Where's my leisure society, dude?

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen.

In the late 1960s my primary school teachers were telling us that they were helping to educate us for leisure as well as for work because when we were adults our country would be able to produce enough wealth for us not to have to work such long hours.

Well, they were right and they were wrong: actually our country arguably does produce enough wealth for us all to live well enough without having to work 60 hour weeks or even less. Perhaps even only 15 hours. Perhaps someone's done the sums (let me know if you have come across them). Certainly in terms of productivity and capability in comparison with the 1960s it's hard to believe we couldn't possibly. In this respect, I reckon, my teachers and Keynes were right.

Obviously, they were wrong because ... austerity! By that I mean that we are in a situation where the idea of only needing to work for a fraction of the time many currently work seems ridiculous. Especially as there are many who feel that they would need to work more to be free from miserable conditions of life.

Part of the clue to why this might be so is in the policies Keynes proposed and which were being enacted between the start of the 1950s and the mid 1970s (and which produced what the Cambridge economist Ha Joon Chang calls the 'golden age' in relation to the political economy of the West). These were key in bringing about a period of time in which my teachers and those they were influenced by could seriously envisage the leisure society. After all it was a period when the gap between the wealth of the richest and that of the poorest was diminished allowing millions to be raised out of poverty. Productivity was growing. (Obviously this scared the would-be plutocrats who plotted to put this stuff into reverse).

So, I guess in short, the main answer to my query about what happened to my eagerly-anticipated leisure society is that it was smuggled away when the foundations for it were substituted by extractive rentier capitalism given a fig leaf of respectability of the superficially plausible Chicago school economics  and the idea of trickle down prosperity (Chang does a good job of showing how this rather one-dimensional approach to economics really isn't adequate).

What we need to remember is that economic activity is socialised at root. The reason why an arch capitalist like Henry Ford would pay his workers more than subsistence wages was a self-interested-but-enlightened recognition that for him to sell stuff, people had to be able to buy it. The name of the capitalist game is to find systems and ideological justifications to extract and suck up to the 1% as much as possible of the wealth that pretty much the whole of society is involved in producing and circulating. What Keynsian policies did was to offset some of the more egregious ways that this wealth-mining takes place and to re-settle the wealth back with those who actually produced much of the value in the first place.

One of the things that has bearing on this is the idea of a Citizen's Income or Basic Income Guarantee. It's been a policy of the Green Party in Britain since the 1970's and seen as likely in the book The History of the Future in 100 Objects (an intriguing read, btw). It would be one way to try to keep wealth from floating off into the stratosphere of offshore banking and ridiculously OTT property bubbles (which, remember, drive up prices for all of us and provide a further extractive mechanism for the already hyper rich).

Redistributive economic mechanism are a vital way to keep the economy balanced and serving the many. The BIG experiment seems to indicate that people will still work and it won't demotivate work being done. It would enable some people to do what turns out to be socially useful stuff 'for free' so to speak.

If, as many Christians would argue, it is true that humans are created to enjoy adding value to creation and to enjoy exercising creativity, learning and helping others (notwithstanding whatever distortions fallenness represents in those things), then we should expect that given opportunity people will indeed make efforts to do things which turn out to work towards the good of many others. The genuinely lazy and parasitical turn out to be relatively rare especially in circumstances where there is a genuine sense of belonging, inclusion and pride in playing ones part.

What we need, as Christians, to recall is that fallenness generally acts upon the already or in-principle good to distort, pervert or weaponise it. Our task in a fallen world is to work to preserve, enhance or even make more goodness and to undistort, revert and ploughshar-ise what has been caught up in fallen usage. We can expect some success in all of this because the Spirit of God still hovers over creation to empower ordering and teeming and redeeming.

The attractiveness of beauty, truth, goodness and love will always draw people (who are created to be drawn) to work with God whether or not they can name or recognise their activity as such.

I would expect 'my' leisure society to be filled with huge amounts of productive 'work' being done, in a sense, for free. Why? Because it would be enjoyable, fulfilling and create social bonds, respect and recognition.

Check out:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-mincome-experiment-dauphin?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs - STRIKE!: