The blurring line between work and leisure

Back when we were kids, most people I knew did the bare minimum in life.  They went to school or work. They came home.  Relaxed. Ate. Went to sleep.

We slept a lot! 

Some may have done a little bit of gardening. Or whatever. But, essentially leisure was leisure. 

Nobody I knew then was even remotely maniacal about how they spent their downtime. I don't know how much life has changed in India.  But, here in the US, leisure is no longer leisure. There is intense commitment, a maniacal intensity, to whatever people decide that they want to pursue.

My early exposure to this was back in California.  Brewing beer at home was becoming a craze.  I practically had to run away from a couple of acquaintances if I ever ran into them at any get together, because they could go on and on about the latest in their brewing.  

Then there were the bake-bread-at-home people, especially after that machine appeared in the market in the early 1990s.  Remember that? 

Quilters, oh, don't get me started on them! 

The age of Facebook and Instagram has made this worse.  

People bike 40 miles and can't wait to post it.  Leisure activities are meticulously documented and broadcast to the world.  

I won't be surprised if soon people start boasting about the awesome sex they have, and broadcasting it as if they are porn stars in their bedrooms. Oh, wait, they already do! 

Why do people get so maniacal, and competitive, about their leisure time "work"?  When did this "play hard" concept take over lives?  And why the condescending attitude towards those of us who don't play hard?  I wish I could just freely admit that I don't do much.  Why not just chill, and enjoy?

One might think that these people go to work in order to relax from such all the strenuous leisure activities.  But, nope.  Working hard and long hours is apparently the modern thing.  I can understand the long, hard, and unpredictable hours in the healthcare world.  But, most others?  Even in the bullshit jobs?

Yes, yes, yes.  I have written about all these.  A lot.  I hope against hope that the coronavirus is compelling people to ask themselves why they do what they do.  

I will now go play bridge, er, work ;)

Stuff it!

A couple of days ago, I blogged that we are addicted to stuff. I added that getting rid of this addiction is impossible.

I continue to think about this and, frankly, it scares the life out of me.  Yes, as I wrote there, there are the awful impacts on the natural environment that sustains our existence.  But, there is more to worry about.  Something more existential.  If we are working long hours primarily because it is not about mere survival but to get more stuff, then "today’s discussions need to move beyond the old point about the marvels of technology, and truly ask: what is it all for?"

The metaphorical tasting of an apple from the forbidden tree is about this aspect of our existence.  Through our curiosity, over the hundreds of thousands of years, we have essentially become people running faster and faster on a treadmill.  What is it all for?

It doesn't have to be this way though.

If we wanted to produce as much as Keynes’s countrymen did in the 1930s, we wouldn’t need everyone to work even 15 hours per week. If you adjust for increases in labour productivity, it could be done in seven or eight hours, 10 in Japan (see graph below). These increases in productivity come from a century of automation and technological advances: allowing us to produce more stuff with less labour. In this sense, modern developed countries have way overshot Keynes prediction – we need to work only half the hours he predicted to match his lifestyle.

But, such short work weeks did not happen, nor will it ever happen.

Globally, people enjoy a standard of living much higher than in 1930 (and nowhere is this more true than in the Western countries that Keynes wrote about). We would not be content with a good life by our grandparents’ standards.

We humans are a strange species!

To complicate things, there is this:

If the pace of increase in life expectancy in developed countries over the past two centuries continues through the 21st century, most babies born since 2000 in France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the USA, Canada, Japan, and other countries with long life expectancies will celebrate their 100th birthdays.

Have we paused to consider what this will mean?  How long will those kids who grow up to be adults be on treadmills so that they can get more stuff?

It is also not the first time that I have blogged about the implications of a 100-year life.  But, it simply sucks to be in the minority worrying about all these things.

I know I don't want to be on a treadmill for ever.

Leisure Suit Sriram

Even the retired folks these days don't seem to have leisure time.  How can that be?

The more I think about my own short life thus far, the clearer it seems that the dream was about a technological future that would launch us into an age of prosperity in which we would do very little work and enjoy a great deal of leisure time.  It would be a denial of gigantic proportions if we were to argue that we not incredibly prosperous now and, yet, leisure has become scarce?

