Coffee, 35 cents per pound. A self-sharpening plough, $3.50. A whip, a buck fourteen. And a gallon of gin, 60 cents, which was “about two-thirds of a day’s wages for the average non-farm white male worker.” (View the prices in a larger format here.)
But I’m less intrigued by the wholesale price of the various items Smith’s hypothetical country storekeeper would pay to stock his shelves in 1836, though I do love a bargain.
It’s more the type of goods listed on that inventory. They’re exactly the sort of items that figure in one of the most memorable chapters of Little House on the Prairie—“Mr Edwards Meets Santa Claus.”
Okay, so maybe not exactly the same. Author Laura Ingalls Wilder was pretty explicit about the simple pleasures of her 1870s and 80s childhood. Her family’s bachelor neighbor, Mr. Edwards, risked life and limb fording a near-impassable, late-December creek, a bundle containing his clothes, a couple of tin cups, some peppermint sticks, and two heart-shaped cakes, tied to his head. Without his kindly initiative, their stockings would have been empty that year.
Presumably, the Independence, Kansas general store where Neighbor Edwards did his Christmas shopping would’ve stocked a lot of the same merch’ that Smith alludes to in the above fragment of a bookkeeping-related story problem. Online bookseller John Ptak, on whose blog the page was originally reproduced, is keeping page 238 close to the vest (coincidentally the last item to be mentioned on the inventory, almost as an afterthought, just one, priced at 50¢.)
Childhood recollections aside, perhaps there was something else in Mr. Edward’s bundle, something the adult Laura chose not to mention. The sort of hostess gift that could’ve warmed Pa and Ma on those long, cold frontier nights…
Some gin, perhaps…or wine? Rum? Brandy?
Smith’s shopkeeper would’ve been well provisioned, laying the stuff in by the barrel, hogshead, and pipe-full.
As for that “bladder” of snuff, a post on the Snuffhouse forum suggests that it wasn’t a euphemism, but the actual bladder of a hog, paced with 4 pounds of snortin’ tobacco.
Of course, Smith’s shopkeeper would’ve also carried a healthy assortment of wholesome goods- hymnals, children’s shoes, calico, satin, whips…
I first came to know the work of Cormac McCarthy through the 1973 novel Child of God, a portrait of a terrifyingly alienated loner who becomes a serial killer. The book so immerses readers in the dank, claustrophobic world of its protagonist, Lester Ballard, that one can almost smell the dirt and rotting flesh. Next, I read Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s psychedelically brutal epic about a mercenary band of scalp hunters who massacred Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century Southwest. In McCarthy’s avalanche of prose—which lacks commas, apostrophes, quotation marks, and most every other mark of punctuation—long passages of grim death and carnage become hallucinatory trance-inducing incantations.
It’s never a good idea to identify an author too closely with their fiction; the most disturbingly effective works of horror and madness have very often been designed by writers of the highest emotional sensitivity and critical intelligence. This is certainly the case with McCarthy, whose work plumbs the deepest existential abysses. Nevertheless, I harbored certain anxious expectations of him, unsure if he was a writer I’d ever actually want to meet. So like many others, I was more than a little puzzled by McCarthy’s decision to give his first and only TV interview in 2007 on Oprah Winfrey’s wildly popular platform.
But among the many things we learned from their pleasant conversation is that McCarthy doesn’t care much for literary society. He doesn’t like writers so much as he loves writing and thinking, of all kinds. He spends most of his time with scientists, keeping—as we noted in a post last week—an office at a think tank called the Santa Fe Institute and doing most of his writing there on a noisy old typewriter. While developing relationships with physicists, McCarthy took an interest in their writing, and volunteered to copy-edit several scientific books. He overhauled the prose in physicist Lawrence Krauss’s Quantum Man, a biography of Richard Feynman, promising, says Krauss, that he “could excise all the exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature.”
In 2005, McCarthy read the manuscript of the Harvard physicist Lisa Randall’s first book, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions. He “gave it a good copy-edit,” Randall said, and “really smoothed the prose.” Later he did the same for her second book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door. During that experience, she notes, “we had some nice conversations about the material. In fact, I saw a quote where he used a physics example I had given in response to a question about truth and beauty.”
