Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness

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pages: 336 words: 83,903

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

Rifkin, J. (2000) The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Work-Force and the Dawn of a Post-Market Era, London: Penguin. Russell, B. (1918) Proposed Roads to Freedom, New York: Blue Ribbon Books. Russell, B. (2004a) In Praise of Idleness, Abingdon, New York: Routledge. (Original work published 1935.) Russell, B. (2004b) ‘Education and Discipline’, in B. Russell (ed) In Praise of Idleness, pp 141–147. Abingdon, New York: Routledge. (Original work published 1935.) Russell, B. (2004c) ‘In Praise of Idleness’ in B. Russell (ed) In Praise of Idleness, pp 1–15. Abingdon, New York: Routledge. Russell, B. (2004d) ‘“Useless” Knowledge’, in B. Russell (ed) In Praise of Idleness, pp 16–27. Abingdon, New York: Routledge.

FOUR * * * The stronghold of work Of course there is a humanitarian side of the shorter day and the shorter week, but dwelling on that subject is likely to get one in trouble, for then leisure may be put before work rather than after work – where it belongs. Henry Ford (cited in Hunnicutt, 1988: 46) In his essay ‘In Praise of Idleness’, Bertrand Russell wasted no time in getting to his point: ‘I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what has always been preached’ (Russell, 2004c: 1). Like the critics of work introduced in Chapter 1, Russell advocated a society-wide reduction of working hours, to be combined with a more equal distribution of the necessary labour.

ONE * * * A provocation Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever. Bertrand Russell – ‘In Praise of Idleness’ (2004c: 15) In his 1972 book Working, Studs Terkel collected transcripts from over a hundred interviews with working Americans, providing an intricate snapshot of American life from an astonishing range of perspectives (Terkel, 2004). In this enormous book, we hear from welders, waiters, cab drivers, housewives, actors and telephone operators, as each discuss their hopes, fears and everyday experiences at work.


pages: 172 words: 50,777

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

‘Productivity Management Software Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report by Deployment (On-Premise, Cloud), by Enterprise (Large Enterprise, SME), by Solution, by Region, and Segment Forecasts, 2021–2028’, Grand View Research, July 2021, https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/productivity-management-software-market 49. Bertrand Russell, ‘In Praise of Idleness’, In Praise of Idleness and Other Stories (Routledge, 2004 [1935]) 50. Charlie Giattino and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, ‘Are We Working More Than Ever?’, 16 December 2020, Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever 51. Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth, ‘Work from Home & Productivity: Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data on IT Professionals’, Becker Friedman Institute, 13 July 2021, https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/2021-56/ 52.

Reimagining the Workplace for the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2020) McGilchrist, Iain, Ways of Attending: How Our Divided Brain Constructs the World (Routledge, 2019) Massey, Doreen, ‘A Global Sense of Place’, Marxism Today, June 1991, http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/91_06_24.pdf Russell, Bertrand, ‘In Praise of Idleness’, In Praise of Idleness and Other Stories (Routledge, 2004 [1935]) Saval, Nikil, Cubed: The Secret History of the Workplace (Doubleday, 2014) Saxenian, Annalee: Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard University Press, 1996) Scarry, Richard, What Do People Do All Day?

., Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin Press, 2009) Frayne, David, The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work (Zed, 2015) Graeber, David, Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It (Allen Lane, 2018) Horowitz, Sara, Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up (Random House, 2021) Jaffe, Sarah, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone (Hurst, 2021) Jeevan, Sharath, Intrinsic: A Manifesto to Reignite Our Inner Drive (Endeavour, 2021) Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (Harvard University Press, 1972) Mayer, Colin, Firm Commitment: Why the Corporation is Failing Us and How to Restore Trust in It (Oxford University Press, 2013) Newport, Cal, Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success in a Distracted World (Piatkus, 2016) Russell, Bertrand, ‘In Praise of Idleness’, In Praise of Idleness (Routledge Classics, 2004 [1935]) Shafik, Minouche, What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract (Bodley Head, 2021) Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle (Penguin, 2002 [1906]) Soojung-Kim Pang, Alex, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less (Penguin Life, 2017) Wooldridge, Adrian, The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World (Allen Lane, 2021) Chapter 4: Shift 4: New Networks Baker, Wayne, Networking Smart: How to Build Relationships for Personal and Organizational Success (McGraw-Hill, 1994) Burt, Ronald S., Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital (Oxford University Press, 2007) Cairncross, Frances, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution is Changing Our Lives (Harvard Business Review Press, 2001) Christakis, Nicholas A., and James H.


pages: 370 words: 94,968

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Greenberg, and Bennett Battaile, “Modeling the Interaction of Light Between Diffuse Surfaces,” Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH Proceedings) 18, no. 3 (July 1984), pp. 213–22. 2 Devon Penney, personal interview. 3 Eduardo Hurtado, “Instrucciones para pintar el cielo” (“How to Paint the Sky”), translated by Mónica de la Torre, in Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico, edited by Luis Cortés Bargalló and Forrest Gander (Louisville, Ky.: Sarabande Books, 2006). 4 Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness,” in In Praise of Idleness, and Other Essays (New York: Norton, 1935).

.: MIT Press, 2004), and his famous criticism of the Loebner Prize is “Lessons from a Restricted Turing Test,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, April 1993. 24 “The art of general conversation”: Russell, Conquest of Happiness. 25 Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Boston: Shambhala, 2006). 26 “Commence relaxation”: This was from a television ad for Beck’s beer. For more information, see Constance L. Hays, “Can Teutonic Qualities Help Beck’s Double Its Beer Sales in Six Years?” New York Times, November 12, 1998. 27 Bertrand Russell, “ ‘Useless’ Knowledge,” in In Praise of Idleness, and Other Essays (New York: Norton, 1935); emphasis mine. 28 Aristotle on friendship: In The Nicomachean Ethics, specifically books 8 and 9.

It was a very exquisite art, bringing the highest faculties into play for the sake of something completely evanescent. But who in our age cares for anything so leisurely? … The competitive habit of mind easily invades regions to which it does not belong. Take, for example, the question of reading. –BERTRAND RUSSELL For some reason I begin enjoying books much less when I’m almost done with them, because some inner drive starts yearning for “completion.” The beginning of the book is about pleasure and exploration, the end is about follow-through and completeness, which interest me much less.10 Somehow I’m particularly susceptible to this notion of purpose or project completion.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930), Essays in Persuasion. http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf 2. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848), Book IV, Chapter VI. http://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlP61.html 3. Quoted from Bertrand Russell’s essay, “In Praise of Idleness” (1932). http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html 4. Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, “The End of Shorter Hours,” Labor History (Summer 1984), pp. 373-404. 5. Ibid. 6. Samuel Crowther, “Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days’ Work With Six Days’ Pay,” World’s Work. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/HENRY_FORD:_Why_I_Favor_Five_Days’_Work_With_Six_Days’_Pay 7.

Most countries have seen these “hour-invariant costs” rise in recent years. See: Juliet Schor, “The Triple Dividend,” p. 9. 56. Nielsen Company, “Americans Watching More TV Than Ever.” http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2009/americans-watching-more-tv-than-ever.html See also: http://www.statisticbrain.com/television-watching-statistics 57. Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932). 3 Why We Should Give Free Money to Everyone 1. This is a very conservative estimate. A study conducted by the British government put the amount at £ 30,000 per homeless person per year (for social services, police, legal costs, etc.). In this case the amount would even have been much higher as they were the most notorious vagrants.

However, it is bleak, if we have no hope of anything better. “Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change,” the British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote. Elsewhere he continued, “It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.” To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization. BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872–1970) 2 A 15-Hour Workweek Had you asked the greatest economist of the 20th century what the biggest challenge of the 21st would be, he wouldn’t have had to think twice.


pages: 376 words: 91,192

Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations by Garson O'Toole

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, en.wikipedia.org, Honoré de Balzac, Internet Archive, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, ought to be enough for anybody, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Steve Jobs, Wayback Machine, Yogi Berra

This name might be a reference to the noted Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith, but QI has not found definitive evidence to disambiguate the moniker:10 Which brings to mind Meredith’s words: “Time enjoyed wasted, is not wasted time.” In his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,” Bertrand Russell said that work hours per week should be dramatically reduced. This essay does not contain the adage. The following excerpt is included simply to suggest why Russell was a plausible candidate for originating the term:11 The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organisation of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world.

., “On Looking Up Words in the Dictionary,” an address delivered at the William Quan Judge Theosophical Club Meeting, May 27, 1927, in Theosophical Path 33, no. 1 (July 1927). Text is based on a 2003 Kessinger reprint. Verified in a Google Books entry that is no longer viewable. 11. Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (London: Routledge Classics, 2004). Accessed in Google Books, https://goo.gl/tNuqr8. 12. Laurence J. Peter, Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (New York: William Morrow, 1977), 299. Verified in hard copy. 13. Elizabeth Knowles, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Quotations in Oxford Reference Online, s.v.

Here is the confusing entry for a Bertrand Russell quotation:12 The thing that I should wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security. —Bertrand Russell (The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.) The parenthetical comment after the name Bertrand Russell was not written by Russell. It was added by Peter. This helps to explain why the saying under investigation is sometimes attributed to Russell and sometimes to Peter. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations uncovered this problem and mentioned it in a valuable section about misquotations.13 By 2000 the adage was being credited to the famous musician John Lennon, who died in 1980.


pages: 354 words: 93,882

How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, call centre, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deskilling, Easter island, financial independence, full employment, Gordon Gekko, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, moral panic, New Urbanism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, spinning jenny, three-martini lunch, Torches of Freedom, trade route, wage slave, work culture

Reinstein, Boris, ' International May Day and American Labor Day: A HOLIDAY Expressing Working Class Emancipation Versus A HOLIDAY Exalting Labor' s Chains ' (New York: National Executive Committee, Socialist Labor Party, 1 9 1 3) . Rimbaud, Penny, Shibboleth: My Revolting Life (Oakland, Calif. : AK Press, 1 999) . Rogers, Cameron, The Magnificent Idler: The Story of Walt Whitman (London: Heinemann, 1 926) . Russell, Bertrand, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (London: Routledge, 2004) . Russell, Bertrand et aI, Why Work? Arguments for the Leisure Society, ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1 983) . Sartre, Jean-Paul, Nausea, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2000) . Saunders, Nicholas, Ecstasy Reconsidered (London: N. Saunders, 1 997) .

