When John Maynard Keynes Predicted a 15-Hour Workweek “in a Hundred Year’s Time” (1930)

Image by IMF, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

That which stands first, and is most to be desired by all hap­py, hon­est and healthy-mind­ed men, is ease with dig­ni­ty.

—Cicero, Pro Ses­tio, XLV., 98

There is much to admire in Roman ideas about the use of leisure time, what Michel Fou­cault referred to as “the care of the self.” The Latin words for work and leisure them­selves give us a sense of what should have pri­or­i­ty in life. Negotium, or busi­ness, is a nega­tion, with the lit­er­al mean­ing of “the nonex­is­tence of leisure” (otium). The Eng­lish word—considered in its parts as “busy-ness”—doesn’t real­ly sound much more appeal­ing.

The notion that every­one, not just a prop­er­tied elite, how­ev­er, should be enti­tled to leisure time came about only rel­a­tive­ly recently—mostly advo­cat­ed by rad­i­cals and trade union­ists. In the U.S., anar­chists and strik­ing work­ers in Chica­go fought against police in 1886 dur­ing the Hay­mar­ket Affair to achieve “Eight Hours for Work, Eight Hours for Rest, Eight Hours for What We Will.” In 1912, women-led immi­grant strik­ers chant­ed “Bread and Ros­es” in Lawrence, Mass­a­chu­setts, pro­claim­ing their right to more than bare sur­vival.

After the achieve­ment of the 40-hour work­week, paid vaca­tions, and oth­er labor con­ces­sions, many influ­en­tial fig­ures believed that egal­i­tar­i­an access to leisure would only increase in the 20th cen­tu­ry. Among them was econ­o­mist John May­nard Keynes, who fore­cast in 1930 that labor-sav­ing tech­nolo­gies might lead to a 15-hour work­week when his grand­chil­dren came of age. Indeed, he titles his essay, “Eco­nom­ic Pos­si­bil­i­ty for our Grand­chil­dren.”

Writ­ing at the start of the Great Depres­sion, Keynes finds rea­son for opti­mism. “We are suf­fer­ing,” he writes, “not from the rheumat­ics of old age, but from the grow­ing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painful­ness of read­just­ment between one eco­nom­ic peri­od and anoth­er.” Keynes’ essay con­cerns what he calls the “eco­nom­ic prob­lem,” which is not only the prob­lem of mass unem­ploy­ment but also, in his esti­ma­tion, the abil­i­ty of cap­i­tal­ism to pro­vide a decent stan­dard of liv­ing for every­one. He did not see its fail­ure to do so as evi­dence of a more fun­da­men­tal dys­func­tion:

[T]his is only a tem­po­rary phase of mal­ad­just­ment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solv­ing its eco­nom­ic prob­lem. I would pre­dict that the stan­dard of life in pro­gres­sive coun­tries one hun­dred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day. There would be noth­ing sur­pris­ing in this even in the light of our present knowl­edge. It would not be fool­ish to con­tem­plate the pos­si­bil­i­ty of afar greater progress still.

Many econ­o­mists shared Keynes’ opti­mism through the 1970s, “a time when rev­o­lu­tion­ary change still seemed like an immi­nent pos­si­bil­i­ty,” writes John Quig­gan, pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Queens­land.” Utopi­an ideas were every­where, exem­pli­fied by the Sit­u­a­tion­ist slo­gan of 1968: ‘Be real­is­tic. Demand the impos­si­ble.’” Cult fig­ures like Buck­min­ster Fuller explained, as had Keynes decades ear­li­er, how tech­nol­o­gy could free every­one from the tyran­ny of the labor mar­ket and the scourge of “use­less jobs.”

Keynes and oth­ers made a “case for leisure, in the sense of free time to use as we please, as opposed to idleness”—a dis­tinc­tion that draws from the ancient philoso­phers. “But Keynes offered some­thing quite new: the idea that leisure could be an option for all, not mere­ly for an aris­to­crat­ic minor­i­ty.” He was, obvi­ous­ly, mis­tak­en. “At least in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world,” Quig­gan writes, “the seem­ing­ly inevitable progress towards short­er work­ing hours has halt­ed. For many work­ers it has gone into reverse.”

That has cer­tain­ly been the case for the major­i­ty of work­ers in the U.S., at least before the nov­el coro­n­avirus led to mass lay­offs and reduced hours. What hap­pened? For one thing, the ascen­sion of neolib­er­al eco­nom­ics in the late 1970s, and the elec­tions of Ronald Rea­gan and Mar­garet Thatch­er, began a long slow decline of orga­nized labor. “Employ­ers have had increas­ing desire for work­ers to work long hours,” says Juli­et Schor, pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­o­gy at Boston Col­lege. “And work­ers haven’t had the pow­er to resist that upward pres­sure.”

Keynes’ pre­dic­tions res­onat­ed with NPR’s David Kesten­baum, who inter­viewed some of Keynes’ descen­dants, the clos­est thing he had to grand­chil­dren, in a short seg­ment on Plan­et Mon­ey in 2015. One Keynes rela­tion points out the irony that the man him­self “died from work­ing too hard.” How can those of us who aren’t glob­al­ly famous econ­o­mists help end the tyran­ny of over­work? Maybe a lot more strik­ing work­ers mak­ing demands; maybe a uni­ver­sal basic income or some­thing like Bhutan’s “gross domes­tic hap­pi­ness” index?

