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Readers know my answer, but what do you think? [Be great to hear your views]. Here’s my blog-sized case for “yes and yes.”
Can we?
It’s already happening.
- Less reliance on job income: The Shift Commission found that less of our income is coming from work, and more is coming from other sources, including dividends, investment income, and government programs like Social Security and disability insurance. Today, only half of personal income comes from wages and salaries, down from almost two-thirds in the 1960s (Slaughter et al., 2016).
- Less reliance on regular, full-time work: The gig economy is being driven by employers seeking to cut costs and avoid benefits, and employees seeking greater flexibility and freedom.
- Less matching of skills and requirements: Eberstadt’s (2016) Men without Work provides lots of useful data on why many men in the US have essentially given up on finding work, noting that since the early 1950s the work rate for adult men has declined by 18%. More and more people are simply left out of the world of work.
The shift to post-work could be happening much faster. The economy is generally becoming more productive (avoiding the “problems with GDP” issue here), but instead of working less, we have been consuming more, so we need to keep working to pay for that consumption. Perhaps the Great Resignation signals a reversal to working less and consuming less?
Should we?
The “should we” has a lot to do with work’s central role in our identity, in structuring daily life structure, and in distributing income.
Just like above, the changes are already happening.
- Our sense of identity is evolving beyond work: The Great Resignation is just one indicator that maybe work is not as central to who we are as it has historically been. The larger social trend is a general question of our preferred identity (she/her/hers).
- The 9-5 structure is crumbling: Gigging, along with globalized and virtual work is already making the 9-5 a quaint historical remembrance for many. [NOTE: I’ll finish this post after my 11:00pm lecture].
- Distributing income: definitely the hardest of the three, but automation and AI are increasingly important factors in productivity that should increase the bounty to be distributed
If you ask most people if they want their job, they will probably say no [I plead the 5th]. Sure, some people really do enjoy their work, but it is not likely the majority. And those who don’t, don’t really want the job per se, but the security it provides. So, let’s provide the security!
Have at it — what do you think? – Andy Hines
I might add a question to your inquiry: “Are we?”. I heard something today that made me pause. Felix Oberholzer-Gee says that over the past two years, for white collar workers “output was amazingly stable…with the really important twist that it took them between 20-25% longer to create the same kind of work”. What??? It was difficult for me to find the data that substantiated this as so many articles conflated pre- and post-pandemic work data. Anecdotally, what I have seen is people floating end and out of work and other responsibilities without the clear delineations we had in the past. Love to know what others think!
I remember seeing some reasonably convincing data that we work less than we think, because of the blurring Timothy mentioned below. We put in a load of laundry, run to the gym, talk to the kids, etc., and maybe it all get lumped into work. It actually fits with my thought that overall most of us are working less (even those like me who think they are not)
Mina, “Are we?” is a very good question. I think the Shift Commission findings point more towards increasing non-work income being an indicator of increasing socio-economic instability and inequality than it does to a post-work future.
From their 2017 report: “The third trend is that less of our income is coming from work, and more is coming from other sources, including dividends, investment income, and government programs like Social Security and disability insurance. Today, only half of personal income comes from wages and salaries, down from almost two-thirds in the 1960s. This shift has contributed to rising inequality, since a higher share of investment income goes to the rich. And as more income flows from non-work sources, the role and meaning of work potentially shift.”
That reads more like the convergance of Boomer Retirement Wave + Rentier Economy + Unstable Employment Environment than it does a positive shift to a gig-by-choice work model. Andy’s reply about arguments that we are working less than we think, while almost certainly true for some, are not universal. I think that phenomena, along with related ones like Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” (https://bit.ly/35hfhZ8), point to this being an era of socio-economic squeeze due to decades of vastly increased worker productivity, obscenely high profit-taking & rent-seeking starting at the top 10% of income earners ($173k+ https://bit.ly/3Hv0wyH otherwise known as those who can afford to buy homes & invest), and accelerating dramatically as we get to the top 1% & 0.1%.
I think the “Great Resignation” is driven more by Covid-lockdown backlash among those who suddenly found themselves with a decent level of “screw you, boss” savings from COVID-lockdown prompted personal austerity, plus a dramatic increase in service sector wages prompting migration away from lower paying factory & other stagnant wage blue collar jobs.