Work in the fields has for a long time evaded the ticking of the clock, permitting country dwellers to harmonize their time with that of nature . . . How did the bloody-minded and freedom-loving Brits allow themselves to become servants of capitalism, a ' Slave State ' as Bertrand Russell put it, in his 1 932 essay ' In Praise of Idleness ' ? The great problem of the Industrial Revolution was how to transform a population of strongwilled, independent-minded, heavy-drinking, partyorientated, riot -loving, life-loving Englishmen into a docile, disciplined, grateful workforce. In 1 835, a prominent moralizing philosopher - today we call them management gurus - called Andrew Ure wrote a book called Philosophy of Manufactures, aimed at the new bosses, in which he wrote of the difficulty of dealing with a nation of idlers and gave advice on brainwashing.

In the sixties and seventies , there was a common belief that all household tasks would one day be performed by robots wearing artificial bow ties, leaving us free to lie around napping, as in Woody Allen ' s classic film Sleeper. But the reality is that technology has been a complete disaster when it comes to lightening the load. Laboursaving devices have not saved any labour. In his essential text ' In Praise of Idleness ' , Bertrand Russell gives the example of a pin factory. In this pin factory, the workers work eight hours a day, and that produces enough pins for the world ' s needs. Then a technological advance appears: Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Keynes called them “our advanced guard,” imagining them up ahead in a world with less work, “spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there.”36 Wassily Leontief invoked them as well, writing that “those who ask what the average working man and woman could do with so much free time forget that in Victorian England the ‘upper classes’ did not seem to have been demoralized by their idleness. Some went hunting, others engaged in politics, and still others created some of the greatest poetry, literature, and science the world has known.”37 Bertrand Russell, a philosopher and a member of the British upper classes himself, captured his views about his prosperous peers in a famous essay, “In Praise of Idleness.” He argued that “a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work,” and that “the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.” It seemed to him that the leisure class “contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilisation … Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.”38 He thought no one should be obliged to work more than four hours a day, leaving people free to devote themselves to the arts, sciences, literature, and economics.

Pierre-Michel Menger calls this “the French Paradox.” He set it out in a presentation titled “What Is Work Worth (in France)?,” prepared for the “Work in the Future” symposium, 6 February 2018, organized by Robert Skidelsky. 36.  Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, p. 368. 37.  Leontief, “National Perspective,” p. 7. 38.  Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 3 and 13. 39.  Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 1994). 40.  G. A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (London: Harvard University Press, 2001). 41.  See http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/story-of-england/victorian/religion/ (accessed 24 April 2018). 42.  

“The Supreme Court Forecasting Project: Legal and Political Science Approaches to Predicting Supreme Court Decisionmaking.” Columbia Law Review 104, no. 4 (2004): 1150–1210. Russakovsky, Olga, Jia Deng, Hao Su, et al. “ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge.” International Journal of Computer Vision 115, no. 3 (2015): 211–52. Russell, Bertrand. In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays. New York: Routledge, 2004. Saez, Emmanuel. “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States.” Published online at https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/ (2016). Saez, Emmanuel, and Thomas Piketty. “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998.”


pages: 1,327 words: 360,897

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

., The Radical Papers (Montréal: Black Rose, 1987) Rubin, Jerry, Do It! (Cape, 1970) Russell, Bertrand, Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916) (Allen & Unwin, 1971) Russell, Bertrand, Roads to Freedom; Socialism, Anarchism, Syndicalism (1918) (Allen & Unwin, 1973) Russell, Bertrand, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935) (Allen & Unwin, 1963) Russell, Bertrand, Power: A New Social Analysis (Basis Books, 1940) Russell, Bertrand, Authority and the Individual (Allen & Unwin, 1949) Russell, Bertrand, History of Western Philosophy (Allen & Unwin, 1962) Russell, Bertrand, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 2 vols. (Allen & Unwin, 1968) Sampson, Ronald, The Anarchist Basis of Pacifism (Peace Pledge Union, 1970) Sampson, Ronald, Tolstoy on the Causes of War (Peace Pledge Union, 1987) Santillan, D.

., II, 154 18 Harper, ‘Russell and the Anarchists’, op. cit., p. 75 19 Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932) (Allen & Unwin, 1963), p. 11 20 Preface to Principles of Social Reconstruction, op. cit. 21 Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (Chatto & Windus, 1937), p. 63 22 Ibid., p. 70 23 Ibid. 24 Huxley, Science, Liberty and Peace (Chatto & Windus, 1947), p. 6 25 Ibid., p. 41 26 Ibid., p. 44 27 Huxley, Island (Frogmore, St Albans: Triad/Panther, 1976), p. 169 28 Ibid., p. 171 29 Ibid., p. 249 30 Ibid., p. 97 31 Quoted in Philip Thody, Aldous Huxley (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), p. 128 32 Martin Buber, ‘Society and the State’ (1950), reprinted in Anarcky 54 (August 1965), pp. 241–2 33 Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (1949) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 39 34 Ibid., pp. 137, 134 35 See John Ellerby, ‘Martin Buber’, Anarcky, 54 (August 1965), p. 230 36 Lewis Mumford, ‘Authoritarian and Democratic Technics’, Questioning Technology, eds.

., p. 432. 19 Orwell, ‘Politics vs. Literature’ (1946), ibid., p. 405. Cf. Shaw, ‘The Impossibilities of Anarchism’, op. cit., p. 508 20 Godwin, Political Justice (1798 edn.), op. cit., I, 168 21 Joll, The Anarchists, op. cit., p. 259 22 Orwell, Poetry Quarterly (Autumn 1945) 23 See Russell, In Praise of Idleness, op. cit., p. 11 24 Shaw, ‘The Impossibilities of Anarchism’, op. cit., p. 508 25 Camillo Berneri, ‘The Problem of Work’ (1938), Why Work? Arguments for the Leisure Society, ed. Vernon Richards (Freedom Press, 1983), p. 74 26 Adresse à tous les travailleurs (30 May 1968) (Paris: Comité Enragés - Internationale Situationniste, 1968) 27 G.


Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism. London: Unwin Books. —Â�—Â�—. 1932/1976. “In Praise of Idleness.” In Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays, 11–25. London: Unwin Paperbacks. Sala-Â�i-Â�Martin, Xavier, and Jeffrey Sachs. 1991. “Fiscal Federalism and Optimal Currency Areas: Evidence for EuÂ�rope from the United States.” NBER Working Paper no. 3855, October. http://Â�w ww╉.Â�nber╉.Â�org╉/Â�papers╉/Â�w3855. Sala╉-Â�i╉-Â�Martin, Xavier, and Arvind Subramanian. 2003. “Addressing the NatuÂ�ral Resource Curse: An Illustration from Nigeria.” NBER Working Paper no. 9804, June. http://Â�w ww╉ .Â�nber╉.Â�org╉/Â�papers╉/Â�w9804.

The artist who preferred to have his Â�whole time for art and enjoyment might live on the 78 Hi story: From Uto pi an D ream to World wi de M ovement ‘vagabond’s wage’—Â�traveling on foot when the humor seized him to see foreign countries, enjoying the air and the sun, as Â�free as the birds, and perhaps scarcely less happy.”37 Like Fourier and Charlier, Russell warned that the provision of this “certain small income, sufficient for necessaries” would affect Â�people’s willingness to work. Like them, however, he regarded this as an argument in Â�favor of the proposal, rather than a drawback: “One Â�great advantage of making idleness ecoÂ�nomÂ�ically posÂ�siÂ�ble is that it would afford a powerÂ�ful motive for making work not disagreeable; and no community where most work is disagreeable can be said to have found a solution of economic probÂ�lems.”38 In his Â�later essay In Praise of Idleness, Russell returns to this theme: “Modern technique has made it posÂ�siÂ�ble for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community.

Reforming Public Welfare: A Critique of the Negative Income Tax Experiment. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Rothbard, Murray N. 1982. The Ethics of Liberty. Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press. Rothstein, Bo. 1998. Just Institutions Â�Matter: The Moral and PoÂ�litiÂ�cal Logic of the Universal Welfare State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Â�Jacques. 1754/1971. Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les homes. Paris: Flammarion. —Â�—Â�—. 1762/2011. Le Contrat social. Paris: Le Livre de poche. —Â�—Â�—. 1789/1996. Les Confessions, vol. 1. Paris: Pocket. Russell, Bertrand. 1918/1966. Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism.


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Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

INTRODUCTION Stephan Aarstol discusses Tower Paddle Board’s transition to a five-hour day in his book, The Five-Hour Workday: Live Differently, Unlock Productivity, and Find Happiness (Lioncrest, 2016). What’s Wrong with Work. Bertrand Russell writes about the future of work in “In Praise of Idleness,” Harper’s, October 1932, https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness. Working hours from 1870 to 1950 were estimated by Michael Huberman and Chris Minns, “The Times They Are Not Changin’: Days and Hours of Work in Old and New Worlds, 1870–2000,” Explorations in Economic History 44, no. 4 (October 2007): 538–567, https://personal.lse.ac.uk/minns/Huberman_Minns_EEH_2007.pdf.