To economists, this is no surprise.  Because, to them, leisure in prosperity means that there is much higher opportunity cost in terms of income that is not earned by doing nothing.  The more the income, the more the opportunity cost of sitting around.  So, people work themselves to death?

It is a strange world in which we live.  Ask yourself what exactly are we working for, and what exactly is it that we want to get out of the incomes that we earn?  Go ahead.  Do that first and then resume reading this post.

Yep, we earn in order to consume.  Our highly productive lives--as in economic productivity--are not about working fewer hours and creating leisure time that we can enjoy, but are about consumption.

It is almost as if we set aside the golden years for leisure.  When we can no longer do anything "productive."  What a wasteful approach to life!

There is one other problem, a nasty one:

Most people haven’t been taught to find fulfillment in their free time. To the contrary, rather than learning how to cultivate lifelong interests, students—both in primary and secondary schooling—are increasingly being educated to meet specific labor-market demands, demands that may also disappear or be automated away. Meanwhile, “It just is assumed that everyone knows how to handle their free time,” Henderson laments. “Not true!”

Yesterday, during a conversation with a student, I yet again heard the familiar: "I pack a whole lot of classes and activities because I am at a loss if I don't have things to do."

 Oh, do not for a second think of people spending time on the likes of Facebook as those enjoying leisure.  Nope. As I have blogged in plenty, people are "raw materials" in those activities, with the businesses making money out of them.  And, these businesses work on making addicts out of their users.

Over the past decade, more people have been spending more time on Facebook, whose business model is not all that different than the tobacco industry—it addicts its users, denies its own harmful effects, and expands its user base by targeting children and developing countries.
Commercial leisure and entertainment industries are undergoing a technological transformation that will be just as profound as the changes in work. But if the prevailing market incentive is to manufacture addiction, then the future of leisure could be bleak indeed. It remains to be seen if those designing social-media platforms, video games, virtual- and augmented-reality applications, and other technologies will feel pressured to do so responsibility.

So, where do we go from here?

Nowhere. We are screwed.

Not me though. Ask my neighbors--they will tell you that I rarely work.  Ask my colleagues--they will tell you I am goofing around and my work is mere mashed potatoes. Mine is a life of leisure! ;)

          Leisure

William Henry Davies

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare

Where have all the young men gone?

I went to listen to the president give his annual state-of-the-college address.  He, like most educators these days, talked about how student enrollment growth is critical for the fiscal future of the university.  He used phrases that one would hear from a factory owner: production, products, pipeline, and--of course--how more students mean more money.  There was no detailed presentation, however, on how well the products (graduates) are selling!

Despite repeating the flat--or even a negative growth--enrollment scenario, the president talked in plenty about the new building construction that has been completed, and another that will soon begin.  How is it that people with PhDs do not see the contradiction in massively increasing capacity even when knowing well that the demand won't be there?  Was there a KoolAid drink that I missed sipping?

Was I also the only one who thought it was yet another profound evidence when the president said that female students accounted for 65 percent of the incoming freshman class?  From 55-45, to 60-40, we have now reached 65-35.  Amazing.  Simply astounding.  What is this evidence for?  It adds more to the 'save the males" that I have been talking and writing about for almost two decades now.

Teenage boys and young men are simply not understanding that the world has changed rapidly in the past two decades.

For low-skilled men in their 20s, employment rates have fallen by about 10 percentage points over the last 15 years—from 82 percent in 2000 to only 72 percent in 2015. This decline is staggering. You might think it’s matched by a rise in school attendance for this age group. That is not the case.
The following may be the most shocking number I give you today: in 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men aged 21–30 had not worked at all during the prior 12 months. Think about that for a second.

Yes, think about all that data. Take more than a second.  Take ten minutes.  In fact, you should ponder those data for a long, long time.  One in five young men between the ages of 21 and 30 had not worked (for wages) over the 12 months.  One in five!

If you are a thinker--and you are; after all, you are here reading this--your immediate question is: "If they are not working, where do these young, low-skilled men live?"

You have an answer, right?  And you are correct about that:

In 2014, 70 percent of lower-skilled men in their 20s without a job lived with a parent or close relative.

