidence and investment, private companies, which do not have the luxury of being supported by the taxpayer, are having to cut costs.

So how to ease the pain and share the burden? In order to minimise the trauma of involuntary redundancies, we believe inadequate consideration is being given to the non-voluntary four-day week as an alternative to redundancy. This may be administratively difficult. We are under no illusions about the workplace legislation imposed on employers by federal and state governments, which is ridiculously complex and burdensome. This idea may also be opposed by unions paranoid about a Trojan horse of lower pay and more onerous conditions. But surely a four-day week, either voluntary or imposed, is preferable to involuntary redundancies.

The idea of a 4 day working week isn't an entirely abstract one for me, as my current employer has been significantly cutting back on staff levels over the past 6 months. The manager of my team took the approach of offering us all reduced work hours rather than having to let anyone go, which we've all accepted, so I'm now seeing what a 4 day week is like (and having just come back from a 4 day weekend hiking in the Snowy Mountains I can't say I have any complaints so far).

Australia isn't the only country considering reducing standard working hours - The Independent recently had an article titled "Britain is facing return of three-day week", quoting government sources as saying "Shorter hours would be preferable to mass unemployment". Car manufacturer Jaguar is currently considering a 4 day week to reduce costs.

Japan is also adopting the approach of reducing employee working hours in preference to firing people as they deal with their slump in exports and consumption, with the practice known locally as "work-sharing".

While the usual reason for adopting a shorter work week is economic, there is also an argument that working less hours reduces consumption and waste and can thus be justified on environmental and health grounds.

One country that shifted to a shorter work week some time ago was France, with their 35 hour week. In recent years this has been rolled back by President Sarkozy, sparking a lot of resentment by affected workers. The New York Times had an article on this, pointing out that relaxed working hours have long been part of French culture:

THE new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has made no secret of his antipathy to his country’s 35-hour workweek. This drastic solution to unemployment was mandated by the leftist government of Lionel Jospin in 2000. The intention was to share out the available work more evenly and to allow workers to spend more time with their families. Its long-term effects on the economy are still unclear.

In the autobiography-manifesto that he published during his presidential campaign, Mr. Sarkozy wrote of “the harm that the 35-hour week has done to our nation”: “What madness it is to think that the way to increase wealth and create jobs is to work less!” On Oct. 1, he effectively abolished the 35-hour week by removing fiscal penalties on overtime. The strikes and protests in France this month give a taste of the unions’ reaction to President Sarkozy’s measure.

President Sarkozy’s 19th-century predecessors would have been amazed that such comparatively small adjustments are treated as matters of economic life and death. They, too, were worried by the snail-like progress of the French economy, and wondered how to compete with the industrial powerhouse of Britain. But they were faced with something far more ruinous than unemployment.

Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.

In the mountains, the tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. “Seven months of winter, five months of hell,” they said in the Alps. When the “hell” of unremitting toil was over, the human beings settled in with their cows and pigs. They lowered their metabolic rate to prevent hunger from exhausting supplies. If someone died during the seven months of winter, the corpse was stored on the roof under a blanket of snow until spring thawed the ground, allowing a grave to be dug and a priest to reach the village.

The same mass dormancy was practiced in other chilly parts. In 1900, The British Medical Journal reported that peasants of the Pskov region in northwestern Russia “adopt the economical expedient” of spending one-half of the year in sleep: “At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread. ... The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself” and “goes out to see if the grass is growing.”

It is unlikely this was hibernation in the zoological sense. While extreme cold might have set off a biological response normally seen only in squirrels, bears and marmots, human hibernation probably reflects a sensible, communal decision to stay in bed for as long as possible.

But the French seem to have been particularly sleepy. They “hibernated” even in temperate zones. In Burgundy, after the wine harvest, the workers burned the vine stocks, repaired their tools and left the land to the wolves. A civil servant who investigated the region’s economic activity in 1844 found that he was almost the only living presence in the landscape: “These vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.”