They’re also building a movement that could improve how we all work and could create a brighter future for work. WHAT’S WRONG WITH WORK And we really need to improve work. A century ago, philosopher Bertrand Russell and economist John Maynard Keynes argued that by 2000—eight decades in their future and two decades in our past—we could all be working as little as three or four hours a day. In Russell and Keynes’s lifetime, technology, labor union demands, rising educational standards, and greater prosperity had reduced the length of the average workday from fourteen to eight hours a day. They thought that as technology continued to advance through the twentieth century, productivity could continue to rise, economies could continue to grow, and working hours could fall further.

storyId=102938615, and Alex Williams, “To Fight Climate Change, Institute Three-Day Weekends,” Quartz, October 10, 2016, https://qz.com/770758/how-three-day-weekends-can-help-save-the-world-and-us-too. Company Profile: AE Harris. Russell Luckock writes about AE Harris in Graeme Brown, “Post Columnist Russell Luckock Looks Back on 60 Years of the Newspaper,” Birmingham Post, September 17, 2014, www.business-live.co.uk/news/local-news/post-columnist-russell-luckock-looks-7839675, and Luckock, “Four-Day Week Has Triumphed,” Birmingham Post, December 10, 2010, www.business-live.co.uk/business/russell-luckock-four-day-week-triumphed-3925111. Free Fridays. On the worldview of software developers, see Clive Thompson’s Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World (New York: Penguin, 2019), and Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents (New York: Picador, 2012).


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The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

The pleasure is transient and self-limiting. We stop when we think we have had enough. As pleasure from play is ephemeral, people who depend on it are doomed to fail. Hedonism is self-defeating – the hedonistic treadmill. Hedonists fear boredom. The great philosopher Bertrand Russell understood the need for boredom, expressed best in his wonderful essay In Praise of Idleness. Hedonistic happiness through play and ‘pleasure’ eventually induces addiction and intolerance of anything other than pleasure, a point brought out by behavioural biologist Paul Martin in his book Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure (2009).

Moreover, a little idleness would not be bad. How do we know that one person’s apparent idleness is not his moment A POLITICS OF PARADISE 161 of repose or contemplation? Why do we feel it necessary to presume and condemn? Some of the greatest minds in history had spells of idleness, and anybody who has read Bertrand Russell’s essay In Praise of Idleness should be ashamed to demand frenetic labour from others. One should not lose a sense of proportion. Labour is needed; jobs are needed. It is just that they are not the be-all-and-end-all of life. Other forms of work and time uses are just as important. John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of the twentieth century, forecast that by now people in rich societies would be doing no more than 15 hours a week in jobs.