Are you now beginning to have a little bit of an anxiety? Perhaps a tinge of panic?  If so, hold on to something, and get a brown-bag if you are beginning to hyperventilate.

If they are not working, how do these young men eat? We—the parents and relatives—feed them. When they are in our basements, they come up for food from time to time and raid our refrigerators. I have no information on whether or not they are showering.
Are these young, nonworking, lower-skilled men who are living in their parents’ basements married? You may be surprised to hear this: they are not. The age of marriage is increasing for this group. In summary, these younger, lower-skilled men are now less likely to work, less likely to marry, and more likely to live with parents or close relatives.

There is an interesting twist to all this.  You ready for that?

If we go to surveys that track subjective well-being—surveys that ask people to assess their overall level of happiness—lower-skilled young men in 2014 reported being much happier on average than did lower-skilled men in the early 2000s. This increase in happiness is despite their employment rate falling by 10 percentage points and the increased propensity to be living in their parents’ basement.

Those young men are happy.  The parents and close relatives hosting these young men might not be happy, but that is another story!

They are happy now. Yes. But, how about life after 30?

There is some evidence that these young, lower-skilled men who are happy in their 20s become much less happy in their 30s and 40s. They haven’t accumulated on-the-job skills because they spent their 20s idle. Many eventually get married and have kids. When this happens, living in their parents’ basements is no longer a viable option. Playing video games does not put food on their tables. It’s a bad combination: low labor demand plus the accumulated effects of low labor supply makes economic conditions for these aging workers pretty bleak.
These labor-market outcomes affect many facets of society. They affect the take-up rates of government transfer programs. They may explain voting patterns for certain candidates in recent periods. There is rising evidence that lower-skilled workers in their 30s and 40s are increasing their drug use. We have also seen increased suicide rates for lower-skilled workers in middle age. The effects of changing technology on the labor markets of lower-skilled workers will likely have repercussions within the US economy for years to come.

When I yell about the urgency to re-write the social contract, to find alternative outlets for testosterone, to figure out ways in which we can help people be productive if they don't want to, or are not suited for, college, well, all those are not random independent issues.  Nope.  These are all inter-related issues that require a great deal of our time and energy.  Our time and energy as in all of us.  And for that, in a democracy, we need leaders who understand these nuances, help shape the conversations, and work out strategies for collective action.  Ain't gonna happen in the democracy that we have and the one that we will wake up to on November 9th :(

Oh, btw, if you thought all the quotes were excerpted from some left-wing nutcase's rants, ahem, it is from as academically rigorous right-wing economics as you can possibly get--Erik Hurst is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.  So, when a U. of Chicago economics/business professor says all those, well, you ought to be scared shitless by now.

Paying for the ancestors' worst mistake ever!

I have often wondered, in this blog too, why we humans tend to work so hard.  Sometimes, if the context ever comes up, I even bug students in my classes about this.  I tell them that biologically we are animals, and that for the longest time we even lived like that--the hunting/gathering ancestors of ours worked enough to get food for the day and then they called it quits. I tell them that the settled agriculture ruined it for us because ever since then we have been working hard from dawn to dusk and now we work round the clock thanks to artificial lighting and heating!

Of course, when I criticize the permanent agriculture, I am merely channeling Jared Diamond, who called that the worst mistake ever!

How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?

From the perspective of hard work and very little down time, the "progress" is questionable:

 Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

Imagine a 14-hour work week.  Oh, wait, that's the faculty life! ;)

In the contemporary world, in a life that the hunter-gatherers would not remotely relate to, we are proud of working hard.  We are even suspicious of those who seemingly do not want to work as hard as some do.  Ryan Avent has a lengthy essay pretty much defending himself while explaining why he--and many others like him--love to work hard and long hours.

BTW, perhaps you recognize the name Avent from having been a subscriber to the Economist.  What I didn't know until I came across that essay by Avent is that the Economist has launched another periodical, called 1843.

The Economist’s bi-monthly magazine of ideas, culture and lifestyle. Aimed at the globally curious, every issue includes in-depth features, as well as culture, design, technology, travel, style, food and drink, and body and mind.