President Sarkozy’s campaign slogan, “Work more to earn more,” would have meant nothing to most French peasants. After the Revolution, government officials complained that farmers were “abandoning themselves to dumb idleness,” instead of undertaking “some peaceful and sedentary industry.” Income acted only as a deterrent. The people of Beaucaire on the Rhône made enough money at their summer fair to spend the rest of the year “smoking, playing cards, hunting and sleeping.”

Until the 20th century, few people needed money. Apart from salt and iron, everything could be paid for in kind. Economic activity was more a means of making the time pass than of making money, which might explain why one of the few winter industries in the Alps was clock-making. Tinkering with tiny mechanisms made time pass less slowly, and the clocks themselves proved that it was indeed passing.

In modern France, where the overheated ski stations of the Alps and the Pyrenees are busier in winter than at any other time, no one is proposing a return to the five-month year. But perhaps there are lessons to be learned from those hibernating ancestors who shared their homes with heat-producing herbivores.

In September, at the General Assembly of the United Nations, President Sarkozy proposed “un New Deal écologique et économique,” but without explaining how economic growth can be reconciled with conservation. If he is serious about saving the planet, and if he wants to reassure the unions that workers will still have time with their families, he should consider introducing tax incentives for hibernation. The long-term benefits of reduced energy consumption would counterbalance the economic loss. There has never been a better time to stay in bed.

Reducing Energy Use Through A Shorter Working Week

One institution that has recently adopted the shorter for all workers is the Utah state government in the US, which switched to a four-day week last year primarily to save money on electricity, gasoline and other energy expenses.

Similar schemes seem to be under consideration throughout the US, with Google News throwing up examples in Florida, North Carolina and Minnesota.

Reducing the working week is an approach for reducing energy consumption recommended by a number of peak oil observers - both recent ones like Aaron Newton and older ones like Bucky Fuller, who argued that many people worked in jobs that did not produce sufficient value to justify the expense of energy required to do them.

The computer will also have verified both of the important findings of the brilliant Denver, Colorado oil geologist, Francois de Chardenedes ... regarding the amount of energy employed as heat and pressure, for the length of time initially that it took nature to photosynthetically process Sun radiation into the myriad of hydrocarbon molecules that comprise all the vegetation and algae ... a large percentage of which Sun-energy-nurtured-and-multiplied molecules are ultimately processed into petroleum.

The script of de Chardenedes' "Scenario of petroleum Production" makes it clear that, with all the cosmic energy processing (as rain, wind and gravitational pressure) and processing time (paid for at the rates you and I pay for household electricity), it costs nature well over a million dollars to produce each gallon of petroleum. To say "I didn't know that" doesn't alter the inexorable energy accounting of eternally-regenerative, 100-per-cent efficient - ergo, 100-pr-cent concerned - physical energy Universe.

We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980 jobs in their cars or buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth producing jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home. - Buckminster Fuller - Critical Path

The Society Of Sloth

One figure who should be familiar to most peak observers that has considered working less as a solution of sorts to peak oil is Jay Hanson. One of Jay's "thought experiments" that is less Malthusian than usual for him (albeit quite coercive) is one he dubbed "The Society Of Sloth".

The society of sloth adopts a technocrat style energy based currency is is distributed equally amongst all by a global government with a mandate to protect the global commons. Jay (echoing Hubbert and Fuller) says that:

With modern technology, probably less than 5% of the population could produce all the goods we really “need”. A certain number of “producers” could be drafted and trained by society to produce for two years. The rest can stay home and sleep, sing, dance, paint, read, write, pray, play, do minor repairs, work in the garden, and practice birth control.

In Praise Of Idleness

There is a large body of work justifying working less not on energy or environmental grounds, but purely on the basis that long working hours are simply not necessary, and that idleness is a virtue in and of itself.

One classic example of this is Bertrand Ruseell's 1932 essay, "In Praise Of Idleness", in which he describes the work ethic (be it the feudal variety manifested in the Protestant work ethic or the modern - at the time of writing - worship of manual work by the Marxists) as a relic of a bygone age and shorter working hours as the natural way for dealing with increased industrial productivity.