(Maltby) 138 Canada 79, 114 capital funds 176–7 Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman) 156 care work 61, 86, 125–6 careers, leisure 129 cash transfers 177 see also conditional cash transfers (CCTs) CCTs (conditional cash transfer schemes) 140 Cerasa, Claudio 149 Channel 4, call centre programme (UK) 16 charities 53 children, care for 125 China 28 and contractualisation 37 criminalisation 88 deliberative democracy 181 education 73 immigrants to Italy 4–5 invasion of privacy 135 migrants 96, 106–9, 109–10 old agers 83 191 192 INDEX China 28 (Continued) Shenzhen 133, 137 and time 115 wages 43 youth 76 see also Chindia China Plus One 28 Chindia 26, 27–9, 83 see also China Chrysler Group LLC 43 circulants 90, 92 Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission (US) 152–3 civil rights 14, 94 class, social 6–8, 66–7 Coase, Ronald 29 Cohen, Daniel 57, 66, 69 collaborative bargaining 168 collective attention deficit syndrome 127 commodification of companies 29–31 of education 67–72 and globalisation 26 labour 161–2 of management 40 of politics 148–53 re- 41–2 conditional cash transfers (CCTs) 140 see also cash transfers conditionality 140, 175 and basic income 172–3 and workfare 143–5, 166–7 connectivity, and youth 127 contract status 35, 36, 37, 44, 51, 61 contractors, independent/ dependent 15–16 contractualisation 37 counselling for stress 126 Crawford, Matthew 70 credit 44 crime 5, 129–30 criminalisation 14, 145, 146 crystallised intelligence 85 cultural rights 14 de Tocqueville, Alexis 145 de-industrialisation 5, 37–8 debt, and youth 73–4 Delfanti, Alessandro 78 deliberative democracy 180–1, 182 denizens 14, 93–102, 105, 113, 117, 157–8 Denmark 150 dependent/independent contractors 15–16 deskilling 17, 33, 40, 124 developing countries 12, 27, 60, 65, 105–9 disabled people 86–7, 89, 170 discrimination age 84–5 disability 81 gender 60, 123 genetic profiling 136–7 and migrants 99, 101–2 disengagement, political 24 distance working 38, 53 dole (UK) 45 Duncan Smith, Iain 143 Durkeim, Emile 20 economic security 157, 171, 173–6 The Economist 17–18, 33, 52, 137 economy, shadow 56–7 education 10, 67–73, 135–6, 159–60 Ehrenreich, Barbara 21, 170–1 elites 7, 22, 24, 40, 50 criminality 152 and democracy 181 ethics 165 Italian 148 and the Tea Party (US) 151 empathy 22–3, 137 employment agencies 33 employment security 10b, 11, 17, 36, 51, 117 Endarkenment 70 Enlightenment 24, 70 enterprise benefits 11, 12 environmental issues 167 environmental refugees 93 Esping-Andersen, G. 41 ethics 23–4, 121–2, 165 ethnic minorities 86 EuroMayDay 1, 2, 3, 167 European Union (EU) 2, 39, 146, 147 and migrants 97, 103, 105 and pensions 80 see also individual countries export processing zones 105–6 Facebook 127, 134, 135 failed occupationality 21 INDEX family 27, 44, 60, 65, 126 fear, used for control 32 fictitious decommodification 41 financial capital 171, 176–7 financial sector jobs 39–40 financial shock 2008-9 see Great Recession Financial Times 44, 55, 121, 155 firing workers 31–2 Fishkin, James 180 Fletcher, Bill 170–1 flexibility 18 labour 23–4, 31–6, 53, 60, 61, 65 labour market 6, 120–1, 170 Ford Motor Company 42, 43 Foucault, Michel 88, 133 Foxconn 28–9, 43, 105, 137 see also Shenzhen France criminalisation 88 de-industrialisation 38 education 69 leisure 129 migrants 95, 97, 101–2, 114 neo-fascism 149 and old agers 85 pensions 79 shadow economy 56 Telecom 11 youth 65–6 fraternity 12, 22, 155 freedom 155, 167–70, 172 freelance see temporary employment freeter unions 9 Friedman, Milton 39, 156 functional flexibility 36–8, 52 furloughs 36, 50 gays 63–4 General Motors (GM) 42, 43, 54 genetic profiling 136 Germany 9 de-industrialisation 38 disengagement with jobs 24 migrants 91, 95, 100–1, 114 pensions 79 shadow economy 56 temporary employment 15, 35 wages 40 and women 62 youth and apprenticeships 72–3 193 Glen Beck’s Common Sense (Beck) 151 Global Transformation 26, 27–31, 91, 115 globalisation 5–7, 27–31, 116, 148 and commodification 26 and criminalisation 87–8 and temporary employment 34 Google Street View 134 Gorz, Andre 7 grants, leisure 180–2 Great Recession 4, 49–51, 63, 176 and education 71 and migrants 102 and old agers 82 and pensions 80 and youth 77–8 Greece 52, 56, 117, 181 grinners/groaners 59, 83–4 Habermas, Jürgen 179 Haidt, J. 23 Hamburg (Germany) 3 happiness 140–1, 162 Hardt, M. 130 Hayek, Friedrich 39 health 51, 70, 120, 126 Hitachi 84 Hobsbawm, Eric 3 hormones 136 hot desking 53 Howker, Ed 65 Human Rights Watch 106 Hungary 149 Hurst, Erik 128 Hyatt Hotels 32 IBM 38, 137 identity 9 digital 134–5 work-based 12, 15–16, 23, 158–9, 163 Ignatieff, Michael 88 illegal migrants 96–8 In Praise of Idleness (Russell) 141, 161 income security 10b, 30, 40, 44 independent/dependent contractors 15–16 India 50, 83, 112, 140 see also Chindia individuality 3, 19, 122 informal status 6–7, 57, 60, 96, 119 inshored/offshored labour 30, 36, 37 194 INDEX International Herald Tribune 21 internet 18, 127, 139, 180, 181 surveillance 134–5, 138 interns 16, 36, 75–6 invasion of privacy 133–5, 167 Ireland 52–3, 77 isolation of workers 38 Italy education 69 neo-fascism 148–9 pensions 79 Prato 4–5 and the public sector 52, 53 shadow economy 56 and temporary employment 34 youth 64 Japan 2, 30 and Chinese migrants 110 commodification of companies 30 and migrants 102, 103 multiple job holding 119–20 neo-fascism 152 pensions 80 salariat 17 subsidies 84 and temporary employment 15, 32–3, 34–5, 41 and youth 66, 74, 76, 77 job security 10b, 11, 36–8 Kellaway, Lucy 83–4 Keynes, John Maynard 161 Kierkegaard, Søren 155 Klein, Naomi 148 knowledge 32, 117, 124–5, 171 labour 13, 115, 161–2 labour brokers 33–4, 49, 110, 111, 167, 168 labour flexibility 23–4, 31–45 labour intensification 119–20 labour market flexibility 6 labour security 10–11, 10b, 31 Laos 112 lay-offs see furloughs Lee Changshik 21 legal knowledge 124–5 legal processing 50 Legal Services Act of 2007 (UK) (Tesco Law) 40 leisure 13, 128–30 see also play lesbians 63–4 Liberal Republic, The 181 Lloyds Banking Group 50–1 localism 181–2 long-term migrants 100–2 loyalty 53, 58, 74–5 McDonald’s 33 McNealy, Scott 69 Malik, Shiv 65 Maltby, Lewis 138 Manafort, Paul 152 management, commodification of 40 Mandelson, Peter, Baron 68 Maroni, Roberto 97 marriage 64–5, 92 Martin, Paul 141 Marx, Karl 161 masculinity, role models for youth 63–5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 68–9 Mayhew, Les 81 Mead, Lawrence 143 mergers, triangular 30 Mexico 91 Middle East 109 migrants 2, 13–14, 25, 90–3, 145–6 and basic income 172 and conditionality 144 denizens 93–102, 157–8 government organised 109–13 internal 105–9 and queuing systems 103–5 and recession 102–3 Mill, John Stuart 160 Morris, William 160, 161 Morrison, Catriona 127 multinational corporations 28, 92 multitasking 19, 126–7 National Broadband Plan 134 near-sourcing/shoring 36 Negri, A. 130 neo-fascism 25, 147–53, 159, 175, 183 Netherlands 39, 79, 114, 149–50 New Thought Movement 21 New York Times 69, 119 News from Nowhere (Morris) 161 Niemöller, Martin 182 INDEX non-refoulement 93 Nudge (Sunstein/Thaler) 138–9 nudging 138–40, 155–6, 165, 167, 172, 178, 182 numerical flexibility 31–6 Obama, Barack 73, 138–9, 147, 148 Observer, The 20 occupations associations of 169–70 dismantling of 38–40 freedom in 162–4 obsolescence in 124 offshored/inshored labour 30, 36, 37 old agers 59, 79– 86, 89 old-age dependency ratio 80–1 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 27 origins of the precariat 1–5 outsourcing 29, 30, 33, 36, 37, 49 Paine, Thomas 173 panopticon society 132–40, 142–3 Parent Motivators (UK) 139–40 part-time employment 15, 35–6, 51, 61, 82 Pasona 33 paternalism 17, 29, 137, 153, 178, 182 nudging 138–40, 155–6, 165, 167, 172, 178, 182 pensions 42, 51, 52, 76–7, 79–81, 84–6 PepsiCo 137 personal deportment skills 123 Philippines 109 Phoenix, University of 71 Pigou, Arthur 117, 125 play 13, 115, 117, 128, 141 pleasure 141 Polanyi, K. 163, 169 political engagement/disengagement 24, 147 Portugal 52, 56 positive thinking 21, 86 Prato (Italy) 4–5 precariat (definition) 6, 7–13 precariato 9 precariatisation 16–18 precarity traps 48–9, 73–5, 114, 129, 144, 178 pride 22 prisoners 112, 146 privacy, invasion of 133–5, 167 private benefits 11 productivity, and old age 85 proficians 7–8, 15, 164 proletariat 7 protectionism 27, 54 public sector 51–4 qualifications 95 queuing systems 103–5 racism 97–8, 101, 114, 149 Randstad 49 re-commodification 41–2 recession see Great Recession refugees 92, 93, 96 regulation 23, 26, 39–40, 84, 171 Reimagining Socialism (Ehrenreich/ Fletcher) 170–1 remote working 38, 53 rentier economies 27, 176 representation security 10b, 31 retirement 42, 80–3 rights 14, 94, 145, 163, 164–5, 169 see also denizens risk management 178 Robin Hood gang 3 role models for youth 63–5 Roma 97, 149 Rossington, John 100 Rothman, David 88 Russell, Bertrand 141, 161 Russell, Lucie 64 Russia 88, 115 salariat 7, 8, 14, 17, 32 Santelli, Rick 150 Sarkozy, Nicolas 69, 97, 149 Sarrazin, Thilo 101 Schachar, Ayelet 177 Schneider, Friedrich 56 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 71 seasonal migrants 98–100 security, economic 157, 171, 173–6 self-employment 15–16, 66, 82 self-esteem 21 self-exploitation 20, 122–3 self-production 11 self-regulation 23, 39 self-service 125 services 37–8, 63 195 196 INDEX Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure (Martin) 141 sex services 63 sexism, reverse 123 shadow economy 56–7, 91 Shenzhen (China) 133, 137 see also Foxconn Shop Class as Soulcraft (Crawford) 70 short-time compensation schemes 55–6 side-jobs 119–20 skill reproduction security 10b skills 157, 176 development of 30, 31, 40 personal deportment 123 tertiary 121–4 Skirbekk, Vegard 85 Smarsh 138 Smile or Die (Ehrenreich) 21 Smith, Adam 71 snowball theory 78 social class 6–8, 66–7 social factory 38, 118, 132 social income 11–12, 40–5, 51, 66 social insurance 22, 104 social memory 12, 23, 129 social mobility 23, 57–8, 175 social networking sites 137 see also Facebook social rights 14 social worth 21 sousveillance 134, 135 South Africa, and migrants 91, 98 South Korea 15, 55, 61, 75 space, public 171, 179–80 Spain BBVA 50 migrants 94 and migrants 102 pensions 79 and the public sector 53 shadow economy 55–6 temporary employment 35 Speenhamland system 55, 143 staffing agencies 33–4, 49, 110, 111, 167, 168 state benefits 11, 12 status 8, 21, 32–3, 94 status discord 10 status frustration 10, 21, 63, 67, 77, 78, 79, 89, 114, 123, 160 stress 19, 126, 141, 141–3 subsidies 44, 54–6, 83–6, 176 suicide, work-related 11, 29, 58, 105 Summers, Larry 148 Sun Microsystems 69 Sunstein, Cass 138–9 surveillance 132–6, 153, 167 see also sousveillance Suzuki, Kensuke 152 Sweden 68, 110–11, 135, 149 symbols 3 Taking of Rome, The (Cerasa) 149 taxes 26 and citizenship 177 France 85 and subsidies 54–5 Tobin 177 United States (US) 180–1 Tea Party movement 150–1 technology and the brain 18 internet 180, 181 surveillance 132–6 teleworking 38 temporary agencies 33–4, 49, 110, 111, 167, 168 temporary employment 14–15, 49 associations for 170 Japan 9 and numerical flexibility 32–6 and old agers 82 and the public sector 51 and youth 65 tertiarisation 37–8 tertiary skill 121–4 tertiary time 116, 119 tertiary workplace 116 Tesco Law (UK) 40 Thailand, migrants 106 Thaler, Richard 138–9 therapy state 141–3, 153 Thompson, E.P. 115 time 115–16, 163, 171, 178 labour intensification 119–20 tertiary 116, 119 use of 38 work-for-labour 120–1 titles of jobs 17–18 Tobin taxes 177 Tomkins, Richard 70 towns, company 137 INDEX toy-factory incident 108–9 trade unions 1, 2, 5, 10b, 26, 31, 168 and migration 91 public sector 51 and youth 77–8 see also yellow unions training 121–4 triangular mergers 30 triangulation 34 Trumka, Richard 78 trust relationships 8–9, 22 Twitter 127 Ukraine 152 undocumented migrants 96–8 unemployment 145 benefits 45–8, 99, 104 insurance for 175 voluntary 122 youth after recession 77 uniforms, to distinguish employment status 32–3 unions freeter 9 yellow 33 see also trade United Kingdom (UK) 102–3 benefit system 173 Channel 4 call centre programme 16 company loyalty 74–5 conditionality 143–5, 166–7 criminalisation 88 de-industrialisation 38 disabled people 170 and education 67, 70, 71 financial shock (2008-9) 49–51, 71 labour intensification 119 Legal Services Act (2007) (Tesco Law) 40 leisure 129 migrants 91, 95, 99, 103–5, 114, 146 neo-fascism 150 paternalism 139–40 pensions 43, 80 and the public sector 53 public spaces 179 and regulation of occupational bodies 39 shadow economy 56 and social mobility 56–8 and subsidies 55 197 temporary employment 15, 34, 35 as a therapy state 142 women 61–2, 162 workplace discipline 138 youth 64, 76 United States (US) care for children 125 criminalisation 88 education 69, 70–1, 73, 135–6 ethnic minorities 86 financial shock (2008-9) 49–50 migrants 90–1, 93, 94, 97, 103, 114 neo-fascism 150–1, 152–3 old agers 82–3, 85 pensions 42, 52, 80 public sector 52 regulation of occupational bodies 39 social mobility in 57–8 subsidies 55, 56 taxes 180–1 temporary employment 34, 35 volunteer work 163 wages and benefits 42 women 62, 63 youth 75, 77 universalism 155, 157, 162, 180 University of the People 69 University of Phoenix 71 unpaid furloughs 36 unpaid leave 50 uptitling 17–18 utilitarianism 88, 132, 141, 154 value of support 11 Vietnam 28, 111–12 voluntary unemployment 122 volunteer work 86, 163–4 voting 146, 147, 181 Wacquant, L. 132 wages 8, 11 and benefits 41–2 family 60 flexibility 40–5, 66 individualised 60 and migrants 103 and temporary workers 32, 33 Vietnam 28 see also basic income Waiting for Superman (documentary) 69 Wall Street Journal 35, 163 198 INDEX Walmart 33, 107 Wandering Tribe 73 Weber, Max 7 welfare claimants 245 welfare systems 44 Wen Jiabao 105 Whitehead, Alfred North 160 Williams, Rob 62 wiretapping 135 women 60–5 and care work 125–6 CCTs (conditional cash transfer schemes) 140 labour commodification 161 and migration 92 multiple jobholding 119–20 reverse sexism 123 work 115, 117, 160–1 and identity 158–9 and labour 13 right to 145, 163, 164–5 security 10b work-for-labour 120–1, 178 work-for-reproduction 124–7 work–life balance 118 worker cooperatives 168–70 workfare 143–5, 166–7 working class 7, 8 workplace 116, 122, 130, 131 discipline 136–8 tertiary 116 Yanukovich, Victor 152 yellow unions 33 youth 59, 65–7, 89, 156 commodification of education 67–72 connectivity 127 and criminality 129–30 generational tension 76–7 and old agers 85 precarity traps 73–5 prospects for the future 78–9 and role models 63–5 streaming education 72–3 zero-hour contracts 36


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The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

Davies (New York: Knopf, 1927), p. 18. 8. William Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply,” in The Prelude, Selected Poems and Sonnets, p. 76. 9. Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy and Other Studies, trans. Charles H. Kerr (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1907), p. 30. 10. Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness,” in In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (New York: Unwin Books, 1962), p. 12. 11. See Bob Black, “The Abolition of Work,” in The Abolition of Work and Other Essays (Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited, 1986), and Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (New York: Vintage, 2010).