You can guess what the significance of 1843 might be to that publication, right?

Anyway, back to Avent's defense of his long work days:

You might have thought that whereas, before, a male professional worked 50 hours a week while his wife stayed at home with the children, a couple of married professionals might instead each opt to work 35 hours a week, sharing more of the housework, and ending up with both more money and more leisure. That didn’t happen. Rather, both are now more likely to work 60 hours a week and pay several people to care for the house and children.
Why?

And that is exactly what Avent attempts to answer.   Read that engaging piece.

I am not sold on the long, long work days.  I remain convinced that it is pretty darn stupid to spend a good chunk of one's life merely working away.  But, hey, if ever you are frustrated by all that hours of work and no leisure, then curse our ancestors whose brilliant idea it was to settle down and start farming and domesticating cattle more than 10,000 years ago!

Here comes the weekend

Back when I was working in the real world--as in outside of academe--large employers were beginning to experiment with staggered work hours in order to test whether that helped their employees with decreased commute times.  If it worked well, then the employees will be more productive, and the staggered hours will also address the congestion issues in the metropolitan area, was the logic.

It can work only if the tasks are such that people do not have to be working at the same time.  However, this is rare--almost always, we seem to need others also to work at the hours when we work, if we want to get the job done.  Which is why with exceptions, offices seem to have similar working hours even now, despite all the technological advancements since those days when I was nothing but a low-paid intern.

If there is a synchronicity that is needed for work time, then how about for free time?

“If I could just get a few more hours off work each week,” you might think, “I would be happier.”

Think about that.  What if you have free time, but your friends and family are at work?  What if you are not a hermit, and you need people's company during your down time?

it’s not just that we have a shortage of free time; it’s also that our free time, in order to be satisfying, often must align with that of our friends and loved ones. We face a problem, in other words, of coordination. Work-life balance is not something that you can solve on your own.

Makes sense, doesn't it?  Suppose you are off work.  The people you like to hang out with are all at work.  You don't even have sports to watch on TV because all those mindless games seem to be scheduled only Friday through Sunday.  This is what happens to the unemployed folks, too:

the jobless showed almost exactly the same day-to-day pattern in emotional well-being as working people did. Their positive emotions soared on the weekend, and dropped back down again on Monday.

Interesting, right?  We sink, or sail, together, it seems:

While the jobless have “free time” during the week, their friends and family still have to go to work. The weekend is when the jobless fall back into sync with society.
The weekend, then, is not just a respite from work, but also gives similar relief from unemployment. It is a time when people can get what they’ve been missing: time together.
This conclusion points to a key feature of the work-life problem: You cannot get more “weekend” simply by taking an extra day off work yourself. If we were to take more time off as individuals, we would be likely to spend that time, as the jobless do, waiting for other people to finish work. We are stuck “at work,” in a sense, by the work schedules of our family and friends.

We humans are complicated ;)

Time is not money. I value time. Ergo, ...

"Are you home these days? No school?" asked a neighbor the other day.

In a nanosecond, I went through the possibilities the conversation could lead to: a friendly humor about not working to a little tongue-in-cheek remark about how teachers have their summers off.  Unless I wanted to pick a fight, there was no point dealing with any snide remark.  I don't like to fight.  I am like Bugs Bunny, as a video recently pointed out, who always shied away from fights; but then he is always poked! ;)

"Yes, this is the first summer that I am not teaching any class" I replied as I continued to walk.  I worried that if I stopped, then the friendliness might be at grave danger.

"Oh like a real vacation then."

I smiled and continued to walk.  How do I explain the concept of a life in furlough?

Source

Over my years here in the US, I have come to understand that Americans have an innate distrust of anyone who seems like is not working long days.  Working late into one's life is a badge of honor to many.  And working long hours--"I am so busy"--is another badge of honor.  Pretty soon, people all around me walk with many badges while, to them, I am doing nothing to earn badges.  It is almost as if I am, ahem, un-American!:

The United States is famously a nation of people who think they should be on the job—and be on the job and be on the job. We work more hours than the Japanese. We work more than the Germans. We’re the only first-world nation that does not mandate vacation time or sick days. And let’s not even discuss our maternity leave policies.
Yet we don’t seem to be aware of how second-tier our standards are compared to other nations.