Keynes may have erred in his pre­dic­tions of the future (though he seems to have under­stood the needs of his moment well enough), but he may not have been wrong to view the eco­nom­ic tur­moil of his time as a rad­i­cal oppor­tu­ni­ty for utopi­an change and bet­ter liv­ing for every­one. Over­turn­ing the dire con­di­tions of the present for our own grand­chil­dren will require not only hard work, but the leisure to do some vision­ary futur­ist think­ing. Read Keynes’ full essay here.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Econ­o­mist John May­nard Keynes

Buck­min­ster Fuller Rails Against the “Non­sense of Earn­ing a Liv­ing”: Why Work Use­less Jobs When Tech­nol­o­gy & Automa­tion Can Let Us Live More Mean­ing­ful Lives

The Case for a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income in the Time of COVID-19

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Case for a Universal Basic Income in the Time of COVID-19

The idea of Uni­ver­sal Basic Income (UBI) has been the sub­ject of much debate in the past few years. The can­di­da­cy of Andrew Yang for U.S. Pres­i­dent brought the issue to nation­al promi­nence, where it has remained dur­ing the spread of COVID-19. What is UBI? Put sim­ply, it pro­pos­es that the gov­ern­ment give every cit­i­zen a cer­tain amount of mon­ey each month to cov­er, at the least, basic liv­ing expens­es. As the video above by YouTube chan­nel Kurzge­sagt explains, those cit­i­zens are then free to live their lives as they like.

Unlike most wel­fare state mod­els, UBI usu­al­ly does not involve any means test­ing. In most schemes, every cit­i­zen, no mat­ter their cur­rent wealth or income, receives the ben­e­fit. (Though most stud­ies of the pro­gram have only giv­en it to poor or unem­ployed ben­e­fi­cia­ries.) Those who do not need the mon­ey can do what­ev­er they want with it, but so too can those who need it. UBI ensures that peo­ple do not have go home­less or hun­gry if they lose their liveli­hood, and that they can sur­vive with­out pater­nal­ist state agen­cies breath­ing down their necks.

UBI is not a new idea but dates back at least to Thomas Paine, whose Com­mon Sense inspired the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and whose Rights of Man defend­ed the French a few years lat­er. As Paine argued in anoth­er, lit­tle-read, pam­phlet, Agrar­i­an Jus­tice, no one could be tru­ly free if they had no means of sub­sis­tence. Since cap­i­tal­ism had placed most of those means under pri­vate own­er­ship, he rea­soned, cit­i­zens should be com­pen­sat­ed for being deprived of resources that belonged to them by nat­ur­al right as much as to any­one else.

This philo­soph­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tion doesn’t always enter into the con­ver­sa­tion, which is often framed in more prag­mat­ic terms as a polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic expe­di­ent in times of cap­i­tal­ist cri­sis: in times, for exam­ple, like the present moment. The COVID-19 cri­sis has inten­si­fied calls for a UBI, as mil­lions of lay­offs point toward the inevitabil­i­ty of a depres­sion. Push­ing peo­ple back to work dur­ing the pan­dem­ic seems to be the only thing the U.S. gov­ern­ment plans to do, but no amount of coer­cion can stop the virus from forc­ing clo­sures all over again.

Even the famous­ly lib­er­tar­i­an econ­o­mist Mil­ton Fried­man once embraced a ver­sion of UBI—as an alter­na­tive to the lib­er­al social pro­grams he loathed. Under Richard Nixon, of all peo­ple, such a pol­i­cy almost came into being in 1969. Nei­ther Fried­man nor Nixon believed in the nat­ur­al right of all cit­i­zens to a share in the prof­its of a state’s nat­ur­al resources. But they could see the wis­dom of ensur­ing mil­lions of U.S. cit­i­zens weren’t rel­e­gat­ed to liv­ing in des­ti­tu­tion.

The pro­gram required test­ing, so the admin­is­tra­tion set up a tri­al run. “Tens of mil­lions of dol­lars were bud­get­ed to pro­vide a basic income for more than 8,500 Amer­i­cans” in five states across the coun­try, writes Rut­ger Breg­man at The Cor­re­spon­dent. Researchers want­ed to know: 1. if those who received a basic income would work sig­nif­i­cant­ly less, 2. if the pro­gram would be too expen­sive, and 3. if it would prove “polit­i­cal­ly unfea­si­ble.” The find­ings? “No, no, and maybe.”

The chief objec­tion, idle­ness, held no water. As the chief data ana­lyst for the Den­ver exper­i­ment put it at the time, “The ‘lazi­ness’ con­tention is just not sup­port­ed by our find­ings.” The two groups who did cut back on hours, 20-some­things and moth­ers of young chil­dren, were peo­ple who most need­ed the mon­ey so they could go to col­lege or devote time to their kids. Oth­er­wise, recip­i­ents did not quit their jobs and lay around watch­ing TV.

Yet there remains a pow­er­ful species of human busy­body who can­not rest until they’re sure everyone’s work­ing. Such peo­ple con­tin­ue to object—whether in good faith or not—that “just giv­ing peo­ple mon­ey” will turn every­one into a slack­er, as though most peo­ple were only moti­vat­ed by the threat of star­va­tion. And so, tri­als con­tin­ue decades lat­er. Researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Helsin­ki recent­ly con­duct­ed a two-year study in Fin­land with a ran­dom selec­tion of 2,000 unem­ployed peo­ple across the coun­try. Each par­tic­i­pant was giv­en €560 (about $607) a month to ease their bur­den, and received the funds whether or not they sought or found a job.