Paul Lafargue, writing in the late nineteenth century, criticized the way that well-intentioned labor movement slogans about “the right to work” and “the dignity of labor” were effectively preaching values that ultimately serve the interests of the bourgeoisie rather than those of the working class. Work, he says in The Right to Be Lazy, should be nothing more than “a mere condiment to the pleasures of idleness.”9 Bertrand Russell echoes this sentiment. “The morality of work is the morality of slaves,” he writes, “and the modern world has no need of slavery.”10 The work ethic is outmoded, Russell argues, because laborsaving technology should make it possible for us to satisfy all our needs while greatly reducing the hours spent performing uninteresting and unfulfilling tasks. From now on, therefore, “the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”

See also escapism Rand, Ayn, 182 Rawls, John, 97–98 recession of 2008, 2, 165, 179, 203, 226 recreational opportunities: expansion of, 204–5, 278–79 recycling, 266–69 Rhinehart, Rob, 29 Rihanna, 168, 177 Romanticism, 22, 24, 117, 252–53 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 7, 21, 54–55, 147, 209–10 routine, 34–36, 37 Rule of St. Benedict, 45, 79 Ruskin, John, 253 Russell, Bertrand, 80, 81 satiation point, 152 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 35, 67, 81, 102 Schor, Juliet, 172, 238, 243, 283 Schwartz, Barry, 151 security. See material security Segal, Jerome, 96–97 self-denial. See asceticism self-reliance. See self-sufficiency self-respect, 97–99, 122–23 self-sufficiency, 18–23, 37, 119–27, 156, 256, 259, 264, 277.


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Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

And even if we can, what then? GDP growth can’t continue forever with finite resources. Of course, this is not a new idea. In 1968 R. Buckminster Fuller warned us about this in his masterwork Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Decades earlier, philosopher Bertrand Russell offered a damning critique of our approach to abundance in his essay “In Praise of Idleness.” Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price.

EPILOGUE: WHAT DREAMS MAY COME “if you’re giving back, you took too much”: Ricardo Semler, “How to run a company with (almost no rules),” TED video, 21:43, October, 2014, www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_how_to_run_a_company_with_almost_no_rules. “Twentieth-century economics assured us”: Kate Raworth, “A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow,” TED video, 15:53, April 2018, www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_should_be_designed_to_thrive_not_grow. “Can anything more insane be imagined?”: Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, and Other Essays (London: Routledge, 2004), 6, www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html. known as the Rochdale Principles: “The Rochdale Principles,” Co-operative Heritage Trust, accessed September 1, 2018, www.rochdalepioneersmuseum.coop/about-us/the-rochdale-principles. one study of cooperatives: Virginie Pérotin, “What Do We Really Know About Worker Co-operatives?”

., 172 one-on-ones, 121–22 OODA loop, 88, 90 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Fuller), 247 operating system, organizational (OS), 12–13, 17, 18, 43, 215 agility and, 19 changing, see change economic, 246–47, 248 evolutionary, see Evolutionary Organizations management innovations and, 20 Operating System Canvas (OS Canvas), 14, 53–57 authority, 14, 54, 63, 65–74 compensation, 14, 54, 163–73 how to use, 174, 270–72 information, 14, 54, 127–37 innovation, 14, 54, 102–9, 188 mastery, 14, 54, 151–62 meetings, 14, 54, 118–26 membership, 14, 54, 138–50 purpose, 14, 54, 68–64, 67, 85 resources, 14, 54, 93–101 strategy, 14, 54, 83–92 structure, 14, 54, 75–82, 111 workflow, 14, 54, 110–17 operating systems, 9 for traffic flow, see traffic flow organizational debt, 27–29, 91 organizations, 255 agility in, 19, 20, 28–29 as complex systems, 45, 187–88 cooperatives, 250 decentralized autonomous, 250–51 entry/exit rates of, 33 evolutionary, see Evolutionary Organizations governance of, 122 investment and, 251–55 lattice, 142 legacy, see Legacy Organizations longevity of, 29–30 mergers and acquisitions, 32, 33 new forms of incorporation, 248–51, 252 operating systems of, see operating system, organizational org charts, 7–9, 24, 77, 78, 81, 114, 189 return on assets of, 31, 32 as set of membranes, 139–40 three structures of, 78 OS Canvas, see Operating System Canvas Ostrom, Elinor, 98 over statements, 89 Page, Larry, 136 Patagonia, 85, 130–31, 133, 249, 259 pay, see compensation People Positive mindset, 13, 36–43, 53, 55–57, 190, 195, 199, 244, 258–59, 267 authority and, 74 compensation and, 173 information and, 137 innovation and, 109 mastery and, 162 meetings and, 126 membership and, 150 purpose and, 64 resources and, 101 strategy and, 92 structure and, 82 workflow and, 117 Percolate, 131–32 performance, 46 individual, 158–60, 172 Petrarch, 224 Pflaeging, Niels, 78, 180, 189–90 Pixar, 119–20, 191–92 planning, 91, 95, 96, 100 see also strategy Plato, 3 Play-Doh, 103 polycentric governance, 98 PopSugar, 135 practices, proposing, 207–12 priming, 193, 197–201, 236 Principles (Dalio), 152 Principles of Scientific Management, The (Taylor), 23–24, 29 priorities, 88–89 profit, 59–60 Project Aristotle, 221 projects, 113, 114, 117 management of, 112, 237 sprints and, 115, 237–38 status of, 121, 132 work in progress and, 115–16, 132 proposing practices, 207–12 psychological safety, 219–23, 236 purpose, 14, 54, 68–64, 67, 85 push vs. pull, 131–32 Quaroni, Guido, 192 railroads, 8, 22–23 Raworth, Kate, 246–47 Ready, The, 17–19, 123, 125, 143, 149, 174, 190, 217 recruiting and hiring, 79, 142–43 Reddit, 135 red team, 90–91 REI, 85 Reinventing Organizations (Laloux), 105 relatedness, 42 relief, 236–37 reputation, 78 resistance, 233–34 resources, 14, 54, 93–101 retrospectives, 123–24 return on assets (ROA), 31, 32 Rework (Fried and Hansson), 68–69 Ries, Eric, 107–8, 254, 255 risk, 68, 122, 132, 231 barbell strategy and, 86–87, 105–6 ritual, 143 Robertson, Brian, 202 Rogers, Carl, 38 roles, 72, 77, 80, 81, 111, 141, 157 decision making and, 72, 73 mixing of, 157–58 Rotter, Julian B., 154 roundabouts, 10–12, 13, 47, 55 Ruimin, Zhang, 76 Russell, Bertrand, 247 Ryan, Richard, 42 sabotage, 5–7 safety, psychological, 219–23, 236 Sahlberg, Pasi, 12 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 212 salary, 164, 165, 168 see also compensation Salary.com, 170 Salesforce, 119 S&P 500, 29–30, 60 Santa Fe, USS, 67 Santa Fe Institute, 29 scaling change, 234–39 scenario planning, 90 Schaar, Tom, 259 Scientific Management, 22–24, 26, 48 Scott, Kim, 120 scribes, 122–23 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 104, 255 self-determination theory, 42 self-employment, 33 self-evaluation, 154 self-management, 16–17 self-set pay, 168 Semler, Ricardo, 245, 258 Seneca, 189 Senge, Peter, 153, 202 sensing, 202–6, 231–32 signal-controlled intersections, 9–12, 13, 46, 55 Simple Sabotage Field Manual, 7 Sinek, Simon, 222 Sisodia, Raj, 60 Slack, 119, 134, 135 SLAM teams, 80 Snowden, Dave, 156, 188–89 Sociocracy, 70–71, 122 space: creating, 224–26, 228 holding, 226–28 liminal, 196, 197, 201 Spencer, Percy, 103 Spotify, 112–13, 160, 218 spread, 217–18 sprints, 115, 237–38 standards vs. defaults, 106–7 Starbucks, 85 startups, 27–28, 33, 76–77, 107, 197, 254 Lean Startup method, 107–8 status quo, 48, 90–91, 233 steering metrics, 60–61 stocks, 30–31 strategy, 14, 54, 83–92 strategy+business, 76 strategy review meetings, 3–4 structure, 14, 54, 75–82, 111 Svenska Handelsbanken, 13, 94, 227–28 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 86–88, 106 targets, 95, 97, 101 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 21–24, 26, 29, 111, 153, 186, 257 teams, 79, 82, 113, 117, 141, 142, 172, 225–26 Ballpoint game for, 199–200 charters for, 144–45 dynamic, 81 gratitude and, 148 ICBD technique for, 222–23 red, 90–91 retrospectives and, 123–24 rituals and, 143 SLAM, 80 sprints and, 115, 237–38 status updates and, 121 teams of, 77, 197 work in progress and, 115–16, 132 technology, 256–57 TED, 128, 246, 257 telephone, 103 Teller, Astro, 49 tensions, sensing, 202–6 Tesla, Inc., 62, 86 Theory X and Theory Y, 39–41, 130 Thomison, Tom, 89 tipping point, 216 Torvalds, Linus, 132 Toyota, 20, 111, 235 TPG, 253 traffic flow, 9–12, 45 roundabouts for, 10–12, 13, 47, 55 signal-controlled intersections for, 9–12, 13, 46, 55 tragedy of the commons, 98 training, 6, 156–57 transparency, 129, 130–31, 134, 136, 190, 195, 258 compensation and, 168, 169–71, 173 radical, 152, 154 trust, 236 twenty percent time, 107 Twitter, 84 Urwick, Lyndall, 25 User Manual to Me, 147–48 value creation, 78, 111–14, 160 Valve Software, 66, 107 Vang-Jensen, Frank, 227 Vanguard, 48 venture capital, 253 Vrba, Elisabeth, 103 VUCA, 43 wages, 34, 166 see also compensation Wallander, Jan, 94, 227 Warby Parker, 96 waterline principle, 69–70, 72 Weber, Max, 25 WeWork, 87 Whole Foods, 59, 61, 170, 259 Wikipedia, 140 Williams, Ev, 84–85 workflow, 14, 54, 110–17 working in public, 132 work in progress (WIP), 115–16, 132 World War II, 6–7 Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 103 Y Combinator, 230 Zanini, Michele, 26 Zappos, 144 al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, 129 Zobrist, Jean-François, 37, 42–43 Zuckerberg, Mark, 88 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ About the Author Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready, an organization design and transformation firm that helps institutions like Johnson & Johnson, Charles Schwab, Kaplan, Microsoft, Lloyds Bank, Citibank, Edelman, Airbnb, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and charity: water change the way they work.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

‘I MEANT TO DO MY WORK TODAY’, RICHARD LE GALLIENNE (1866–1947) Contrary to the preaching of dour labourists, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a bit of laziness. Great philosophers through the ages have argued in its favour. Aristotle explicitly recognized the necessity of aergia, laziness, for contemplative thought. Bertrand Russell wrote a celebrated essay, In Praise of Idleness. Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, authored a subversive book entitled The Right to be Lazy that communists detested because it made the case against forcing everybody to labour more intensively. Today, however, the words ‘idleness’ and ‘lazy’ are used pejoratively to convey indolence, time wasting and drift.

