In the early fifties, the science fiction author Kurt Vonnegut wrote a prophetic novel, Player Piano, about automation. In the novel, low skilled workers made redundant are given make work, but the workers know it is make work, and that leads to social unrest. In our world, it is often well educated people, with non science skills, who are given make work, which is the point made in the article.
I wouldn't get too excited about anything Keynes penned, I rather look at him and Hayek like the Sigmund Freuds of economics: technically wrong with the benefit of modern hindsight, but very important in getting us to a better place.
However both were smart men who said some things of value that seem to be true still even if the greater body of their work didn't hold up over time; in particular, Keynes once quipped: "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."
With all that said, here's my take: I am of two minds on this.
In the first mind, I agree with the article (except for its unnecessary political jabs against strawmen that don't contribute to its substance) because there's more to work than productivity. There are also cultural considerations, that you wake up and go to work so often for so long. It isn't a deliberate conspiracy per se but there is definitely a group of people who have power who are enforcing the 40 hour week.
Over time how much we work is trending down, many attribute it to labor unions but I see them as incidental to a collective realization that it made economic sense to pare down to the now standard 40 hour work week. It used to be everyone worked every day for at least 11-12 hours because tedious tasks like picking cotton took that long.
Even now, casual days, flextime, telecommuting are freeing small numbers of people. I benefit from flextime myself, and I could reduce my cost of living and stress incredibly if my employer would allow telecommuting on any kind of consistent basis.
In fact before I started, it was apparently normal for about half the office to be out telecommuting on a given day. Considering I can analyze data extracts anywhere with an internet connection, this makes sense to me.
However this alarmed the senior staff, who were panicking that no one was at their desk, and telecommuting was restricted to special circumstances like working on vacations or weekends only. I have literally heard one person tell me he was concerned that when working from home, employees were prioritizing the most important tasks first and getting their work done in just a few hours and not really doing anything the rest of the time. But he wasn't concerned with giving them more work (there are good reasons he can't easily always do this I won't go into) he was concerned with seeing them pound sand for eight hors. An observer from outside the organization (like a brand new employee) can see how absurd this concern is. Cultural conservatism (which I don't condemn, it has benefits too) backfires.
On the one hand this has been good because a lot of external reports get reviewed now. On the downside, the reviewing is just done to fill time and isn't that productive all considered. Also this is work that any reasonable person who can type a grammatically coherent sentence could perform, you don't need degreed people for this. If I were in charge, we'd have a web portal where you could create an account, read and write the review summaries and we'd have one person whose duties would include feedback and approval on the summaries. We'd open it up to the public, it'd be the perfect work from home job for a legitimately needed service and a great job for a disabled person or just a good way to make $5 when you were bored at 11 PM.
I don't know how to program it myself exactly but I know it could be done with some development, and we have the resources to make it. But that's exactly the kind of thinking my management can't stand: using resources to automate tasks to eliminate time spent on them in the office is so counter to their thinking.
I'm 32, and I hear constantly from those twenty years and more my senior we should work like they did for the sake of living as they have. It's true, my industry used to be a lot more time intensive, using columnar paper and colored pencils to do the same work I now do in minutes with software. I should have to do long tedious things too. They don't phrase it that way, but that's what they mean.
It's perfectly understandable really, if you can remember spending your youth going to school for 9 hours a day, then coming home and doing chores for 5 hours, then homework for 3 hours, none of which involved sports or extracurricular activities, and you spent most of your twenties and thirties working 84 hours a week in entry level positions (my own father spent his twenties working 6 days a week, 12-14 hours a day as an engineer), you might resent younger people who have no concept of such a world.
Of course not all people have this attitude, my grandmother for instance toiled most of her life and broke her body doing hard work, and it was her sincere wish to see a world where people didn't have to do that any more. She reportedly wept for joy when I graduated from college. She later told me that was such a proud moment for her because it made her feel like all her hard work was for a reason. She'd be thrilled if the automated society came to pass.
But there does seem to be a strong social craving to preserve a norm for the sake of a norm. While I rued that social conservatism was working against us, one of the benefits of conservatism is that it shields us from the unpredictable.
I don't know if we're ready for a society where "work" looks like people lacadaiscally strolling about, stopping to hit buttons for a few minutes every once in a while, and then resuming their reverie. I mean really would most people suddenly start producing music? It's nice to think so, but there's a famous saying about idle hands.
I see how the reduced work time could and really should happen for many, I truly do, but I don't think Keynes foresaw the cultural barriers.