“The scheme was not strict­ly speak­ing a uni­ver­sal basic income tri­al because the recip­i­ents came from a restrict­ed group and the pay­ments were not enough to live on,” points out Guardian cor­re­spon­dent Jon Hen­ley. Nonethe­less, the researchers found that recip­i­ents were sig­nif­i­cant­ly less stressed than a con­trol group—and that they could make dif­fer­ent choic­es than they might oth­er­wise. “Some said the basic income allowed them to go back to the life they had before they became unem­ployed,” the study authors write. “While oth­ers said it gave them the pow­er to say no to low-paid inse­cure jobs, and thus increased their sense of auton­o­my.”

Oth­er find­ings also showed how UBI could rad­i­cal­ize our rela­tion­ship to work. “Free­lancers and artists and entre­pre­neurs had more pos­i­tive views on the effects of the basic income, which some felt had cre­at­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties for them to start busi­ness­es.” Peo­ple pro­vid­ing unpaid care for oth­ers felt their time was more val­ued. “The secu­ri­ty of the basic income allowed them to do more mean­ing­ful things, as they felt it legit­imized this kind of care work.” The find­ings are being tak­en seri­ous­ly by many Euro­pean gov­ern­ments.

In Spain, Scot­land, and else­where, lead­ers are propos­ing or con­sid­er­ing some form of UBI to com­bat mas­sive unem­ploy­ment due to the pan­dem­ic. While the idea may have lit­tle polit­i­cal future in the U.S. at the moment, where pri­or­i­ties are to use the country’s wealth to fur­ther enrich the wealthy, UBI is becom­ing tremen­dous­ly pop­u­lar else­where. (A recent poll found sup­port among 71% of Euro­peans sur­veyed.) No one believes UBI is a panacea for the world’s ills, but as the Wired video above argues, there may be no bet­ter time than now to make the case for it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Pre­dic­tion That Automa­tion Will Neces­si­tate a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income

Buck­min­ster Fuller Rails Against the “Non­sense of Earn­ing a Liv­ing”: Why Work Use­less Jobs When Tech­nol­o­gy & Automa­tion Can Let Us Live More Mean­ing­ful Lives

To Save Civ­i­liza­tion, the Rich Need to Pay Their Tax­es: His­to­ri­an Rut­ger Breg­man Speaks Truth to Pow­er at Davos and to Fox’s Tuck­er Carl­son

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Watch 21 Animated Ideas from Big Thinkers: Steven Pinker, Carol Dweck, Philip Zimbardo, David Harvey & More

The Roy­al Soci­ety for the Encour­age­ment of Arts, Man­u­fac­tures and Com­merce, bet­ter known as the Roy­al Soci­ety for the Arts, and best known sim­ply as the RSA, was found­ed in 1754. At the time, nobody could have imag­ined a world in which the peo­ple of every land, no mat­ter how far-flung, could hear the same talks by well-known schol­ars and speak­ers, let alone see them ani­mat­ed as if on a con­fer­ence-room white­board. Yet even back then, in an era before the inven­tion of ani­ma­tion and white­boards, let alone com­put­ers and the inter­net, peo­ple had an appetite for strong, often coun­ter­in­tu­itive or even con­trar­i­an ideas to diag­nose and poten­tial­ly even solve social prob­lems — an appetite for which the RSA Ani­mate series of videos was made.

We can’t under­stand what goes right and what goes wrong in our soci­eties with­out under­stand­ing how we think. To that end the RSA has com­mis­sioned ani­mat­ed videos based on talks by psy­chi­a­trist Iain McGilchrist on our “divid­ed brain,” for­mer polit­i­cal strate­gist (and cur­rent RSA Chief Exec­u­tive) Matthew Tay­lor on how our left and right brains shape our pol­i­tics, psy­chol­o­gist Steven Pinker on lan­guage as a win­dow into human nature, philoso­pher-soci­ol­o­gist Rena­ta Sale­cl on the para­dox­i­cal down­side of choice, psy­chol­o­gist Philip Zim­bar­do on our per­cep­tion of time, “social and eth­i­cal prophet” Jere­my Rifkin on empa­thy, philoso­pher Roman Krz­nar­ic on “out­ro­spec­tion,” jour­nal­ist Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich on “the dark­er side of pos­i­tive think­ing,” and behav­ioral-eco­nom­ics researcher Dan Ariely on dri­ve and dis­hon­esty.

Eco­nom­ics is anoth­er field that has pro­vid­ed the RSA with a sur­feit of ani­mat­able mate­r­i­al — even of the kind “econ­o­mists don’t want you to see,” as the RSA pro­motes econ­o­mist Ha-joon Chang’s talk on “why every sin­gle per­son can and SHOULD get their head around basic eco­nom­ics” and “how eas­i­ly eco­nom­ic myths and assump­tions become gospel.”