It was a vision of work soon to be lost in the dour ‘labourism’ of both socialists and communists in the early decades of the twentieth century, which made income and benefits dependent on jobs. What might be regarded as the second wave of proponents came in the wake of the First World War, in the writings of Bertrand Russell, Mabel and Dennis Milner, Bertram Pickard, G. D. H. Cole and the disciples of Henry George.6 Walter van Trier wrote an engaging doctoral dissertation identifying the Milners as the pioneers of a basic income (which they called a ‘state bonus’) as practical policy.7 Shortly after them, writing in the 1920s, came British engineer C.

Australian Agency for International Development (2011), Targeting the Poorest: An Assessment of the Proxy Means Test Methodology. Canberra: AusAID, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. 5. P. Bardhan (2016), ‘Universal basic income for India’, Livemint, 12 October. 6. P. Niehaus, A. Atanassova, M. Bertrand and S. Mullainathan (2013), ‘Targeting with agents’, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 5(1), pp. 206–38. 7. G. Standing, J. Unni, R. Jhabvala and U. Rani (2010), Social Income and Insecurity: A Study in Gujarat. New Delhi: Routledge. 8. N. Caldés, D. Coady and J. A. Maluccio (2004), ‘The cost of poverty alleviation transfer programs: A comparative analysis of three programs in Latin America’, FCND Discussion Paper No. 174.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2016. Rushkoff, Douglas. Program or be Programmed:Ten Commands for a Digital Age. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2011. Rushkoff, Douglas. Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2016. Russell, Bertrand. In Praise of Idleness. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004. Russell, Stuart J., and Peter Norvig. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Third Edition). London: Pearson, 2015. Ryan, Alan. On Politics: A History of Political thought from Herodotus to the Present. London: Penguin, 2013. Sadowski, Jathan and Frank Pasquale. ‘The Spectrum of Control: A Social Theory of the Smart City’.

For further reading, see Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London:Verso, 2015); David Frayne, The Refusal of Work:The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work (London: Zed Books, 2015); André Gorz, Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society, translated by Chris Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005); André Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, translated by Martin Chalmers (London and New York:Verso, 2012); and Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004). Chapter 18 1. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 169. 2. Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (London: Atlantic, 2010), 276. 3. Ibid. 4. Cited in Wu, Master Switch, 276–7. 5. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 18.

California 381 Roberts, John 52 RoboBees 55 robotics Asimov’s First Law 198–9 degradation argument 361 digital liberation 169 force 106 harm principle 204 increasingly integrated technology 53–6 productive technologies 316 technological unemployment 295, 298, 299 Robot Tax 306, 328 Rockefeller, John D. 318 Rome, ancient freedom 168 property 77, 324 stars 253 statistics 18 writing 19 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 510 Index Roosevelt, Franklin D. 18 Roosevelt, Theodore 318 Rose, David 43, 376, 381, 385, 396 Rosenberg, Robin 407, 408 Rosenbush, Steve 392 rough and ready test of algorithmic injustice 280–1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 394, 401, 408, 411, 415, 429 democracy 207, 222, 225, 240 freedom of thought 165 liberty 207 political theory 9 property 323–4 scrutiny 123 state and force 114 Rowling, J. K. 324–5, 333 Ruan, Lotus 399 rule-based injustice 283–8 rule of law 115 rules code-ified law 112 digital law 107–8, 109, 113 Rushkoff, Douglas 207, 408, 421 Russell, Bertrand 426 Russia 55–6, 354 Ryan, Alan 218, 409, 410, 417, 429 Sadowski, Jathan 404 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de 69 Sample, Ian 413 Samsung 48, 59, 119 Sandel, Michael J. 361, 434, 435 Sander, Alison 383 Sandvig, Christian 422, 433 Santander, Spain 50 Saudi Arabia 183 Savulescu, Julian 402, 434 Scanlon, Thomas 165, 401, 418 Schaff, Kory 300–1, 425 Schattschneider, E.


pages: 12 words: 5,028

In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, failed state, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, means of production, plutocrats, profit motive, refrigerator car

By the same Author THE ANALYSIS OF MIND Fourth Impression INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY Fourth Impression OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD Second Edition AN OUTLINE OF PHILOSOPHY Second Impression MYSTICISM AND LOGIC Seventh Impression THE CONQUEST OF HAPPINESS Fifth Impression SCEPTICAL ESSAYS Third Impression THE SCIENTIFIC OUTLOOK PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION Tenth Impression ROADS TO FREEDOM Eighth Impression JUSTICE IN WAR-TIME FREE THOUGHT AND OFFICIAL PROPAGANDA FREEDOM AND ORGANIZATION 1814-1914 Second Impression THE PROBLEM OF CHINA ON EDUCATION Sixth Impression EDUCATION AND THE SOCIAL ORDER MARRIAGE AND MORALS Fifth Impression With Dora Russell THE PROSPECTS OF INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION Third Impression With Scott Nearing BOLSHEVISM AND THE WEST BERTRAND RUSSELL IN PRAISE OF IDLENESS AND OTHER ESSAYS LONDON GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD MUSEUM STREET FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1935 All rights reserved PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY UNWIN BROTHERS LTD., WOKING PREFACE This book contains essays on such aspects of social questions as tend to be ignored in the clash of politics.

Of the other essays in this volume, some are new, while others, which have been already published in magazines, are here reprinted by the kind permission of the editors. “In Praise of Idleness” and “The Modern Midas” appeared in Harpers Magazine·, “The Ancestry of Fascism” (under a different title) appeared in The Political Quarterly in England and The Atlantic Monthly in America; “Scylla and Charybdis, or Communism and Fascism” appeared in The Modem Monthly, “Modern Homogeneity” in New York in The Outlook (now The New Outlook) ; “Education and Discipline” was published in The New Statesman and Nation. I have also to acknowledge the assistance of Peter Spence in suggesting and discussing many of the subjects. CONTENTS IN PRAISE OF IDLENESS 9 “USELESS” KNOWLEDGE 30 ARCHITECTURE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS 47 THE MODERN MIDAS 62 THE ANCESTRY OF FASCISM 82 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS, OR COMMUNISM AND FASCISM 109 THE CASE FOR SOCIALISM 121 WESTERN CIVILIZATION 157 ON YOUTHFUL CYNICISM 176 MODERN HOMOGENEITY 188 MEN VERSUS INSECTS 199 EDUCATION AND DISCIPLINE 202 STOICISM AND MENTAL HEALTH 211 ON COMETS 223 WHAT IS THE SOUL?

Table of Contents Preface I - In Praise of Idleness II - "Useless" Knowledge III - Architecture and Social Questions IV - The Modern Midas V - The Ancestry of Fascism VI - Scylla and Charybdis, or Communism and Fascism VII - The Case for Socialism VIII - Western Civilization IX - On Youthful Cynicism X - Modern Homogeneity XI - Men versus Insects XII - Education and Discipline XIII - Stoicism and Mental Health XIV - On Comets XV - What is the Soul? By the same Author THE ANALYSIS OF MIND Fourth Impression INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY Fourth Impression OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD Second Edition AN OUTLINE OF PHILOSOPHY Second Impression MYSTICISM AND LOGIC Seventh Impression THE CONQUEST OF HAPPINESS Fifth Impression SCEPTICAL ESSAYS Third Impression THE SCIENTIFIC OUTLOOK PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION Tenth Impression ROADS TO FREEDOM Eighth Impression JUSTICE IN WAR-TIME FREE THOUGHT AND OFFICIAL PROPAGANDA FREEDOM AND ORGANIZATION 1814-1914 Second Impression THE PROBLEM OF CHINA ON EDUCATION Sixth Impression EDUCATION AND THE SOCIAL ORDER MARRIAGE AND MORALS Fifth Impression With Dora Russell THE PROSPECTS OF INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION Third Impression With Scott Nearing BOLSHEVISM AND THE WEST BERTRAND RUSSELL IN PRAISE OF IDLENESS AND OTHER ESSAYS LONDON GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD MUSEUM STREET FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1935 All rights reserved PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY UNWIN BROTHERS LTD., WOKING PREFACE This book contains essays on such aspects of social questions as tend to be ignored in the clash of politics.


pages: 246 words: 74,404

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. —BERTRAND RUSSELL, “In Praise of Idleness,” 1932 WE ANSWER WORK EMAILS on Sunday night. We read endless articles about how to hack our brains to achieve more productivity. We crop our photos and use filters before we post them on social media to earn approval. We read only the first couple paragraphs of the articles we find interesting because we don’t have time to read them in their entirety.

And every week, I collapsed onto my couch on Friday night and thought about how I used to meet my friends for drinks, but now I didn’t have time. I had some tough questions for myself. Why? Why do I do this? Why do any of us do this? For the past several years, I’ve searched for the answer to those questions. Reading that eighty-seven-year-old essay from Bertrand Russell brought a flash of insight. I considered the fact that I did things rarely for their own sake, but in service to my drive to constantly improve and be productive. Far too many of us have been lured into the cult of efficiency. We are driven, but we long ago lost sight of what we were driving toward.