The Protestant work ethic has seeped into the Catholics, the Mormons, the Hindus, the atheists, ... Wait, it gets worse, writes that author at Slate:

If you don’t take part in this orgy of work and more work? Something must be wrong with you— and that’s you, specifically.

How do I begin to explain that I intentionally chose this profession even though it pays less than other professions that I could have easily signed up for?  And that the nature of this profession is that we have only nine-month contracts, which results in an appearance of leisure time, even though I am working every day?

At least, they don't beat up on me.  But, the political rhetoric in this country beats up on the poor and the low-income households.  As if they are all poor only because they are lazy bums who don't work long hours--even though the data clearly show otherwise.  What gives?

Here’s a thought: In an era in which decent, high-paying jobs are hard to find, and in which the workforce-participation rate is at lows not seen since the late 1970s, gainful employment turns into something of a status item. That allows us to rationalize the increasing hours we put in on the job—often done because we fear the consequences of saying no—as choice. Then we turn around and demean others who don’t work.

It is a strange life that we lead.

I know you are not a busy person. Why? You are reading this!

Back when I was young--ah, those years that were so long ago--even when I was merely agnostic, I was convinced that there was nothing after death.  A conviction that there was, literally, only life to live.  Then, kaput. Gone. And, therefore, I didn't want to live a life that I did not want to and do something for a living that did not interest me.

I thank the cosmos (though the cosmos couldn't care whether or not I exist) for such an understanding early enough in my life.  

The way I earn my paycheck now is exactly how I would like to earn my paycheck--of course, a few more dollars will always help, but this is plenty enough.  "Plenty enough" in dollars is nothing compared to what I could/would have earned had I continued on with engineering.  But, this plenty enough provides me with a hassle-free life.  And has always provided me with an abundance of a commodity that no amount of dollars can buy--time.

Everybody, everywhere seems to be busy. In the corporate world, a “perennial time-scarcity problem” afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm.

Incredibly busy many affluent people are.

A couple, who are a gazillion times wealthier than I will ever be, commented to me when we met before my Ecuador trip, "you are lucky that professors have a long summer break for such travels. We have no time."  I thought to myself that with all their wealth they could easily not work for another second in their lives and travel all they wanted to; but they choose not to because they equate not working with gazillons foregone.

When people see their time in terms of money, they often grow stingy with the former to maximise the latter.

But, unlike what we think, the problem is not entirely new either:

Writing in the first century, Seneca was startled by how little people seemed to value their lives as they were living them—how busy, terribly busy, everyone seemed to be, mortal in their fears, immortal in their desires and wasteful of their time. He noticed how even wealthy people hustled their lives along, ruing their fortune, anticipating a time in the future when they would rest. “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy,” he observed in “On the Shortness of Life”, perhaps the very first time-management self-help book. Time on Earth may be uncertain and fleeting, but nearly everyone has enough of it to take some deep breaths, think deep thoughts and smell some roses, deeply. “Life is long if you know how to use it,” he counselled.

A wise Seneca observed the rich rushing around complaining about not having enough time, and this pretentious blogger also observes the same.  Perhaps we even observe these only because we are sitting quietly not rushing around chasing money!

But, once I turn my attention away from the affluent population, which includes me, and consider, for instance, the lives of the non-traditional students in my classes, then I notice a difference--those students are also incredibly short of time because they juggle school with work and family, and barely have any leisure time.  They, unfortunately, seem to lack both money and time.

Ultimately, more people at the top are trading leisure for work because the gains of working—and the costs of shirking—are higher than ever before. Revealingly, inequalities in leisure have coincided with other measures of inequality, in wages and consumption, which have been increasing steadily since the 1980s. While the wages of most workers, and particularly uneducated workers, have either remained stagnant or grown slowly, the incomes at the top—and those at the very top most of all—have been rising at a swift rate. This makes leisure time terribly expensive.
So if leisureliness was once a badge of honour among the well-off of the 19th century, in the words of Thorsten Veblen, an American economist at the time, then busyness—and even stressful feelings of time scarcity—has become that badge now. To be pressed for time has become a sign of prosperity, an indicator of social status, and one that most people are inclined to claim.