Freako­nom­ics co-authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dub­n­er make an appear­ance to break down altru­ism, and “eco­nom­ic geo­g­ra­ph­er” David Har­vey attempts to envi­sion a sys­tem beyond cap­i­tal­ism. And on the parts of the intel­lec­tu­al map where eco­nom­ics over­laps pol­i­tics, the RSA brings us fig­ures like Slavoj Žižek, who “inves­ti­gates the sur­pris­ing eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions of char­i­ta­ble giv­ing.”

As, in essence, an edu­ca­tion­al enter­prise, RSA Ani­mate videos also look into new ways to think about edu­ca­tion itself. Edu­ca­tion­al­ist Car­ol Dweck exam­ines the issues of “why kids say they’re bored at school, or why they stop try­ing when the work gets hard­er” by look­ing at what kind of praise helps young stu­dents, and what kind harms them.

Edu­ca­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty expert Sir Ken Robin­son explains the need to change our very par­a­digms of edu­ca­tion. And accord­ing to the RSA’s speak­ers, those aren’t the only par­a­digms we should change: Microsoft Chief Envi­sion­ing Offi­cer Dave Coplin argues that we should re-imag­ine work, and tech­nol­o­gy crit­ic Evge­ny Moro­zov argues that we should rethink the “cyber-utopi­anism” that has exposed harm­ful side-effects of our dig­i­tal world.

httvs://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&list=PL39BF9545D740ECFF&index=11&t=0s

But it is in this world that the RSA pro­motes “21st-cen­tu­ry enlight­en­ment,” a con­cept fur­ther explored in anoth­er talk by Matthew Tay­lor — and one of which you can get a few dos­es, ten min­utes at a time, on the full RSA Ani­mate Youtube playlist. Watch the com­plete playlist of 21 videos, from start to fin­ish, below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Decline of Civilization’s Right Brain: Ani­mat­ed

Dan Ariely’s Ani­mat­ed Talk Reveals How and Why We’re All Dis­hon­est

The Pow­er of “Out­ro­spec­tion” — A Way of Life, A Force for Social Change — Explained with Ani­ma­tion

The His­to­ry of Music Told in Sev­en Rapid­ly Illus­trat­ed Min­utes

48 Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain the His­to­ry of Ideas: From Aris­to­tle to Sartre

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

An Animated Michael Sandel Explains How Meritocracy Degrades Our Democracy

Imag­ine if gov­ern­ments and insti­tu­tions took their pol­i­cy direc­tives straight from George Orwell’s 1984 or Jonathan Swift’s “A Mod­est Pro­pos­al.” We might veer dis­tress­ing­ly close to many a lit­er­ary dystopia in these times, with duck­s­peak tak­ing over all the dis­course. But some lines—bans on think­ing or non-pro­cre­ative sex, or seri­ous­ly propos­ing to eat babies—have not yet been crossed.

When it comes, how­ev­er, to meritocracy—a term that orig­i­nat­ed in a 1958 satir­i­cal dystopi­an nov­el by British soci­ol­o­gist Michael Young—it can seem as if the polit­i­cal class had tak­en fic­tion as man­i­festo. Young him­self wrote in 2001, “much that was pre­dict­ed has already come about. It is high­ly unlike­ly the prime min­is­ter has read the book, but he has caught on to the word with­out real­iz­ing the dan­gers of what he is advo­cat­ing.”

In Young’s his­tor­i­cal analy­sis, what began as an alleged­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic impulse, a means of break­ing up hered­i­tary castes, became itself a way to solid­i­fy and entrench a rul­ing hier­ar­chy. “The new class has the means at hand,” wrote Young, “and large­ly under its con­trol, by which it repro­duces itself.” (Wealthy peo­ple brib­ing their chil­dren’s way into elite insti­tu­tions comes to mind.) Equal oppor­tu­ni­ty for those who work hard and play by the rules doesn’t actu­al­ly obtain in the real world, mer­i­toc­ra­cy’s crit­ics demonstrate—prominent among them the man who coined the term “mer­i­toc­ra­cy.”

One prob­lem, as Harvard’s Michael Sandel frames it in the short RSA ani­mat­ed video above, is an ancient one, char­ac­ter­ized by a very ancient word. “Mer­i­to­crat­ic hubris,” he says, “the ten­den­cy of win­ners to inhale too deeply of their suc­cess,” caus­es them to “for­get the luck and good for­tune that helped them on their way.” Acci­dents of birth are ignored in a hyper-indi­vid­u­al­ist ide­ol­o­gy that insists on nar­cis­sis­tic notions of self-made peo­ple and a just world (for them).

“The smug con­vic­tion that those on the top deserve their fate” comes with its inevitable corollary—“those on the bot­tom deserve theirs too,” no mat­ter the his­tor­i­cal, polit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ic cir­cum­stances beyond their con­trol, and no mat­ter how hard they might work or how tal­ent­ed they may be. Mer­i­toc­ra­cy obvi­ates the idea, Sandel says, that “there but for the grace of God or acci­dents of for­tune go I,” which pro­mot­ed a healthy degree of humil­i­ty and an accep­tance of life’s con­tin­gency.