We are overworked and overstressed, constantly dissatisfied, and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher. We are members of the cult of efficiency, and we’re killing ourselves with productivity. The passage at the beginning of this Introduction was written in 1932, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, which caused the Great Depression. Russell’s description of the “cult of efficiency” predates World War II, the rise of rock and roll, the civil rights movement, and the dawn of the twenty-first century. More important, in my mind: It was written before the creation of the internet and smartphones and social media. In other words, technology didn’t create this cult; it simply added to an existing culture.


pages: 279 words: 87,910

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky, Edward Skidelsky

banking crisis, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon credits, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, Dr. Strangelove, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Meghnad Desai, Paul Samuelson, Philippa Foot, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, union organizing, University of East Anglia, Veblen good, wage slave, wealth creators, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 293. 2. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 182. 3. W. Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 37. 4. Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 11. 5. Charles Baudelaire, Journaux intimes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1938), p. 61. 6. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 374. 7.

Of course, Athenian and Roman citizens were schooled from an early age in the wise use of leisure. Our project implies a similar educational effort. We cannot expect a society trained in the servile and mechanical uses of time to become one of free men overnight. But we should not doubt that the task is in principle possible. Bertrand Russell, in an essay written just two years after Keynes’s effort—a further illustration of the stimulating effects of economic crisis—put the point with his usual clarity: It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four.

But they would be astonished beyond measure that we view such things, not as vile deformations, but as a normal and indispensable part of the social mechanism, even as marks of vitality. Aristotle knew of insatiability only as a personal vice; he had no inkling of the collective, politically orchestrated insatiability that we call growth. The civilization of toujours plus, as the French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel termed it, would have struck him as moral and political madness. Economic Attitudes in Europe and Asia Aristotle is often, and with some reason, dismissed as the ideologist of a slave-owning oligarchy. His vision of the good life is very much of its time and place. It has no room for the joys of nature, of solitude, of artistic creation or religious ecstasy, for all the things that Christianity and romanticism have taught us to appreciate.


pages: 421 words: 110,272

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Henrik Jacobsen Kleven, 2014, “How can Scandinavians tax so much?,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(4), 77–98. 14. Lane Kenworthy, 2019, Social democratic capitalism, Oxford University Press. 15. Bertrand Russell, 1935, In praise of idleness and other essays, Routledge. 16. Michele Lamont, 2000, The dignity of the working man, Harvard University Press. 17. Andrew Cherlin, 2014, Labor’s love lost: The rise and fall of the working class family in America, Russell Sage Foundation. 18. Richard B. Freeman and James L. Medoff, 1984, What do unions do?, Basic Books. 19. Henry S. Farber, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu, 2018, “Unions and inequality over the twentieth century: New evidence from survey data,” NBER Working Paper 24587, May. 20.

The contrary argument is that many jobs are pure drudgery, that leisure is itself pleasurable and freedom enhancing, so even if the cost of supporting that leisure is paid by others, it might be a good thing to do. We are often happy to subsidize food or shelter for those who cannot provide it for themselves, the argument goes, so why not leisure? As Bertrand Russell once noted, among the strongest advocates that the poor should work more are the idle rich, who have never done any.15 Such arguments are important when we come to think about what to do, in chapter 16, and particularly about the much-discussed universal basic income. The Changing Nature of Work for Those with Less Education The American working class has not always existed.

., 272n6 Rodrik, Dani, 222, 266n17, 285n16, 289n44 Roe v. Wade, 169 Rogstad, Teresa L., 282n7 Roosevelt, Theodore, 228 Roser, Max, 282n5 Rossi-Hansberg, Esteban, 287n23 Rothschild, Emma, 290n19 Rothstein, Jesse, 290n21 Ruhm, Christopher J., 266n2, 277n14 rural areas, 236; employees in, 237 Rush, Benjamin, 104 Russell, Bertrand, 163, 279n15 Russia, 106–7; suicides and, 108 Ryan, Harriet, 291n34 Ryan, Paul, 146 Sackler, Arthur M., 128 Sackler, Mortimer, 128 Sackler, Raymond, 128 Sackler, Richard, 128 Sackler family, 10, 114 Saez, Emmanuel, 269n5, 277n10, 289n4 Safford, Monika M., 268n8 Samsung, 231 Sandel, Michael, 54–55, 265n4, 269n11, 290n33 Sandoe, Emma, 275n31 SARS, 29 Sarte, Pierre-Daniel, 287n23 Sasahara, Akira, 285n12 Scalia, Antonin, 234 Scandinavian countries, 73 Scheidel, Walter, 266n24 Scheve, Kenneth, 266n21 Schmalz, Martin C., 287n11 Schmieder, Johannes, 238 Schoen, Cathy, 282n14 Schoenbaum, Stephen, 282n14 Schofield, Roger, 280n6 Schott, Peter K., 278n21 Schulhofer-Wohl, Sam, 272n13 Schuller, Andrew, 263 Schumpeter, Joseph, 234, 235 Schweitzer, Albert, 84 Schweitzer, Mark, 274n8 Scotland, 38, 224 Scott, Dylan, 289n14 Scurria, Andrew, 274n9 Second World War, 20, 35, 149, 151, 224; progress after, 21 self-harm, 212.


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Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Then you sort of zoom in and you’re like, ‘Oh, there’s this tiny little character there for a fragment of time worrying about X.’” TF: This is similar to the “star therapy” that BJ Miller describes on page 401. I use a combination of both each night before bed. ✸ Book recommendations In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts Maxims and Reflections by Goethe: “I was traveling around the world at the age of 18, which is what people in England do between high school and university. In my coat, I had Goethe’s aphorisms, his short little thoughts in my pocket.

Covey), The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker) Catmull, Ed: One Monster After Another (Mercer Mayer) Chin, Jimmy: Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era (Eiji Yoshikawa and Charles Terry), A Guide to the I Ching (Carol K. Anthony), Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (Jon Krakauer) Cho, Margaret: How to Be a Movie Star (William J. Mann) Cooke, Ed: The Age of Wonder (Richard Holmes), Touching the Rock (John M. Hull), In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays (Bertrand Russell), The Sorrows of Young Werther; Theory of Colours; Maxims and Reflections (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), The Joyous Cosmology (Alan Watts) Cummings, Whitney: Super Sad True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart), The Drama of the Gifted Child (Alice Miller), The Fantasy Bond (Robert W.

Harris), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Little Drummer’s Girl; The Russia House; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John le Carré), The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (Michael Lewis), The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande), all of Lee Child’s books Godin, Seth: Makers; Little Brother (Cory Doctorow), Understanding Comics (Scott McCloud), Snow Crash; The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson), Dune (Frank Herbert), Pattern Recognition (William Gibson) AUDIOBOOKS: The Recorded Works (Pema Chödrön), Debt (David Graeber), Just Kids (Patti Smith), The Art of Possibility (Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander), Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale (Zig Ziglar), The War of Art (Steven Pressfield) Goldberg, Evan: Love You Forever (Robert Munsch), Watchmen; V for Vendetta (Alan Moore), Preacher (Garth Ennis), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams), The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) Goodman, Marc: One Police Plaza (William Caunitz), The 4-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss), The Singularity Is Near (Ray Kurzweil), Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom) Hamilton, Laird: The Bible, Natural Born Heroes (Christopher McDougall), Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien), Deep Survival (Laurence Gonzales), Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Richard Bach and Russell Munson), Dune (Frank Herbert) Harris, Sam: A History of Western Philosophy (Bertrand Russell), Reasons and Persons (Derek Parfit), The Last Word; Mortal Questions (Thomas Nagel), Our Final Invention (James Barrat), Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom), Humiliation; The Anatomy of Disgust (William Ian Miller), The Flight of the Garuda: The Dzogchen Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism (Keith Dowman), I Am That (Nisargadatta Maharaj), Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (Jean Hatzfeld), God Is Not Great; Hitch-22 (Christopher Hitchens), Stumbling on Happiness (Daniel Gilbert), The Qur’an Hart, Mark: Mastery (Robert Greene), The Art of Learning (Josh Waitzkin), The 4-Hour Body (Tim Ferriss) Hof, Wim: Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Richard Bach and Russell Munson), Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse), The Bhagavad Gita, The Bible Hoffman, Reid: Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values (Fred Kofman), Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari) Holiday, Ryan: Meditations (Marcus Aurelius), The War of Art (Steven Pressfield), What Makes Sammy Run?


pages: 455 words: 133,719

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

It is a time not just for play, recreation, and connection with others but also for meditation, reflection, and deep thought.35 Throughout the course of history, in this “leisure” time away from toil, elite men—the ones who, as Jonathan Gershuny explained over lunch in Paris, enjoyed true leisure for most of human history—came up with some of the most brilliant innovations, enduring art, and soaring discoveries humanity has ever known. The “leisure class,” Bertrand Russell wrote, “cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.” In his 1932 classic essay, “In Praise of Idleness,” Russell heralded a coming time when modern technology would bring shorter work hours and time for leisure to be enjoyed equally by everyone.

productivity prolactin psychotherapy pulses Purdue University Pythagoras Quakers Quinn, Patricia radio reading Reagan, Ronald recession (2008) Reed, Donna religion RescueTime résumé retirement rhythm Richardson, Elliot risk Rivelli, Renate Robinson, John; Time for Life; time studies Robinson, Sara Rockefeller University Rodriguez, Edson role overload Romans, ancient Romney, Mitt Rosie the Riveter ROWE Rowe, Tim Rowe-Finkbeiner, Kristin; The F-Word: Feminism in Jeopardy Rubenstein, Carin: The Sacrificial Mother Rudman, Laurie Running Out of Time (PBS program) rural America, busyness in Russell, Bertrand, “In Praise of Idleness” Rutberg, Malin Rutgers University Samuelsson, Marcus Sandberg, Sheryl; Lean In San Francisco Saturday Night Live (TV show) Saudi Arabia schizophrenia Schlafly, Phyllis Schneider, Barbara Schneider, Matt Schor, Juliet; The Overwhelmed American Schroeder, Pat Schwartz, Tony; Be Excellent at Anything; The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working Schweiker, Richard science seasons, changing of Seattle self-efficacy Semedo-Strauss, Carolyn Senge, Peter: The Fifth Discipline “separate spheres theory” serotonin service industry Sevareid, Eric seven deadly sins Sevilla-Sanz, Almudena sex; discrimination Shaw, Sue Shelton, Beth Anne Sheridan, Rich shopping Sibelius, Kathleen SIDS Silicon Valley Simplicity Moms single mothers Skype Slaughter, Anne-Marie; “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” slavery sleep; brain and; cortisol levels during; lack of smartphones smiling Smith, Tom social media software South Africa South Korea Soviet Union Spain Spira, Jonathan: Overload!