Perhaps McCarthy sees this avocation as a challenge and an opportunity to learn. Perhaps he’s also doing research for his own work. His latest project, The Passenger, includes a character who is a Los Alamos physicist. But what about another, surprisingly out-of-the-blue editorial job he took on in 1996? Before he applied his austerities to Krauss and Randall’s work, he received an article from theoretical economist and friend W. Brian Arthur. The piece, scheduled to be published in the Harvard Business Review, was titled “Increasing Returns and the New World of Business.”
After mailing McCarthy the article, Arthur called and asked him how he liked it. “There was a silence on the line,” he tells Rick Tetzeli in an interview for Fast Company, “and then he said, ‘Would you be interested in some editorial help on that?’” The two spent four hours going over the writing. “Let’s say the piece was better for all the hours Cormac and I spent poring over every sentence,” Arthur says, noting that his editor called in a “slight panic” after hearing about the collaboration. You can read the full article here. It’s “a lot punchier and more sharply worded than you might expect, given its subject matter,” writes The Onion’s A.V. Club. It also contains a lot more punctuation than we might expect, given its copy-editor’s philosophy.
“Increasing Returns and the New World of Business” became one of Harvard Business Review’s “most influential articles” Tetzeli writes. “Even now, the theory of increasing returns is as important as ever: it’s at the heart of the success of companies such as Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, and Airbnb.” Did McCarthy’s encounter with Arthur’s theory appear in his later fiction? Who knows. Perhaps where Arthur’s vision of economic growth predicted the massive tech giants to come, McCarthy’s keen mind saw the ever-increasing profits of business savvy drug cartels like those in No Country for Old Men and his Ridley Scott collaboration The Counselor.
One of the most propulsive forces in our social and economic lives is the rate at which emerging technology transforms every sphere of human labor. Despite the political leverage obtained by fearmongering about immigrants and foreigners, it’s the robots who are actually taking our jobs. It is happening, as former SEIU president Andy Stern warns in his book Raising the Floor, not in a generation or so, but right now, and exponentially in the next 10–15 years.
Self-driving cars and trucks will eliminate millions of jobs, not only for truckers and taxi (and Uber and Lyft) drivers, but for all of the people who provide goods and services for those drivers. AI will take over for thousands of coders and may even soon write articles like this one (warning us of its impending conquest). What to do? The current buzzword—or buzz-acronym—is UBI, which stands for “Universal Basic Income,” a scheme in which everyone would receive a basic wage from the government for doing nothing at all. UBI, its proponents argue, is the most effective way to mitigate the inevitably massive job losses ahead.
Those proponents include not only labor leaders like Stern, but entrepreneurs like Peter Barnes and Elon Musk (listen to him discuss it below), and political philosophers like Georgetown University’s Karl Widerquist. The idea is an old one; its modern articulation originated with Thomas Paine in his 1795 tract Agrarian Justice. But Thomas Paine did not foresee the robot angle. Alan Watts, on the other hand, knew precisely what lay ahead for post-industrial society back in the 1960s, as did many of his contemporaries.
The English Episcopal priest, lecturer, writer, and popularizer of Eastern religion and philosophy in England and the U.S. gave a talk in which he described “what happens when you introduce technology into production.” Technological innovation enables us to “produce enormous quantities of goods… but at the same time, you put people out of work.”
You can say, but it always creates more jobs, there’ll always be more jobs. Yes, but lots of them will be futile jobs. They will be jobs making every kind of frippery and unnecessary contraption, and one will also at the same time beguile the public into feeling that they need and want these completely unnecessary things that aren’t even beautiful.
Watts goes on to say that this “enormous amount of nonsense employment and busywork, bureaucratic and otherwise, has to be created in order to keep people working, because we believe as good Protestants that the devil finds work for idle hands to do.” People who aren’t forced into wage labor for the profit of others, or who don’t themselves seek to become profiteers, will be trouble for the state, or the church, or their family, friends, and neighbors. In such an ethos, the word “leisure” is a pejorative one.
So far, Watts’ insights are right in line with those of Bertrand Russell and Buckminster Fuller, whose critiques of meaningless work we covered in an earlier post. Russell, writes philosopher Gary Gutting, argued “that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous.” Harm to our intellects, bodies, creativity, scientific curiosity, environment. Watts also suggests that our fixation on jobs is a relic of a pre-technological age. The whole purpose of machinery, after all, he says, is to make drudgery unnecessary.