Sandel sees mer­i­to­crat­ic atti­tudes as cor­ro­sive to democ­ra­cy, describ­ing their effects in his upcom­ing book The Tyran­ny of Mer­it. Yale Law Pro­fes­sor Daniel Markovits, anoth­er ivy league aca­d­e­m­ic and heir to Michael Young’s cri­tique, has also just released a book (The Mer­i­toc­ra­cy Trap) decry­ing mer­i­toc­ra­cy. He describes the sys­tem as a “trap” in which “upward mobil­i­ty has become a fan­ta­sy, and the embat­tled mid­dle class­es are now more like­ly to sink into the work­ing poor than to rise into the pro­fes­sion­al elite.”

Markovitz, who holds two degrees from Yale and a doc­tor­ate from Oxford, admits at The Atlantic that most of his stu­dents “unnerv­ing­ly resem­ble my younger self: They are, over­whelm­ing­ly, prod­ucts of pro­fes­sion­al par­ents and high-class uni­ver­si­ties.” Once an advo­cate of the idea of mer­i­toc­ra­cy as a demo­c­ra­t­ic force, he now argues that its promis­es “exclude every­one out­side of a nar­row elite…. Hard­work­ing out­siders no longer enjoy gen­uine oppor­tu­ni­ty.”

Accord­ing to Michael Young, meritocracy’s tire­less first crit­ic and the­o­rist (he adapt­ed his satire from his 1955 dis­ser­ta­tion), “those judged to have mer­it of a par­tic­u­lar kind,” whether they tru­ly have it or not, always had the poten­tial, as he wrote in The Guardian, to “hard­en into a new social class with­out room in it for oth­ers.” A class that fur­ther dis­pos­sessed and dis­em­pow­ered those viewed as losers in the end­less rounds of com­pe­ti­tion for social worth.

Young died in 2002. We can only imag­ine what he would have made of the expo­nen­tial extremes of inequal­i­ty in 2019. A utopi­an social­ist and tire­less edu­ca­tor, he also became an MP in the House of Lords and a baron in 1978. Per­haps his new posi­tion gave him fur­ther van­tage to see how “with the com­ing of the mer­i­toc­ra­cy, the now lead­er­less mass­es were par­tial­ly dis­fran­chised; a time has gone by, more and more of them have been dis­en­gaged, and dis­af­fect­ed to the extent of not even both­er­ing to vote. They no longer have their own peo­ple to rep­re­sent them.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michael Sandel on the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Pod­cast Talks About the Lim­its of a Free Mar­ket Soci­ety

Michael Sandel’s Famous Har­vard Course on Jus­tice Launch­es as a MOOC on Tues­day

Free: Lis­ten to John Rawls’ Course on “Mod­ern Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy” (Record­ed at Har­vard, 1984)

Piketty’s Cap­i­tal in a Nut­shell

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Economics 101: Hedge Fund Investor Ray Dalio Explains How the Economy Works in a 30-Minute Animated Video

Want to know how the econ­o­my works? It “works like a sim­ple machine,” accord­ing to Ray Dalio, who explains its mech­a­nisms in the 30-minute video above. The pre­sen­ta­tion is “sim­ple but not sim­plis­tic,” says the site Eco­nom­ic Prin­ci­ples, a research arm of Dalio’s com­pa­ny Bridge­wa­ter Asso­ciates. The les­son packs in most of the major bold­faced con­cepts in the aver­age over­priced col­lege eco­nom­ics text­book, “such as cred­it, inter­est, rates, lever­ag­ing, and delever­ag­ing.” And it does so in that most engag­ing means of learn­ing things online, an ani­mat­ed video, nar­rat­ed by an expert.

All that’s well and good, but can we real­ly under­stand such a volatile beast as “the economy”—an abstrac­tion that some­times seems like a cru­el­ly rigged game and some­times like a not-par­tic­u­lar­ly-benev­o­lent (to most peo­ple) deity—in only half an hour? Should we trust Dalio to sum­ma­rize its com­plex­i­ty? The bil­lion­aire hedge-fund man­ag­er did, he tells us, man­age “to antic­i­pate and to side­step the glob­al finan­cial cri­sis.” And he has made quite an impres­sion on peo­ple like Forbes Senior Con­trib­u­tor Carmine Gal­lo with his “7,500-word LinkedIn arti­cle titled ‘Why and How Cap­i­tal­ism Needs to be Reformed.’”

In that piece, the “vora­cious learn­er who stud­ies nar­ra­tive and com­mu­ni­ca­tion… turns an enor­mous­ly com­plex sub­ject into a sim­ple, com­pelling nar­ra­tive.” He also makes it clear right in the title that by “the econ­o­my” he means a cap­i­tal­ist econ­o­my. It’s a point large­ly tak­en for grant­ed in the ani­mat­ed explain­er but an impor­tant one nonethe­less giv­en the under­ly­ing assump­tions of the the­o­ry. Seri­ous cri­tiques of cap­i­tal­ism seem much hard­er to con­dense because they’re tasked with unpack­ing all those assump­tions.

Marx’s Das Kap­i­tal spans three vol­umes, though he only lived to pub­lish the first one, itself a mon­ster of a read. Thomas Piketty’s Cap­i­tal in the 21st Cen­tu­ry is maybe a lit­tle breezi­er, at 696 pages (though if you let The Econ­o­mist read it for you, they can sum it up in four para­graphs). By con­trast, Dalio offers a com­pre­hen­sive primer in brief for those of us who skipped that macro­eco­nom­ics course, or who nev­er got the chance to sign up for one. But else­where he has matched cap­i­tal­is­m’s biggest crit­ics with his own best-sell­ing book Prin­ci­ples: Life and Work, a huge and high­ly-praised look at eco­nom­ic crises of debt, gross inequal­i­ty, stag­nant wages, etc. See him describe the book, in five min­utes, on 60 Min­utes, just above.