The reality is, I see in my own job that while I do some things of value and necessity, I see ways I could easily have a four hour workday. Not at all times during the year of course, but there's similarly no reason they couldn't just give me entire months off after a busy season, it'd be the same effect.
Ironically, I only got to do a job that has some actual value because I spent years in jobs I knew were, to borrow the article's phrase, bull shit jobs.
The flipside of this is, if you actually let someone in a position like mine just work four hours a day, do you pay me only half as much? The implication seems to be that the bulk of what I get paid is earned in my productive time, so if we're really trying to make economic sense, I should be getting paid roughly the same for providing those services timely regardless of how long it takes me to perform them.
Let's say culturally, we can get over that emotional hangup that so many people should earn that kind of money for "part time" work and we put that four hour day in place.
What's the first thing I'm going to do? Get another job, it doesn't matter if it's a job at McDonald's, any other job going directly to my savings would mean YEARS off my working career. I'm a more desirable employee than the average person in any number of jobs not related to my "main" job. Granted, I would quit it after I had reached my FI goal, but in the short term am I not displacing someone else from the labor pool?
What's more is because of conflicts of interest and the relative complexity of other jobs requiring training I can't easily get (for example being a doctor and a lawyer at the same time is possible but hard to achieve), my secondary career is not likely to be something highly skilled, more likely it is to be something with a low barrier to entry, meaning I would displace someone with fewer economic opportunities than I have.
Is that something we can handle? Huge swarms of unemployable people displaced by the better educated? Of course most people with a white collar job seem to think they're "too good" for such jobs despite the heroic work hours culture.
But the point is, each person not filling up 40 hours a week at work might be something we're not ready for yet either. Handfuls of people are figuring it out I think, FI forums are full of the self employed. But only people with high skilled technical trades whose work can easily be subdivided or freelanced can viably become self employed. That's not most of us until cultural considerations change.
I think we'll find new social conventions to make such a world work and it will work out in time, but predictions are usually wrong.
the ignorant and foolish believe in indefinite growth
It is precisely because of the thimble full of intelligence I possess that I believe it's quite foolish to surmise there's some kind of "cap" on what humanity can achieve for itself in an economic sense or any other sense.
It's probably not correct to assume growth can continue indefinitely, surely we're constrained at some point, but that assumption is probably more correct than assuming anything else in a pre-singularity world.
It was predicted at several points that:
- A rocket would never leave Earth's atmosphere. Also manned space travel was impossible.
- There would never be 6 or 7 billion people, long before that most people would start starving to death and the world population would never reach such levels.
- Trains could never travel as quickly as stagecoaches. Additionally, the automobile was a niche technology that would never rise beyond the capabilities it had at the dawn of the twentieth century.
- There would only be a handful of computers by now, perhaps as many as a dozen depending on who you ask, and each unit would weigh around a ton.
- The Iphone would have little to no market share.
- Interest rates would go up.
And so on, and so on. Many very intelligent people with the best education, shrewd intellects and razor sharp wits have been rendered apparent (but not actual) fools in hindsight by saying it couldn't be done, that humanity was somehow limited.
Science is great, it is fantastic and wonderful and we should all do more science. However we should avoid scientism very carefully. Indeed it anecdotally seems the only people who can get the future right sometimes are those who use intuitive, emotion based interpretations and personal speculations, such as fiction writers. It seems the more technical, the more grounded in facts and details, a prediction is the more likely it is time eventually makes the predictor look silly. That actually makes a great deal of sense to me, someone focusing on the speculative can guess where the facts might ultimately wind up than someone who is more focused on understanding the implications of current facts. I'd guess if we could test it somehow, we might be able to conclude that the more creative the thinking is, the more likely it seems to be to actually occur.
I suggest to the reader it's worthwhile to speculate whether scientific thinking, which is constrained by evidentialism, is not in and of itself limited in what understanding it can impart due to incompleteness (incompleteness in the Gödelian sense).
Of course this may be a self fulfilling prophecy in some cases: other people see the idea and consciously or subconsciously try to make it happen. I can't argue any of this conclusively either way of course, who could?
I am just posting some food for thought that perhaps science in and of itself is but one tool in our species' cognitive toolbox, and that perhaps it's not so foolish to assume growth is unlimited at this point in time.
However if anyone reading this can predict the entire future accurately in a way not attributable to simple luck, you are a better human being than I and at least ten orders of magnitude more intelligent and I salute you for it. There's a million perfectly intelligent predictions made every moment every day and most of them seem to be wrong despite being reasonable and well grounded.