A World Without Work

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.

nytimes