Cap­i­tal­is­m’s best-known crit­ics, even those who want to see the cur­rent sys­tem swapped out for a more equi­table, sus­tain­able mod­el, have known they must begin by learn­ing how the cur­rent sys­tem works, or how it doesn’t. Dalio him­self isn’t set­ting out to build a worker’s par­adise or to make financiers like him­self obso­lete, but he does have some tren­chant thoughts on capitalism’s failures—and they are many, in his esti­ma­tion. Still, he believes he knows how it can be reformed “to pro­duce bet­ter out­comes.” Learn more in his com­pelling­ly-writ­ten essay here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How The Eco­nom­ic Machine Works: A 30-Minute Ani­mat­ed Primer by Hedge Fund Investor Ray Dalio

Free Online Eco­nom­ics Cours­es

David Harvey’s Course on Marx’s Cap­i­tal: Vol­umes 1 & 2 Now Avail­able Free Online

Piketty’s Cap­i­tal in a Nut­shell

Free Online Eco­nom­ics Cours­es 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Buckminster Fuller Rails Against the “Nonsense of Earning a Living”: Why Work Useless Jobs When Technology & Automation Can Let Us Live More Meaningful Lives

We are a haunt­ed species: haunt­ed by the specter of cli­mate change, of eco­nom­ic col­lapse, and of automa­tion mak­ing our lives redun­dant. When Marx used the specter metaphor in his man­i­festo, he was iron­i­cal­ly invok­ing Goth­ic tropes. But Com­mu­nism was not a boogey­man. It was a com­ing real­i­ty, for a time at least. Like­wise, we face very real and sub­stan­tial com­ing real­i­ties. But in far too many instances, they are also man­u­fac­tured, under ide­olo­gies that insist there is no alter­na­tive.

But let’s assume there are oth­er ways to order our pri­or­i­ties, such as valu­ing human life as an end in itself. Per­haps then we could treat the threat of automa­tion as a ghost: insub­stan­tial, imma­te­r­i­al, maybe scary but harm­less. Or treat it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to order our lives the way we want. We could stop invent­ing bull­shit, low-pay­ing, waste­ful jobs that con­tribute to cycles of pover­ty and envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion. We could slash the num­ber of hours we work and spend time with peo­ple and pur­suits we love.

We have been taught to think of this sce­nario as a fan­ta­sy. Or, as Buck­min­ster Fuller declared in 1970—on the thresh­old of the “Malthu­sian-Dar­win­ian” wave of neolib­er­al thought to come—“We keep invent­ing jobs because of this false idea that every­body has to be employed at some kind of drudgery…. He must jus­ti­fy his right to exist.” In cur­rent par­lance, every per­son must some­how “add val­ue” to share­hold­ers’ port­fo­lios. The share­hold­ers them­selves are under no oblig­a­tion to return the favor.

What about adding val­ue to our own lives? “The true busi­ness of peo­ple,” says Fuller, “should be to go back to school and think about what­ev­er it was they were think­ing about before some­body came along and told them they had to earn a liv­ing.” Against the “spe­cious notion” that every­one should have to make a wage to live–this “non­sense of earn­ing a living”–he takes a more mag­nan­i­mous view: “It is a fact today that one in ten thou­sand of us can make a tech­no­log­i­cal break­through capa­ble of sup­port­ing all the rest,” who then may go on to make mil­lions of small break­throughs of their own.

He may have sound­ed over­con­fi­dent at the time. But fifty years lat­er, we see engi­neers, devel­op­ers, and ana­lysts of all kinds pro­claim­ing the com­ing age of automa­tion in our life­times, with a major­i­ty of jobs to be ful­ly or par­tial­ly auto­mat­ed in 10–15 years. It is a tech­no­log­i­cal break­through capa­ble of dis­pens­ing with huge num­bers of peo­ple, unless its ben­e­fits are wide­ly shared. The cor­po­rate world sticks its head in the sand and issues guide­lines for retrain­ing, a solu­tion that will still leave mass­es unem­ployed. No mat­ter the state of the most recent jobs report, seri­ous loss­es in near­ly every sec­tor, espe­cial­ly man­u­fac­tur­ing and ser­vice work, are unavoid­able.

The jobs we invent have changed since Fuller’s time, become more con­tin­gent and less secure. But the obses­sion with cre­at­ing them, no mat­ter their impact or intent, has only grown, a run­away delu­sion no one can seem to stop. Should we fear automa­tion? Only if we col­lec­tive­ly decide the cur­rent course of action is all there is, that “every­body has to earn a living”—meaning turn a profit—or drop dead. As Con­gress­woman Alexan­dria Ocasio-Cortez—echoing Fuller—put it recent­ly at SXSW, “we live in a soci­ety where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our prob­lem…. We should not be haunt­ed by the specter of being auto­mat­ed out of work.”