Let's see: those with gazillions are working even harder because they value their "free time" as way too much money to be lost, and those struggling for paychecks are working even harder because they cannot afford to take time off.  Isn't something seriously wrong with this picture?

Alas time, ultimately, is a strange and slippery resource, easily traded, visible only when it passes and often most highly valued when it is gone. No one has ever complained of having too much of it. Instead, most people worry over how it flies, and wonder where it goes. Cruelly, it runs away faster as people get older, as each accumulating year grows less significant, proportionally, but also less vivid. Experiences become less novel and more habitual. The years soon bleed together and end up rushing past, with the most vibrant memories tucked somewhere near the beginning. And of course the more one tries to hold on to something, the swifter it seems to go.

The faster does time fly as we age, and as we rush around.  But, it will all end; after all, as I like to say, we all come with our own expiration dates.  Perhaps there are those who will think in their death-beds,  "instead of watching the sunset, I am so glad I spent a couple of additional hours in the office in order to earn more."

I, for one, am so glad that I have the time to watch the river flow by, the birds chirp, the sun set, the children scream, the adults yak in their cellphones, the older folks shuffle along.

If you behave well, I will even spend some of that time with you ;)

Source

I tell you, it's not fair. Damn it, it's not fair

As I get older, some of the finer details from the years past get fuzzy.  I don't mean I am imagining events and places--it is just that sometimes I am not sure about the contexts.  I guess it happens to all of us with aging--earlier than normal for some, and much later for a lucky few.

There is one that I am certain about--every time my father reads a collection that I put together from my blog-posts, he remarks, as if for the first time ever, that my narrations remind him of Somerset Maugham's storytelling, of the characters he portrays and the places he describes.  Of course, it is a parental duty to exaggerate a child's accomplishments, even if the child is an old man himself!

There is a reason, perhaps, that subconsciously I have been trying to follow Maugham's path--I read quite a few of his works when I was young.  And when I was older, too.

I loved Maugham's short stories in particular.  I was in Neyveli or in Madras or in Coimbatore, and hadn't been outside the country ever, and yet I was able to be in the very settings that Maugham described and interact with the characters that he so easily and vividly described.

There are many favorites of mine, and one of them I am blogging about today because it is past midsummer and I am beginning to worry that I have eased off way too much.  Perhaps I have not been enough of an ant, and like a grasshopper I enjoyed the summer without preparing for the seasons that follow.   Remember that old and familiar story of the ant and the grasshopper, from which we learnt about hard work and saving for the rainy day as the "moral of the story"?

This is where my memory begins to get fuzzy: did I read the short story in which Maugham played on this ant and the grasshopper theme because it was in the school curriculum, or was the story in the collection that father owned, or was it in an anthology that I had borrowed from the library?  Ah, when I was younger even such fine details were within grasp and now I am left to wonder forever!

It is not the aging, or being unable to recall the fine details, that I refer to in the title of this post, "I tell you, it's not fair. Damn it, it's not fair."  So, what's it about then?  Google for Somerset Maugham's short story in which he plays on the ant and the grasshopper fable and read it for yourself and you will also chime in with, "I tell you, it's not fair. Damn it, it's not fair."  Or, maybe you want the story to be read to you, while you lie on your hammock and enjoy the summer, you lazy grasshopper!

Thanks to robots, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary? Work!

I always watch out for the issues over which the Economist and the Wall Street Journal express concern.  The issues that we would not typically expect these pro-business newspapers to worry about.  Because, if they do, it means that the issue is for real, and urgent to those of us who are not all that rah-rah about business affairs.

Thus, when the Economist runs a special report on robots, and when in the lead article lies buried a concern, it is way past time to duck and cover!

As consumers and citizens, people will benefit greatly from the rise of the robots. Whether they will as workers is less clear, for the robots’ growing competence may make some human labour redundant.