This theme continues to appear with some regularity, with some examples that caught my eye in recent years including Jason Godesky's "In praise of laziness (looking at the issue from a primitivist point of view), Gene Longsdon's "The lovely, life-saving virtue of laziness" (small scale farming) and Mark Slouka's "Quitting the paint factory: On the virtues of idleness" (idleness as the foundation of democracy). One writer even went so far as to recommend "idle parenting", declaring it results in "happy children" who have learnt how to fend for themselves.

Sometimes the idolisation of idleness is more a product of cynicism and disengagement from seemingly meaningless work, as in this French example celebrating the "sloth ethic", as documented in Crinne Maier's book "Hello Laziness!: Why Hard Work Doesn't Pay".

The Onion once summed up this line of thinking (perhaps not entirely seriously) in "180 Trillion Leisure Hours Lost To Work Last Year":

According to a report released Monday by Boston University's School of Lifestyle Management, more than 180 trillion leisure hours were lost to work in 2004.

"The majority of American adults find work cutting into the middle of their days—exactly when leisure is most effective," said Adam Bernhardt, the Boston University sociology professor who headed the study. "The hours between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. are ideally suited to browsing stores, dozing in front of the television, and finishing the morning paper. Daytime hours are also the warmest and sunniest of the day, making them perfect for outdoor activities. Unfortunately, most Americans can't enjoy leisure during this time, for the simple reason that they're 'at work.'"

There is a dormant site called "Why Work: Creating Livable Alternatives To Wage Slavery" which has collected essays, book excerpts and articles by Bob Black (such as The Abolition of Work), Robert Anton Wilson, Bertrand Russell, Buckminster Fuller, Jean Liedloff and others on the theme of virtuous laziness.

While most advocates of laziness seem to come from the left (Karl Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafarge, for example, wrote a tract called "The Right To Be Lazy" during a period of enforced semi-idleness at Saint Pélagie Prison, though apparently he couldn't help but put his time to a form of productive endeavour), the more anarchically inclined denizens tend to regard the socialists and communists as being just as work obsessed as the capitalists.

This essay on "Bob Black: Abolitionist and Archestrator of the Slack Revolution" sums up the view of the anti-marxists:

After all these years, and after reading Bob Black's The Abolition of Work, I have finally realized just what was wrong with Marxism. Oh, the Marxists talked a good game - working in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, lounging around to watch the sunset; 20-hour workweeks; month-long vacations; etc. But when you get down to it, they are still drawing from the same poisoned well that has parched Western civilization for the last 500 years: the Protestant Ethic, which freed Europe from Catholic voodoo only to feed its heads with doodoo, such as "work is the outward sign of moral perfection." While Luther was telling people that what counted was faith and the Holy Spirit, not work and deeds, Calvin helped spread silly ideas, like the one that people had to be at constant physical labor or idleness would tempt them to sin. Deep down, this is the root of the Puritan Ethic: why even today the neo-Puritans hate Hollywood with such passion: they feel that if we are not kept busy with mindless, rote work, then we will be seized by the carnal passions and led to sin.

Marxists claim that workers are overexploited. So what is their solution? Have the workers take over the factory to "restore the dignity of work." Make everybody do manual labor, like the Pol Pot regime did in Cambodia and the Incas did in Peru - as Mao said, "let there be no separation between the work of the hands and the work of the mind." Our goal should be to increase production. Deep down Marxists, while despising capitalism, only want to hijack what they see as its main notable achievement, accomplished through the Industrial Revolution: mass production. They do not want to abolish the assembly line, only bring more of us to its trough. Let the elite fat cats sweat with the so-called "working class." Rather than wanting us to all enjoy the life of leisure led by the fat cats, the Marxists' main goal is motivated by envy - they want to force the fat cats to suffer as the "working class" has suffered.