Those who lose their jobs—or who are forced to take low-paying service work to survive—now must live in greatly diminished circumstances and cannot afford the surplus of cheaply-produced consumer goods churned out by automated factories. This Neoliberal status quo is thoroughly, economically untenable. “The public has to be provided,” says Watts, “with the means of purchasing what the machines produce.” That is, if we insist on perpetuating economies of scaled-up production. The perpetuation of work, however, simply becomes a means of social control.
Watts has his own theories about how we would pay for a UBI, and every advocate since has varied the terms, depending on their level of policy expertise, theoretical bent, or political persuasion. It’s important to point out, however, that UBI has never been a partisan idea. It has been favored by civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and controversial conservative writers like Charles Murray; by Keynesians and supply-siders alike. A version of UBI at one time found a proponent in Milton Friedman, as well as Richard Nixon, whose UBI proposal, Stern notes, “was passed twice by the House of Representatives.” (See Stern below discuss UBI and this history.)
During the sixties, a lively debate over UBI took place among economists who foresaw the situation Watts describes and also sought to simplify the Byzantine means-tested welfare system. The usual congressional bickering eventually killed Universal Basic Income in 1972, but most Americans would be surprised to discover how close the country actually came to implementing it, under a Republican president. (There are now existing versions of UBI, or revenue sharing schemes in limited form, in Alaska, and several countries around the world, including the largest experiment in history happening in Kenya.)
To learn more about the long history of basic income ideas, see this chronology at the Basic Income Earth Network. Watts mentions his own source for many of his ideas on the subject, Robert Theobald, whose 1963 Free Men and Free Markets defied left and right orthodoxies, and was consistently mistaken for one or the other. (Theobald introduced the term guaranteed basic income.) Watts, who would be 101 today, had other thoughts on economics in his essay “Wealth Versus Money.” Some of these now seem, writes Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, “bittersweetly naïve” in retrospect. But when it came to technological “disruptions” of capitalism and the effect on work, Watts was cannily perceptive. Perhaps his ideas about basic income were as well.
Image via YouTube, 1959 interview with Mike Wallace
A robust social safety net can benefit both the individuals in a society and the society itself. Free of the fear of total impoverishment and able to meet their basic needs, people have a better opportunity to pursue long-term goals, to invent, create, and innovate. Of course, there are many who believe otherwise. And there are some, including the acolytes of Ayn Rand, who believe as Rand did: that those who rely on social systems are—to use her ugly term—“parasites,” and those who amass large amounts of private wealth are heroic supermen.
Rand disciple Alan Greenspan, for example, initiated the era of “Reaganomics” in the early 1980s by engineering “an increase in the most regressive tax on the poor and middle class,” writes Gary Weiss, “the Social Security payroll tax—combined with a cut in benefits.” For Greenspan, “this was no contradiction. Social Security was a system of altruism at its worst. Its beneficiaries were looters. Raising their taxes and cutting their benefits was no loss to society.”
One problem with Rand’s reasoning is this: whether “parasite” or titan of industry, none of us is anything more than human, subject to the same kinds of cruel twists of fate, the same existential uncertainty, the same illness and disease. Suffering may be unequally distributed to a great degree by human agency, but nature and circumstance often have a way of evening the odds. Rand herself experienced such a leveling effect in her retirement. After undergoing surgery in 1974 for lung cancer caused by her heavy smoking, she found herself in straitened circumstances.
Two years later, she was paired with social worker Evva Pryor, who gave an interview in 1998 about their relationship. “Rarely have I respected someone as much as I did Ayn Rand,” said Pryor. When asked about their philosophical disagreements, she replied, “My background was social work. That should tell you all you need to know about our differences.” Pryor was tasked with persuading Rand to accept Social Security and Medicare to help with mounting medical expenses.
I had read enough to know that she despised government interference, and that she felt that people should and could live independently. She was coming to a point in her life where she was going to receive the very thing she didn’t like.… For me to do my job, she had to recognize that there were exceptions to her theory.… She had to see that there was such a thing as greed in this world.… She could be totally wiped out by medical bills if she didn’t watch it. Since she had worked her entire life and had paid into Social Security, she had a right to it. She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.