“We should be excit­ed about automa­tion,” she went on, “because what it could poten­tial­ly mean is more time to edu­cate our­selves, more time cre­at­ing art, more time invest­ing in and inves­ti­gat­ing the sci­ences.” How­ev­er that might be achieved, through sub­si­dized health, edu­ca­tion, and basic ser­vices, new New Deal and Civ­il Rights poli­cies, a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income, or some cre­ative syn­the­sis of all of the above, it will not pro­duce a utopia—no polit­i­cal solu­tion is up that task. But con­sid­er­ing the ben­e­fits of sub­si­diz­ing our human­i­ty, and the alter­na­tive of let­ting its val­ue decline, it seems worth a shot to try what econ­o­mist Bill Black calls the “pro­gres­sive pol­i­cy core,” which, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, hap­pens to be “cen­trist in terms of the elec­torate’s pref­er­ences.”

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

To Save Civilization, the Rich Need to Pay Their Taxes: Historian Rutger Bregman Speaks Truth to Power at Davos and to Fox’s Tucker Carlson

Cer­tain econ­o­mists may have down­grad­ed the labor the­o­ry of val­ue, but most of us can agree on the basic moral intu­ition that no one per­son is worth mil­lions, even bil­lions, more than almost every­one else on the plan­et. Yet we live in a soci­ety that allows indi­vid­u­als to hoard mil­lions and bil­lions of dol­lars in cash, assets, and cap­i­tal gains, with­out even the pre­sump­tion that they demon­strate why they should have it–especially to the degree that the top 1% now holds more wealth than 90% in the U.S.

What social con­tract allows for this sit­u­a­tion? I’m not per­son­al­ly inter­est­ed in the answer from econ­o­mists, though I imag­ine there are many excel­lent­ly accred­it­ed pro­po­nents. The dom­i­nant assump­tions in eco­nom­ics come from fan­tasies like ceteris paribus, “all else being equal,” and the con­cept of “exter­nal­i­ties.” World his­tor­i­cal inequal­i­ty, polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty, and eco­log­i­cal dev­as­ta­tion do not seem to pose seri­ous prob­lems for most main­stream eco­nom­ic think­ing. But what do his­to­ri­ans say? This is, after all, a his­tor­i­cal ques­tion.

Many sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions have obtained in the past. Some­times they have result­ed in bloody rev­o­lu­tions, some­times sack­ing and pil­lag­ing, some­times redis­tri­b­u­tion schemes. Noblesse oblige: land grants, endow­ments, hos­pi­tals, muse­ums, uni­ver­si­ties… these have not only eased the con­sciences of the rich but have stood out as appeas­ing acts of pub­lic gen­eros­i­ty. But the only thing that has real­ly mit­i­gat­ed the con­di­tions for soci­etal col­lapse under cap­i­tal­ism?

Accord­ing to Dutch his­to­ri­an and writer Rut­ger Breg­man, it’s high tax­es on high incomes and estates. It just so hap­pened, how­ev­er, at this year’s Davos World Eco­nom­ic Forum, as Breg­man lament­ed in a Davos pan­el dis­cus­sion, tax­es were the one thing bil­lion­aires would not dis­cuss. This was so, he observes, at a con­fer­ence that fea­tures Sir David Atten­bor­ough “talk­ing about how we’re wreck­ing the plan­et.”

I mean, I hear peo­ple talk­ing the lan­guage of par­tic­i­pa­tion and jus­tice and equal­i­ty and trans­paren­cy, but then, I mean, almost no one rais­es the real issue of tax avoid­ance, right? And of the rich are just not pay­ing their fair share. I mean, it feels like I’m at a firefighter’s con­fer­ence and no one’s allowed to speak about water.

Pic­tur­ing fire­fight­ers hoard­ing water and refus­ing to share it while the plan­et is going up in flames is a sin­is­ter image, but maybe the inten­tions are beside the point. Even where tax rates are high(ish), gov­ern­ments go out of their way to allow com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als to avoid pay­ing them. Sure­ly, many peo­ple believe this is nec­es­sary to cre­ate jobs? So what if those jobs lack secu­ri­ty, ben­e­fits, or a liv­ing wage?

Breg­man pulls back from the inflam­ma­to­ry metaphor to con­cede that one pan­el did address the issue. He was one of fif­teen par­tic­i­pants. We have to “stop talk­ing about phil­an­thropy,” he says, “and start talk­ing about tax­es,” just like Amer­i­cans did in the sup­pos­ed­ly hal­cy­on days of the 1950s, when under Repub­li­can pres­i­dent Dwight D. Eisen­how­er the top mar­gin­al tax rate was 91%. He says this to peo­ple like Michael Dell, who once asked Breg­man for an exam­ple of a 70% tax rate ever work­ing.

Oxfam’s exec­u­tive direc­tor Win­nie Byany­i­ma sub­stan­ti­ates his polemic, not­ing glob­al­ly “we have a tax sys­tem that leaks so much, that $170 bil­lion” annu­al­ly ends up in tax havens. This is wealth that is extract­ed from the planet’s resources, from gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies and the labor hours and health of gross­ly under­paid work­ers. Then it is dis­ap­peared. If you’ve seen this video, you’ve seen the charges of “one-sid­ed­ness” lobbed by for­mer Yahoo CFO Ken Gold­man from the audi­ence. Byany­i­ma’s response rebuts all of his talk­ing points. She deserves her own cheer­lead­ing video edit.