I finally saw through the Marxist illusion when I realized the deep-set opposition to automation of mass production. Marx could not have predicted the development of robots, and yet his so-called followers oppose them with tooth and nail. Why should we force people to do machine-like rote work? Why not have machines do the work of machines? Marxists fight automation because they claim it threatens jobs. You remember what "jobs" are, right? They are the things that society tells us we have to work 9 to 5 at and be "productive," right? Marxists deep down view people as units of production. They hate people who refuse to be productive, who will not work, the so-called "lumpenproletariat" who refuse to be a part of anybody's 'productive forces.' Marxists do not have a true liberatory vision. They want to "liberate" the working class from its exploitation by the finance class. But they do not want to liberate everyone. They want to turn us all into "workers."

Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, and other anarcho-syndicalists, libertarian-socialists, and anti-technocrats at the International realized that this was the fatal flaw of Marxism. "Work" as we know it should be abolished - that is, the requirement that all of us "mass produce" things that other people need - and taken over by robot labor. This is the promise of post-industrial society, and yet some Marxists greet it with horror. After all, even capitalist industrialism raised the standard of living of the working class to an incredible degree. Yet, things like nanotechnology and the miniaturization revolution have abolished the fundamental assumptions of Marxism and of economics in general. There will be no more scarcity. More and more can be produced with less and less - of energy, capital, resources, and, yes, human labor as well. People can and always will produce the things they or those they know want with their own hands, or, if they are skilled artisans, the things that others want, but with time, precision, and care. But there will be no more mass production.

If you understand Black, Bookchin, Fuller, Henderson, or others, then you know that the industrial revolution is at an end. The Modernist assumption, that the way our lives could improve was through industrialization and urbanization, is at an end. Industrialism is a massive roaring engine, to whom we have sacrificed so many human lives, and whose appetite threatens to consume and poison the world today. But if we "downsize" and "localize" what we make - Schumacher's "small is beautiful" - and do it with robots, we will not need industrialism anymore. There is nothing radical, revolutionary, or liberatory in the industrial vision. Putting more of us into the factories will not accomplish anything. No matter how "friendly" you make the factory - slow down the assembly line, improve worker safety, give hour-long coffee breaks, have ten people doing the job of two - the factory remains a factory. A place where workers' safety, health, and mental well-being is challenged each and every day.

Marxists are still hung up on this concept of "use value." Something is only worth as much as the amount of "work" - mindless routine labor - that went into its making. They react with horror to the way the economists have been 'brainwashing' us with the silly notion of "exchange value" - i.e. that something is worth as much as you or I are willing to pay for it - because it does not attach any value to the "work" of the robot-human who produced it. Marxists hate artists - at least, those who do not practice social realism - because they produce things that have no "use." You cannot "use" a painting or sculpture, any more than you can a smile or a rainbow. The value of art does not come from the hours of sweat the painter put into the canvas. No, it comes from how much someone enjoys the painting. Yes, you heard me right. Enjoyment. Pleasure. It doesn't fit into the dim, dingy workers' universe of the Marxists. That people might want things not so much that they can use them, but simply because they enjoy having them.

An artist is sharing his creative vision with you, and you pay him as thanks for that. Someday, there will be no workers, only artists. Like the artisans of old, the only things people will make will be the things they want to. Everything else, especially the thing that everybody needs - food, clothing, shelter, and so forth - will be made by robots, who can make them more efficiently. Robots do not complain, do not have "health" to be insured or threatened by industrial processes, do not make mistakes (if programmed correctly), and do not need to be paid. The "bosses" have known this for thirty years. Only the "workers," those neo-Luddites, seem to want to protect their neat unionized niche in the assembly plant from the new technology of automation. They do not realize that the boss is their liberator. He has liberated them from the factory. Marxists call this "unemployment," and treat it as a tragedy, because in our society someone must somehow be "employed" in order to have the things they need to feed themselves and their families.

The truly humane, post-Marxist society will be one in which no one needs to have a "job." The idea is an obsolete concept. For the so-called "middle class" the idea is an especial absurdity. These people get in their polluting cars, wait in traffic jams, and search frenetically for parking, all so they can go to an "office" where they do things that could just as easily be done at home with a computer and a modem. But we seem fixated on this idea, that we must go somewhere else, "work" for eight hours, and then come home again. The "work" of the middle class may not be as physically exhausting as that of the "working class," but it is as equally rote, boring, repetitive, and unoriginal, focusing on the copying and recopying of information. That is something that could be done much better by artificially intelligent computers. As one writer once put it, 95% of people move matter from one place on earth to another, and 5% keep track of where they put it. In our post-industrial society, there is no need for either "labor" or "management." Both have become equally obsolete.