Finally, Rand relented. “Whether she agreed or not is not the issue,” said Pryor, “She saw the necessity for both her and [her husband] Frank.” Or as Weiss puts it, “Reality had intruded upon her ideological pipedreams.” That’s one way of interpreting the contradiction: that Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, “has no practical purpose except to promote the economic interests of the people bankrolling it”—the sole function of her thought is to justify wealth, explain away poverty, and normalize the sort of Hobbesian war of all against all Rand saw as a societal ideal.
Rand taught “there is no such thing as the public interest,” that programs like Social Security and Medicare steal from “creators” and illegitimately redistribute their wealth. This was a “sublimely enticing argument for wealthy businessmen who had no interest whatever in the public interest.… Yet the taxpayers of America paid Rand’s and Frank O’Connor’s medical expenses.” Randians have offered many convoluted explanations for what her critics see as sheer hypocrisy. We may or may not find them persuasive.
In the simplest terms, Rand discovered at the end of her life that she was only human and in need of help. Rather than starve or drop dead—as she would have let so many others do—she took the help on offer. Rand died in 1982, as her admirer Alan Greenspan had begun putting her ideas into practice in Reagan’s administration, making sure, writes Weiss, that the system was “more favorable to the creators and entrepreneurs who were more valuable to society,” in his Randian estimation, “than people lower down the ladder of success.” After well over three decades of such policies, we can draw our own conclusions about the results.
It has been a while, but RSA has returned with another one of their whiteboard animated videos. During the early days of YouTube, they broke some aesthetic ground by animating Slavoj Zizek on the Surprising Ethical Implications of Charitable Giving; Barbara Ehrenreich (author of Nickel and Dimed) on The Perils of Positive Psychology; Daniel Pink on The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo on The Secret Powers of Time. Now, they’re back with the influential Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang explaining “why every single person can and SHOULD get their head around basic economics.” Here, Chang “pulls back the curtain on the often mystifying language of derivatives and quantitative easing, and explains how easily economic myths and assumptions become gospel,” helping you to “arm yourself with some facts” and take part in “discussions about the fundamentals that underpin our day-to-day lives.” If you want to get up to speed on economics, some of the resources below will undoubtedly give you a hand.
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Spend an hour or two at MoMA, Tate Modern, or some other world class museum and inevitably you’’ll overhear some variation of “my seven-year-old could paint that.”
Mayhaps, Madam, but how much would it fetch at auction?
As a new documentary series, the Art Market (in Four Parts), makes clear, the monetary value of art is tricky to assign.
There are exceptions, of course, such as in the irresistible Picasso anecdote cited in the trailer, above.
Usually however, even the experts must resort to an educated guess, based on a number of factors, none of which can tell the whole story.
I’d have thought a signature as famous as Warhol’s would confer the same sort of insta-worth Picasso claimed his John Hancock did.
The unpredictability of final sales figures has led auction houses to issue guarantees in return for a split of the profits, a practice Sotheby’s North and South America chairman, Lisa Dennison, likens to an insurance policy for the seller.
With the exception of the ill-fated Warhol’s great big goose egg, the numbers batted around by the series’ influential talking heads are pretty staggering. Snappy editing also lends a sense of art world glamour, though gallerist Michele Maccarone betrays a certain weariness that may come closer to the true energy at the epicenter of the scene.
As for me, I couldn’t help thinking back to my days as a receptionist in a commercial gallery on Chicago’s tourist friendly Magnificent Mile. I was contemptuous of most of the stuff on our walls, which ran heavily to pastel garden parties and harlequins posed in front of recognizable landmarks. One day, a couple who’d wandered in on impulse dropped a ridiculous sum on a florid beach scene, complete with shimmering rainbows. Rich they may have been, but their utter lack of taste was appalling, at least until the wife excitedly confided that the painting’s setting reminded them of their long ago Hawaiian honeymoon. That clarified a lot for me as to art’s true value. I hope that the couple is still alive and enjoying the most for their money’s worth, every single day.