Breg­man took the same con­fronta­tion­al stance in an unaired inter­view with Fox’s Tuck­er Carl­son. After Carl­son seemed to agree with him, the his­to­ri­an bris­tled and point­ed out that as “a mil­lion­aire fund­ed by bil­lion­aires,” Carl­son has faith­ful­ly rep­re­sent­ed and com­mu­ni­cat­ed the inter­ests of his employ­ers for decades, whether that’s the bru­tal scape­goat­ing of immi­grants or the defense of unlim­it­ed prof­i­teer­ing and huge tax cuts for the wealthy (and tax rais­es for every­one else). The host ends the inter­view sput­ter­ing insults and obscen­i­ties and sneers “I was will­ing to give you a hear­ing.” The prob­lem requires more than a con­de­scend­ing pat on the head, Breg­man argues.

His solu­tion to mas­sive inequal­i­ty and unrest, uni­ver­sal basic income, is one that, like high mar­gin­al tax rates, once appealed to Repub­li­cans. The pro­pos­al has a long his­to­ry, many seri­ous detrac­tors, and it’s also polit­i­cal­ly ignored. You can hear Bregman’s argu­ment for it above, and against Mar­garet Thatcher’s ruth­less­ly ahis­tor­i­cal char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of pover­ty as a “per­son­al­i­ty defect.” If you think UBI goes too far, or not near­ly far enough, maybe you’d be inter­est­ed in oth­er ideas, like a 15-hour work­week and open bor­ders, part of the “ide­al world” Breg­man says is pos­si­ble in his book Utopia for Real­ists. You can down­load it as a free audio­book if you sign up for Audi­ble’s free tri­al pro­gram.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Pre­dic­tion That Automa­tion Will Neces­si­tate a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income

Experts Pre­dict When Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writ­ing Essays, Books & Songs, to Per­form­ing Surgery and Dri­ving Trucks

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

How the Ancient Mayans Used Chocolate as Money

We’ve had hun­dreds and hun­dreds of years to get used to mon­ey in the form of coins and bills, though exact­ly how long we’ve used them varies quite a bit from region to region. Of course, some spots on the globe have yet to adopt them at all, as any­one who’s heard the much-told sto­ry of the Yap islanders and their huge lime­stone discs knows. But the his­to­ry of mon­ey is, in essence, the his­to­ry of bar­ter­ing — trad­ing some­thing you have for some­thing you want — becom­ing more and more abstract; now, with dig­i­tal cryp­to-cur­ren­cies like Bit­coin, it looks like mon­ey will ascend one lev­el of abstrac­tion high­er. But to imag­ine what a tru­ly non-abstract cur­ren­cy looks like, just look at the ancient Mayan civ­i­liza­tion, the mem­bers of which paid their debts with choco­late.

“The ancient Maya nev­er used coins as mon­ey,” writes Sci­ence’s Joshua Rapp Learn. “Instead, like many ear­ly civ­i­liza­tions, they were thought to most­ly barter, trad­ing items such as tobac­co, maize, and cloth­ing.” Thanks to the work of archae­ol­o­gist Joanne Baron, a schol­ar of murals, ceram­ic paint­ings, carv­ings and oth­er objects depict­ing life in the Clas­sic Maya peri­od which ran from around 250 BC to 900 AD, we’ve now begun to learn how choco­late took on a major, mon­ey-like role in the Maya’s econ­o­my.

Some images depict cups of choco­late itself, which the Mayans usu­al­ly enjoyed in the form of a hot drink, being accept­ed as pay­ment, and oth­ers show choco­late trad­ed in the coin-like form of “fer­ment­ed and dried cacao beans.” In many scenes, Maya lead­ers receive their trib­utes (or tax­es) most often in the form of “pieces of woven cloth and bags labeled with the quan­ti­ty of dried cacao beans they con­tain.”

Cacao beans even­tu­al­ly became such a valu­able cur­ren­cy “that it was evi­dent­ly worth the trou­ble to coun­ter­feit them,” writes Smith­son­ian’s Josie Garth­waite in an arti­cle about the ear­ly his­to­ry of choco­late (a sub­ject about which you can learn more in the TED-ed video above). “At mul­ti­ple archae­o­log­i­cal sites in Mex­i­co and Guatemala,” she quotes anthro­pol­o­gist Joel Pal­ka as say­ing, “researchers have come across remark­ably well-pre­served ‘cacao beans’ ” that turn out to be made of clay. “Some schol­ars believe drought led to the down­fall of the Clas­sic Maya civ­i­liza­tion,” Learn notes, and accord­ing to Baron, “the dis­rup­tion of the cacao sup­ply which fueled polit­i­cal pow­er may have led to an eco­nom­ic break­down in some cas­es.” That may sound strange­ly famil­iar to those of us who — even here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, among the many who have gone near­ly cash­less and may soon not even need a cred­it card — have break­downs of our own when we can’t get our choco­late.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mar­velous Health Ben­e­fits of Choco­late: A Curi­ous Med­ical Essay from 1631

Mak­ing Choco­late the Tra­di­tion­al Way, From Bean to Bar: A Short French Film

The Ups & Downs of Ancient Rome’s Economy–All 1,900 Years of It–Get Doc­u­ment­ed by Pol­lu­tion Traces Found in Greenland’s Ice

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Bit­coin, the New Decen­tral­ized Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cy, Demys­ti­fied in a Three Minute Video

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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