The Economics Of Abundance

The idea of a post-scarcity society, where industrial processes are so well automated that little human labour is require to produce all our material needs, isn't a particularly well studied one, though obviously both Bucky Fuller and the technocracy people have promoted it versions of it in the past.

The primary exception is information production, where the rise of the internet and the ability to copy and distribute information at negligible cost has made it a topic of interest for thinkers like Chris Anderson and his theory of "The Long Tail", who suggest the "Tragically Neglected Economics of Abundance" are worthy of greater attention.

The economics of abundance do get quite a bit of attention amongst science fiction authors however (mainstream economists preferring to dwell in the present, and perhaps the past, as much as possible).

There are some signs that even in the world of material goods some parts of the world are approaching a post scarcity-economy with most people in the developed world have few material wants that they cannot satisfy (and you could make the case that the reason that this could be true for everyone, if not for the way society and the economy is currently structured) - countries like Japan have long needed to export unwanted second hand cars to places like New Zealand, for example.

One person who has made an attempt to try and describe what abundance looks like is Walt Frazier, in his essay "A World Based On Abundance", though this seems overly-utopian in many ways and I'm not sure human nature is such that all the characteristics specified could ever be met (conflict isn't always based on economics / survival and some things will always remain "scare" - large houses facing onto Palm Beach, for example).

Whether or not we ever reach a global, post scarcity economy is a matter for debate, though I'd like to think that it is possible or at the very least a useful "target" of sorts.

I'll close with a quote from Robert Anton Wilson's paper "The RICH economy":

If there is one proposition which currently wins the assent of nearly everybody, it is that we need more jobs. "A cure for unemployment" is promised, or earnestly sought, by every Heavy Thinker from Jimmy Carter to the Communist Party USA, from Ronald Reagan to the head of the economics department at the local university, from the Birchers to the New Left.

I would like to challenge that idea. I don't think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society.

The inevitable direction of any technology, and of any rational species such as Homo sap., is toward what Buckminster Fuller calls ephemeralization, or doing-more-with-less. For instance, a modern computer does more (handles more bits of information) with less hardware than the proto-computers of the late '40's and '50's. One worker with a modern teletype machine does more in an hour than a thousand medieval monks painstakingly copying scrolls for a century. ...

Unemployment is not a disease; so it has no "cure."

This tendency toward ephemeralization or doing more-with-less is based on two principal factors, viz:

1. The increment-of-association, a term coined by engineer C.H. Douglas, a meaning simply that when we combine our efforts we can do more than the sum of what each of us could do seperately. Five people acting synergetically together can lift a small modern car, but if each of the five tries separately, the car will not budge. As society evolved from tiny bands, to larger tribes, to federations of tribes, to city-states, to nations, to multinational alliances, the increment-of-association increased exponentially. A stone-age hunting band could not build the Parthenon; a Renaissance city-state could not put Neil Armstrong on the Moon. When the increment-of-association increases, through larger social units, doing-more-with-less becomes increasingly possible.

2. Knowledge itself is inherently self-augmenting. Every discovery "suggests" further discoveries; every innovation provokes further innovations. This can be seen concretely, in the records of the U.S. Patent Office, where you will find more patents granted every year than were granted the year before, in a rising curve that seems to be headed toward infinity. ...

Unemployment is directly caused by this technological capacity to do more-with-less. Thousands of monks were technologically unemployed by Gutenberg. Thousands of blacksmiths were technologically unemployed by Ford's Model T. Each device that does-more-with-less makes human labor that much less necessary.

Aristotle said that slavery could only be abolished when machines were built that could operate themselves. Working for wages, the modern equivalent of slavery -- very accurately called "wage slavery" by social critics -- is in the process of being abolished by just such self-programming machines. In fact, Norbert Wiener, one of the creators of cybernetics, foresaw this as early as 1947 and warned that we would have massive unemployment once the computer revolution really got moving.