The Art Market’s other three parts, “Galleries,” “Patrons,” and “Art Fairs,” will be released weekly through mid-June. And we’ll try to add them to this post, as they roll out.
It shouldn’t be especially controversial to point out that we live in a pivotal time in human history—that the actions we collectively take (or that plutocrats and technocrats take) will determine the future of the human species—or whether we even have a future in the coming centuries. The threats posed by climate change and war are exacerbated and accelerated by rapidly worsening economic inequality. Exponential advances in technology threaten to eclipse our ability to control machines rather than be controlled, or stamped out, by them.
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Where Kurzweil has seen this event through an optimistic, New Age lens, Hawking’s view seems more in line with dystopian sci-fi visions of robot apocalypse. “Success in AI would be the biggest event in human history,” he wrote in The Independent last year, “Unfortunately it might also be the last.” Given the design of autonomous weapons systems and, as he told the BBC, the fact that “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded,” the prospect looks chilling, but it isn’t inevitable.
Our tech isn’t actively out to get us. “The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence,” Hawking clarified, in a fascinating Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session last month. Due to the physicist’s physical limitations, readers posted questions and voted on their favorites. From these, Hawking elected the “ones he feels he can give answers to.” In response to a top-rated question about the so-called “Terminator Conversation,” he wrote, “A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.”
This problem of misaligned goals is not of course limited to our relationship with machines. Our precarious economic relationships with each other pose a separate threat, especially in the face of massive job loss due to future automation. We’d like to imagine a future where technology frees us of toil and want, the kind of society Buckminster Fuller sought to create. But the truth is that wealth and income inequality, at their highest levels in the U.S. since at least the Gilded Age, may determine a very different path—one we might think of in terms of “The ElysiumConversation.” Asked in the same AMA Reddit session, “Do you foresee a world where people work less because so much work is automated? Do you think people will always either find work or manufacture more work to be done?,” Hawking elaborated,
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
For decades after the Cold War, capitalism had the status of an unquestionably sacred doctrine—the end of history and the best of all possible worlds. Now, not only has Hawking identified its excesses as drivers of human decline, but so have other decidedly non-Marxist figures like Bill Gates, who in a recent Atlantic interview described the private sector as “in general inept” and unable to address the climate crisis because of its focus on short-term gains and maximal profits. “There’s no fortune to be made,” he said, from dealing with some of the biggest threats to our survival. But if we don’t deal with them, the losses are incalculable.
Why must we all work long hours to earn the right to live? Why must only the wealthy have access to leisure, aesthetic pleasure, self-actualization…? Everyone seems to have an answer, according to their political or theological bent. One economic bogeyman, so-called “trickle-down” economics, or “Reaganomics,” actually predates our 40th president by a few hundred years at least. The notion that we must better ourselves—or simply survive—by toiling to increase the wealth and property of already wealthy men was perhaps first comprehensively articulated in the 18th-century doctrine of “improvement.” In order to justify privatizing common land and forcing the peasantry into jobbing for them, English landlords attempted to show in treatise after treatise that 1) the peasants were lazy, immoral, and unproductive, and 2) they were better off working for others. As a corollary, most argued that landowners should be given the utmost social and political privilege so that their largesse could benefit everyone.
This scheme necessitated a complete redefinition of what it meant to work. In his study, The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements, historian W.E. Tate quotes from several of the “improvement” treatises, many written by Puritans who argued that “the poor are of two classes, the industrious poor who are content to work for their betters, and the idle poor who prefer to work for themselves.” Tate’s summation perfectly articulates the early modern redefinition of “work” as the creation of profit for owners. Such work is virtuous, “industrious,” and leads to contentment. Other kinds of work, leisurely, domestic, pleasurable, subsistence, or otherwise, qualifies—in an Orwellian turn of phrase—as “idleness.” (We hear echoes of this rhetoric in the language of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.) It was this language, and its legal and social repercussions, that Max Weber later documented in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Karl Marx reacted to in Das Capital, and feminists have shown to be a consolidation of patriarchal power and further exclusion of women from economic participation.
