Recently, there's been a spate of articles about the virtues of slack, in this time of unemployment. CNN asks Are jobs obsolete? Thanks to automation and technology, the basic needs of society can be met using the productivity of a fraction of the population. So, the question becomes, what do the rest of us do?
So far, the answer seems to be the service economy, along with increasingly esoteric definitions of work and more frivolous things to spend money on. But, that runs out of steam, eventually. Most of us have too much to eat and all our time is spent working or consuming distracting amusements.
But, what if we're not driven to accumulate ever more marginally useful stuff, but rather reach a point where enough is enough. What, then, is the source of growth? In Work for post-materialists, the author confesses to being a “threshold earner”, as described by Tyler Cowen in The Inequality That Matters.
A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. [...] That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure—whether spending time with friends and family, walking in the woods and so on.
In the old days, before I was a respectable family man, I used to work consulting gigs. That business attracts some sleazy characters, but that's another rant for another time. Anyway, for a stretch of a few years, I managed to get summers off. I prefer to think of myself as a gentleman hacker, but I guess that's another word for threshold earner.
This phenomenon has a generational aspect to it. In The Experience Economy, David Brooks tells the tale of Sam, a hardworking American, born in 1900, who ran a business making brakes and his post-materialist grandson, Jared.
Sam’s grandson, Jared, was born in 1978. Jared wasn’t really drawn to the brake-systems business, which was withering in America. He works at a company that organizes conferences. He brings together fascinating speakers for lifelong learning. He writes a blog on modern art and takes his family on vacations that are more daring and exciting than any Sam experienced. Jared lives a much more intellectually diverse life than Sam. He loves Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and his iPhone apps. But many of these things are produced outside the conventional monetized economy. Most of the products are produced by people working for free. They cost nothing to consume.
But, while Jared is traipsing around the Burning Man festival in nothing but lime green body paint, someone has to do the dirty work. Soldiering, mining, cleaning hotel rooms, making car parts. Thinking about how we get some unfortunate people to do those unpleasant things in a world of overflowing plenty might not make you feel too good.
[Burning Man, Jim Urquhart/Reuters, Boston Globe]
Technology plays a role in generating high productivity in the first place, not to mention exaggerating inequality in the process, but also in providing cheap mostly-harmless virtual goods for us to consume. In 1996, William Gibson wrote The Net Is a Waste of Time. But, I've often had a different thought. The purpose of the internet is to absorb the excess productivity of mankind.
There's a lot to be said about the nature of work in the networked age: globalized, distributed, bursty. And thinking to be done about worthy purposes for all those liberated brain cycles, Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. But, we'll leave those for later. In the meantime, I hope you're enjoying my non-remunerative contribution to the post-materialist slacker geek-fest gift economy that is the internet.
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