All that said, I think the best argument for a plausible Non-workers Paradise future is to tie Andy’s Consumer Shift values emergence theory with Teilhard’s Noosphere theory. The two are complimentary because both are developmental theories based on evolution of increasing complexity of consciousness. Teilhard considered the noosphere to be the latest natural evolution of dominant natural layers of the earth (barysphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, & now noosphere). Teilhard’s noosphere (with a little boost from Meme/Teme theory) is an emergence of increasingly complex thoughts & beliefs populating socially connected human minds in response to increasing socially-created environmental complexity. (Aside, there are an as yet unidentified set of social complexity feedback loops implied which should be formally explored).
Consumer Shift theory thus becomes a specific framework for exploring how certain aspects of Teilhard’s Noosphere has evolved previously, and appears to be evolving now.
So from the data above, it appears that *some* segments of society are shifting from the Traditional+Modern ownership+productivity growth view of capital/economics to an emerging Postmodern+Integral meaning+systems view of economics. Basically, the older views of capital & wealth are meeting active attempts to redefine or replace them with socially healthier concepts & dynamics.
The thing to remember is that evolution tends to produce complex adaptive ecosystems. If so, then the Noosphere is a cognitive ecosystem. Ecosystems adapt to changes, which is why they tend to increase in complexity. Ecosystems also tend to come to a new equilibrium when changes happen. That means that the old Traditional+Modern capitalism alliance (which formed after a few centuries of their own struggle) is adapting to the Postmodern+Integral social economics emergence. The non-work signals then point to the current adaptive struggle between the old paradigm and the new. The rentier aspect of Capitalism is being broadened to include others either via their own investments in abstract constructs like stocks or 401k funds or more commons-based wealth rebalancing benefits like Social Security.
None of those can expand out to include everyone in society as long as the foundation of wealth is Property + Labor. Someone has to “own” and someone else has to “work” for the system to feed money & resources into the mix. Unless, we look at other signals pointing at how we can shift to different resource allocation systems and different “rewards” for doing productive work in a way that is not work-for-wages. I would look to the following themes for those: Decentralization/Democratization of tech & supply chains, New Localism movements like Strong Towns, DIY & “maker” movements based on Knowledge & Resource sharing (Knowledge & Resource Commons), Gamification of work, and sustainable/democratized tech movements.
My favorite example of the last one is an online publication called “Low-Tech Magazine”. It specializes in showing how applying current knowledge via older, more sustainable tech can provide both economic and ecological resilience. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/
As a high-potential-underachieving middle school student, I was assessed by a school psychologist who, in the assessment interview, asked me what was the difference between work and play. I responded that work was what one had to do, while play was what one preferred to do. Of course, we know that work as a concept has largely shifted from what Shoshana Zuboff called, “the laboring body”, to ever more passive activities. The one thing that I would add is that work is much less recursive, by and large, and much more project centered giving rise to adhocratic forms that range from musical ensembles, sports teams, construction work, etc., where one is brought in for a given task and often released to move onto another project, either with an existing organization or as an independent contractor. Ultimately I’d say that the line between work and play has blurred for many ,including myself.
Thanks for bringing up project work. I didn’t think of it when writing my response.
Agreed! We had blurring as a huge factor in our study of emerging student needs. Am I learning, working, playing, connecting, etc?
Andy I am thinking that you post reflects well on the people like you and me – the knowledge workers, those who have more power and ‘white’. I am not sure this is reality for those who are the working poor, holding down several jobs, hardly seeing their partner because one works day shift and one night shift. We were talking about this in a conversation last night in our Ōtautahi Futures Collective. Gig economy meets my needs exactly as you mention. But gig for others is not reality. Thoughts?
Agreed, it’s the challenge of doing all-too-brief blog post on very complex topics. One must be in a level of “existential security” to be able to make the gigger choice. Nonetheless, should the knowledge workers choose to move toward post-work, as appears to be happening, that does have implications for the whole system.
On the class dimension of work, no doubt the economically insecure have it tougher as they always have. Now and moving forward, I daresay that their challenges are largely not over doing things that can cause loss of life and limb, and instead involve more emotionally taxing work (smile duty) in low-end service jobs where they bear the brunt of the customer always being right.