Along with Marx, various others have raised significant objections to Protestant, capitalist definitions of work, including Thomas Paine, the Fabians, agrarians, and anarchists. In the twentieth century, we can add two significant names to an already distinguished list of dissenters: Buckminster Fuller and Bertrand Russell. Both challenged the notion that we must have wage-earning jobs in order to live, and that we are not entitled to indulge our passions and interests unless we do so for monetary profit or have independent wealth. In a New York Times column on Russell’s 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,” Gary Gutting writes, “For most of us, a paying job is still utterly essential — as masses of unemployed people know all too well. But in our economic system, most of us inevitably see our work as a means to something else: it makes a living, but it doesn’t make a life.”
In far too many cases in fact, the work we must do to survive robs us of the ability to live by ruining our health, consuming all our precious time, and degrading our environment. In his essay, Russell argued that “there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what has always been preached.” His “arguments for laziness,” as he called them, begin with definitions of what we mean by “work,” which might be characterized as the difference between labor and management:
What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
Russell further divides the second category into “those who give orders” and “those who give advice as to what orders should be given.” This latter kind of work, he says, “is called politics,” and requires no real “knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given,” but only the ability to manipulate: “the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.” Russell then discusses a “third class of men” at the top, “more respected than either of the classes of the workers”—the landowners, who “are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work.” The idleness of landowners, he writes, “is only rendered possible by the industry of others. Indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.”
The “gospel of work” Russell outlines is, he writes, “the morality of the Slave State,” and the kinds of murderous toil that developed under its rule—actual chattel slavery, fifteen hour workdays in abominable conditions, child labor—has been “disastrous.” Work looks very different today than it did even in Russell’s time, but even in modernity, when labor movements have managed to gather some increasingly precarious amount of social security and leisure time for working people, the amount of work forced upon the majority of us is unnecessary for human thriving and in fact counter to it—the result of a still-successful capitalist propaganda campaign: if we aren’t laboring for wages to increase the profits of others, the logic still dictates, we will fall to sloth and vice and fail to earn our keep. “Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do,” goes the Protestant proverb Russell quotes at the beginning of his essay. On the contrary, he concludes,
…in a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity.
The less we are forced to labor, the more we can do good work in our idleness, and we can all labor less, Russell argues, because “modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all” instead of “overwork for some and starvation for others.”
A few decades later, visionary architect, inventor, and theorist Buckminster Fuller would make exactly the same argument, in similar terms, against the “specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.” Fuller articulated his ideas on work and non-work throughout his long career. He put them most succinctly in a 1970 New York magazine “Environmental Teach-In”:
It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest…. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.
Many people are paid very little to do backbreaking labor; many others paid quite a lot to do very little. The creation of surplus jobs leads to redundancy, inefficiency, and the bureaucratic waste we hear so many politicians rail against: “we have inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors”—all to satisfy a dubious moral imperative and to make a small number of rich people even richer.
What should we do instead? We should continue our education, and do what we please, Fuller argues: “The true business of people 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.” We should all, in other words, work for ourselves, performing the kind of labor we deem necessary for our quality of life and our social arrangements, rather than the kinds of labor dictated to us by governments, landowners, and corporate executives. And we can all do so, Fuller thought, and all flourish similarly. Fuller called the technological and evolutionary advancement that enables us to do more with less “euphemeralization.” InCritical Path, a visionary work on human development, he claimed “It is now possible to give every man, woman and child on Earth a standard of living comparable to that of a modern-day billionaire.”
Sound utopian? Perhaps. But Fuller’s far-reaching path out of reliance on fossil fuels and into a sustainable future has never been tried, for some depressingly obvious reasons and some less obvious. Neither Russell nor Fuller argued for the abolition—or inevitable self-destruction—of capitalism and the rise of a workers’ paradise. (Russell gave up his early enthusiasm for communism.) Neither does Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, who in his New York Times commentary on Russell asserts that “Capitalism, with its devotion to profit, is not in itself evil.” Most Marxists on the other hand would argue that devotion to profit can never be benign. But there are many middle ways between state communism and our current religious devotion to supply-side capitalism, such as robust democratic socialism or a basic income guarantee. In any case, what most dissenters against modern notions of work share in common is the conviction that education should produce critical thinkers and self-directed individuals, and not, as Gutting puts it, “be primarily for training workers or consumers”—and that doing work we love for the sake of our own personal fulfillment should not be the exclusive preserve of a propertied leisure class.
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