[acb-hsp] A World Without Work (from the New Yorm Times)

[peter altschul]

A World Without Work
  Ross Douthat
  IMAGINE, as 19th-century utopians often did, a society rich 
enough that fewer and fewer people need to work -- a society 
where leisure becomes universally accessible, where part-time 
jobs replace the regimented workweek, and where living standards 
keep rising even though more people have left the work force 
altogether.
  If such a utopia were possible, one might expect that it would 
be achieved first among the upper classes, and then gradually 
spread down the social ladder.  First the wealthy would work 
shorter hours, then the middle class, and finally even high 
school dropouts would be able to sleep late and take four-day 
weekends and choose their own adventures -- "to hunt in the 
morning," as Karl Marx once prophesied, "fish in the afternoon, 
rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner ..."
  Yet the decline of work isn't actually some wild Marxist 
scenario.  It's a basic reality of 21st-century American life, 
one that predates the financial crash and promises to continue 
apace even as normal economic growth returns.  This decline isn't 
unemployment in the usual sense, where people look for work and 
can't find it.  It's a kind of post-employment, in which people 
drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less 
permanently, without a steady job.  So instead of spreading from 
the top down, leisure time -- wanted or unwanted -- is expanding 
from the bottom up.  Long hours are increasingly the province of 
the rich.
  Of course, nobody is hailing this trend as the sign of 
civilizational progress.  Instead, the decline in blue-collar 
work is often portrayed in near-apocalyptic terms -- on the left 
as the economy's failure to supply good-paying jobs, and on the 
right as a depressing sign that government dependency is killing 
the American work ethic.
  But it's worth linking today's trends to the older dream of a 
post-work utopia, because there are ways in which the decline in 
work-force participation is actually being made possible by 
material progress.
  That progress can be hard to appreciate at the moment, but 
America's immense wealth is still our era's most important 
economic fact.  "When a nation is as rich as ours," Scott Winship 
points out in an essay for Breakthrough Journal, "it can realize 
larger absolute gains than it did in the past ...  even if it has 
lower growth rates." Our economy may look stagnant compared to 
the acceleration after World War II, but even disappointing 
growth rates are likely to leave the America of 2050 much richer 
than today.
  Those riches mean that we can probably find ways to subsidize 
-- through public means and private -- a continuing decline in 
blue-collar work.  Many of the Americans dropping out of the work 
force are not destitute: they're receiving disability payments 
and food stamps, living with relatives, cobbling together work 
here and there, and often doing as well as they might with a 
low-wage job.  By historical standards their lives are more 
comfortable than the left often allows, and the fiscal cost of 
their situation is more sustainable than the right tends to 
admits.  (Medicare may bankrupt us, but food stamps probably will 
not.)
  There is a certain air of irresponsibility to giving up on 
employment altogether, of course.  But while pundits who tap on 
keyboards for a living like to extol the inherent dignity of 
labor, we aren't the ones stocking shelves at Walmart or hunting 
wearily, week after week, for a job that probably pays less than 
our last one did.  One could make the case that the right to not 
have a boss is actually the hardest won of modern freedoms: 
should it really trouble us if more people in a rich society end 
up exercising it?
  The answer is yes -- but mostly because the decline of work 
carries social costs as well as an economic price tag.  Even a 
grinding job tends to be an important source of social capital, 
providing everyday structure for people who live alone, a place 
to meet friends and kindle romances for people who lack other 
forms of community, a path away from crime and prison for young 
men, an example to children and a source of self-respect for 
parents.
  Here the decline in work-force participation is of a piece with 
the broader turn away from community in America -- from family 
breakdown and declining churchgoing to the retreat into the 
virtual forms of sport and sex and friendship.  Like many of 
these trends, it poses a much greater threat to social mobility 
than to absolute prosperity.  (A nonworking working class may not 
be immiserated; neither will its members ever find a way to rise 
above their station.) And its costs will be felt in people's 
private lives and inner worlds even when they don't show up in 
the nation's G.D.P.
  In a sense, the old utopians were prescient: we've gained a 
world where steady work is less necessary to human survival than 
ever before.
  But human flourishing is another matter.  And it's our 
fulfillment, rather than the satisfaction of our appetites, 
that's threatened by the slow decline of work.