Social scientists comb this time data for clues about the way we live, how we work, what kind of progress we’re making toward gender equality, and how much time we make for leisure. 13. Suzanne M. Bianchi, John P. Robinson, and Melissa A. Milkie, Changing Rhythms of American Family Life (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 53–58. 14. John P. Robinson, “Time Use and Qualities of Life,” Social Indicators Research: Special Issue (IATUR Conference, Washington, D.C., 2007). 15. Kristen Gerancher, “The Economic Value of Housework: New Survey to Track Women-Dominated Labor,” CBS.MarketWatch.com, 2001 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Partnership Studies, 2012), www.partnershipway.org/learn-more/articles-by-riane-eisler/economics-business-organizational-development/the-economic-value-of-housework.


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

All that saves this statement from absolutely meaningless circularity (they’re smart because they’re rich because they’re smart, and on and on) is that it emphasizes that (most of) the very rich do have jobs. 21. This is why the books they produce become ever shorter, more simplistic, and less well researched. 22. Geoff Shullenberger, “The Rise of the Voluntariat,” Jacobin online, last modified May 5, 2014, www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/the-rise-of-the-voluntariat. 23. Bertrand Russell puts it nicely in his essay “In Praise of Idleness”: “What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.” (1935:13). 24.

Ray, Benjamin C. Myth, Ritual and Kingship in Buganda. London: Oxford University Press, 1991. Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. London: Penguin, 2004. Reich, Robert. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Russell, Bertrand. In Praise of Idleness. London: Unwin Hyman, 1935. Schmidt, Jeff. Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. London: Penguin, 2003. ________. Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality.

on the misery of ambiguity and forced pretense Let us return to the subject of make-believe. Obviously, a lot of jobs require make-believe. Almost all service jobs do to a certain extent. In a classic study of Delta Airlines flight attendants, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild introduced the notion of “emotional labor.” Hoschschild found air hostesses typically had to spend so much effort creating and maintaining a perky, empathetic, good-natured persona as part of their conditions of employment that they often became haunted by feelings of emptiness, depression, or confusion, unsure of who or what they really were.


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The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Engels, Frederick, "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific," in Ten Classics of Marxism (New York: International Publishers, 1946), pp. 62-63. 30. Kimball, Dexter S., "The Social Effects of Mass Production," Science 77, January 6, 1933), p. 1. 31. Hunnicutt, p. 83. 32. Ibid., p. 76. 33. Russell, Bertrand, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (London, 1935), P.17. 34. Bergson, Roy, "Work Sharing in Industry: History, Methods and Extent of the Movement in the United States, 1929-33" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1933), pp. 7-8. 35. Hunnicut, P·148. 36. "The Death of Kellogg's Six-Hour Day," Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline (Iowa City: University of Iowa) p. 9. 37.

Redistribution of hours was increasingly seen as a survival issue. If new technologies increased productivity and led to fewer workers and overproduction, the only appropriate antidote was to reduce the number of hours worked so that everyone would have a job and enough income and purchasing power to absorb the increases in production. Bertrand Russell, the great English mathematician and philosopher, stated labor's case. "There should not be eight hours per day for some and zero for others but four hours per day for all."33 On July 20, 1932, the AFL Executive Council, meeting in Atlantic City, drafted a statement calling on President Hoover to convene a conference of business and labor leaders for the purpose of implementing a thirty-hour workweek to "create work opportunities for millions of idle men and women."34 Anxious to stimulate consumer purchasing power, and seeing no other viable solution on the horizon, many business leaders reluctantly joined the campaign for a shorter workweek.

., 156-57 Ricardo, David, xi Roach, Stephen, 92, 143, 153 Robinson, 64 Robodoc,158 Robotics in agriculture, 115-17 in automobile industry, 131-32 in medicine, 158 in retail industry, 153 Rocard, Michel, 224 Rogoff, Martin H., 126 Rohatyn, Felix, 264 ROMPER (Robotic Melon Picker), 115 Roos, Daniel, 94-95, 96, 99,100 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 28-29, 30 Rubber industry, automation in, 136-37 Rucci, Anthony, 153 Rudney, Gabriel, 241 Russell, Bertrand, 26 Russia, 214-15, 279 Sadan, Ezra, 115 Saffo, Paul, 148, 177 Samuelson, Paul, 37 Sarvodaya Sharanadana Movement (SSM), 281 Saturday Evening Post, 51 Saturn, 104 Saunders, Lee A., 266-67 Savory, Thomas, 59 Say, Jean Baptiste, 15, 113 Schlilein, Peter, 224 Schmidt, Helmut, 199 Schor, Juliet, 222-23 Schraggs,Steven,159 Science, 116 Scientific management, 50 Scott, Jerry, 171 Sculley, John, 7 Sears, Roebuck, 26, 153 347 Second Industrial Revolution, 60 Secretaries, impact of automation on, 148-49 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 51 Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA),280 Senegal, third/volunteer sector in, 281 Service sector banking industry, 144-45 changes in the traditional office, 146-51 growth in, xii-xiii impact of automation on, 141-62 insurance industry, 145-46 in New York City, 143-44 telecommunications industry, 141-42 Shaiken, Harley, 204, 205 Share the work movement, 25-29 Sheinkman, Jack, 139-40 Shiva, Vandana, 286 Siemens, 4 Silberman, Charles, 84 Simons, Geoff, 187 Sismondi, Simonde de, xi Skerritt, John c., 7 Slaughter, Jane, 185 Sloan, Alfred, 93 Small companies, job growth in, 9-10 Smith, Alan A., 68 Smith, John F., Jr., 130 Sobow, Richard, 6 Social diSintegration, 177- 80 Social economy, 242 globalizing, 275-93 Social income theory, 259-67 Social Security Act (1935), 31 Social wages, provision for, 258 - 67 Social welfare programs international, 202-3 overhaul proposals for U.S., 265- 67 Society National Bank (Cleveland), 144 Soil Conservation Act (1936), 31 Sony, 204 Sorj, Bernardo, 123 Sous vide, 154 Soviet Union, third/volunteer sector in, 279 Space age, 55 Spain, unemployment in, 199 Sri Lanka, third/volunteer sector in, 281 Standard Oil, 26 Starr, Frederick, 279 Steam power, role of, 59 - 60 Steel industry, automation in the, 132-36 Steel Workers Union, 67 Stockman, David, 40 Strasser, Susan, 21 Stress biorhythms and burnout, 186-90 impact of high-tech, 182-86 Student Community Service Program, 262,263 Suburbs, mass consumption and role of, 22-23 Sugrue, Thomas J., 75 Sultan, Arthur, 193 Sumitomo, 133, 136-37 Sunkist, 268 Suris, Peter, 156 Sweden, layoffs in, 4 Synthesizers, 160 Syre, Alfred, 196-97 Tabulating Machine Co., 64 Tax credits for third/volunteer sector, 264-65 Tax deductions/shadow wages for third/ volunteer sector, 256-58, 272-73 Taylor, Frederick w., 50, 94 Technocrats, 54-56 Technology.


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Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

[T]here’s probably no other product or service that we can think of that is like it in terms of capturing kids’ interest,” precisely because when kids go on-line, they enter the “flow state,” that “highly pleasurable experience of total absorption in a challenging activity” which means “there is nothing else that exists like it for advertisers to build relationships with kids.”29 FAST over SLOW The preference for easy over hard and simple over complex issues naturally in a preference for fast over slow. The world of kids is a hare’s civilization in which tortoises have no place. It has been seventy-five years since philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote In Praise of Idleness, and since that time the “pleasure of slowness,” Milan Kundera observed not long ago, “has disappeared.” Kundera proposes that “speed is the form of ecstasy the technological revolution has bestowed upon man,”30 and ecstasy, like speed (the eponymous drug for people who think they are cool), is a specialty of the young.

In all these fields he was a pioneer and speculator who led the way for more prudent followers like Pan American Airways and the great Hollywood studios. Like his love life that touched most of the fabled names of Hollywood glory days (Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Hutton, Susan Hayward, Jane Russell, Linda Darnell, Zizi Jeanmaire, Jean Simmons, Elizabeth Taylor, Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Joan Fontaine, Gene Tierney, and his wives, Jean Peters and Terry Moore), his business career was a bizarre concoction of daring and foolhardiness, invention and corruption, vision and insanity, that left him and the companies he founded deeply distressed.48 His 1930 $4-million blockbuster film Hell’s Angels paved the way for all the excessive Hollywood megahits to come, just as his Spruce Goose flying ship that flew but once, Hughes at the controls, became an icon of the aviation imagination that pushed America toward global leadership in the military and commercial aviation field.

Sports in the commercial setting offer insistent consumables that demand and are reinforced by infantilization—whether it is of thuggish soccer fans in England hypocritically condemned by the owners who sometimes seem to welcome if not actually incite their behaviors, or of twenty-or thirty-something television viewers in the United States wooed by goofy beer ads targeting their puerile fantasies and encouraging their teen taste tendencies. While there are certainly athletes like NBA players Bill Russell and Michael Jordan from earlier eras and Channing Frye or Steve Nash today19 who whatever their age are thoughtful and grown-up, able to treat their sport as an adult profession, this is not apparently what the companies that have transformed athletics into pure circus entertainment have in mind: the norm is increasingly the infantilized athlete controlled by the supposedly adult corporate owner indulging in infantilizing tactics in the name of the bottom line.