It is arguable, and I for one would argue, that the only reason Wiener's prediction has not totally been realized yet -- although we do have ever-increasing unemployment -- is that big unions, the corporations, and government have all tacitly agreed to slow down the pace of cybernation, to drag their feet and run the economy with the brakes on. This is because they all, still, regard unemployment as a "disease" and cannot imagine a "cure" for the nearly total unemployment that full cybernation will create.

Suppose, for a moment, we challenge this Calvinistic mind-set. Let us regard wage-work -- as most people do, in fact, regard it -- as a curse, a drag, a nuisance, a barrier that stands between us and what we really want to do. In that case, your job is the disease, and unemployment is the cure.

"But without working for wages we'll all starve to death!?! Won't we?"

Not at all. Many farseeing social thinkers have suggested intelligent and plausible plans for adapting to a society of rising unemployment. Here are some examples.

1. The National Dividend. This was invented by engineer C. H. Douglas and has been revived with some modifications by poet Ezra Pound and designer Buckminster Fuller. The basic idea (although Douglas, Pound, and Fuller differ on the details) is that every citizen should be declared a shareholder in the nation, and should receive dividends on the Gross National Product for the year. Estimates differ as to how much this would be for each citizen, but at the current level of the GNP it is conservative to say that a share would be worth several times as much, per year, as a welfare recipient receives -- at least five times more.

Critics complain that this would be inflationary. Supporters of the National Dividend reply that it would only be inflationary if the dividends distributed were more than the GNP; and they are proposing only to issue dividends equal to the GNP.

2. The Guaranteed Annual Income. This has been urged by economist Robert Theobald and others. The government would simply establish an income level above the poverty line and guarantee that no citizen would receive less; if your wages fall below that level, or you have no wages, the government makes up the difference.

This plan would definitely cost the government less than the present welfare system, with all its bureaucratic red tape and redundancy: a point worth considering for those conservatives who are always complaining about the high cost of welfare. It would also spare the recipients the humiliation, degradation and dehumanization built into the present welfare system: a point for liberals to consider. A system that is less expensive than welfare and also less debasing to the poor, it seems to me, should not be objectionable to anybody but hardcore sadists.

3. The Negative Income Tax. This was first devised by Nobel economist Milton Friedman and is a less radical variation on the above ideas. The Negative Income Tax would establish a minimum income for every citizen; anyone whose income fell below that level would receive the amount necessary to bring them up to that standard. Friedman, who is sometimes called a conservative but prefers to title himself a libertarian, points out that this would cost "the government" (i.e. the taxpayers) less than the present welfare system, like Theobald's Guaranteed Annual Income. It would also dispense with the last tinge of humiliation associated with government "charity," since when you cashed a check from IRS nobody (not even your banker) would know if it was supplementary income due to poverty or a refund due to overpayment of last year's taxes. ...

What I am proposing, in brief, is that the Work Ethic (find a Master to employ you for wages, or live in squalid poverty) is obsolete.

Delivered from the role of things and robots, people will learn to become fully developed persons, in the sense of the Human Potential movement. They will not seek work out of economic necessity, but out of psychological necessity—as an outlet for their creative potential.

As Bucky Fuller says, the first thought of people, once they are delivered from wage slavery, will be, “What was it that I was so interested in as a youth, before I was told I had to earn a living?”

The answer to that question, coming from millions and then billions of persons liberated from mechanical toil, will make the Renaissance look like a high school science fair or a Greenwich Village art show.

Next

This post is the second in a 4 part series that began with my review of Bucky Fuller's book "Critical Path".

Next up I'll look at at how Bucky's ideas influenced modern day techie culture, via the cold war technocrats and the hippie "back to the landers" of the 60s and 70s, with a review of Fred Turner's book "From Counterculture To Cyberculture".

I'll conclude with an in-depth look at progress towards the global energy grid Bucky advocated, and why its become an increasingly good idea.