In the introductory economic geography class that I teach, the last two years, I think, I have been providing reading materials that alert them about the real possibility that the jobs they are hoping for might not exist thanks to to the robots.  I tell them not to always imagine a physical robot and that a lot of work could simply be replaced by sophisticated software agents.  If what you do is routine day in and day out, it will be automated, I warn them.

But, of course, suffering from the Cassandra Curse means that I do not end up convincing anybody.  The story of my life!

And now, I can add to my list, this small little hedging by the Economist: "may make some human labour redundant."

Back in 1964, Isaac Asimov imagined 2014 in which robots will start making their presence felt:

Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.

Which is exactly where we are now: robots are not very good, nor are they common, but they are in existence.  The special report in the Economist includes examples of many such robots.

The subheading for one of the essays in the special report summarizes it all:

Job destruction by robots could outweigh creation

That idea of destruction outweighing job creation is, to some of us, quite an understatement!

So, forget the Economist; what else did Asimov imagine?

The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction. ...  It is not only the techniques of teaching that will advance, however, but also the subject matter that will change. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary "Fortran" (from "formula translation").

 Too bad Asimov did not live long to see these unfold.

Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.

Yep. We have arrived at that very moment.  I have been routinely warning students for a few years now that a career that promises an affluent middle-class life might no longer be guaranteed.  There will be jobs at the lower end. And there will be lucrative opportunities for those who can do things that a software or hardware robot cannot--for which the key element is creativity.  Creativity not as in the fine arts alone, but creativity in a much larger sense.

So, what did Asimov think will be prized, valued?

Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!

Indeed!  You da man, Asimov!

Work without hopeBy Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

         Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

Are you afraid of ... nothing to do? Learn to enjoy it, instead!

I never liked engineering, in which I earned my undergrad degree--I had a compelling desire to understand poverty and development and how I could contribute to making the world a better place.  And, thus, I was off to graduate schooling in the US, to focus on topics that I wanted to understand.

It was humbling to realize how complex the issues were.  There was no case of any Occam's Razor solution to anything.  Add to all that a more fundamental question of "what for?"

A standard joke laid all these out.  A World Bank consultant (my adviser was one of them, yes) goes to Bangladesh to suggest strategies, and goes to a village where he finds a twenty-something able-bodied man doing nothing but lying under a tree by the water.

"Why don't you work?" the expert asks him.

"I am happy with this.  Why should I work?"

"You can start your own business and earn money."

"Ok, let us say I do that.  What will I do with that money?"

"You can send your children to good schools and college, and they will help expand your business."

"Ok, say I did that.  Then what?"

"You can earn and save a lot of money."

"But, what will I do with the money?"

"You can retire and spend your time simply watching the day go by."

"But, that is exactly what I am doing now" says the villager.

Of course, it is more than a joke.  It is a whole bunch of existential questions.  Why do we do what we do?  What is it that we want?  What is happiness?  Are poor people happy?  Is it ok not to do anything?

In the modern world, we have made a culture of doing something. In fact, we have even created a world of our own of doing more than one thing at one time and we prize that multitasking (I am miserable even at one task a time!)

But, why not do nothing?  Why not get bored?

Yes, this is a topic that fascinates me.  When my neighbors joke that I don't seem to work for a living, I am always tempted to engage them in this kind of a serious discussion.  But, thankfully, I know to recognize small talk when I hear one!  Thus, I blog (previous posts on boredom: here and here) and this post is the latest in the series, triggered by this article:

What if you answered the question “What do you do all day?” with “Nothing”? It isn’t as if that could possibly be true. If you spent all day in bed watching television, or staring at the clouds, you wouldn’t be doing nothing. Children are always being told to stop doing “nothing” when they’re reading or daydreaming. It is lifelong training for the idea that activity is considered essential to mental health, whether it is meaningful or not. Behind the “nothing” is in part a terror of boredom, as if most of the work most people do for most of their lives isn’t boring.

It is bizarre that people would rather report to work that they will openly admit to something they hate, while turning around to make negative comments about people who prefer not to do that and instead do nothing.  They drive to work with bumper stickers along the lines of "I would rather be fishing" when they could, instead, like the Bangladeshi fisherman, spend all day and life by the waters.

We do not like to live like that Bangladeshi because we like to have iPhones, watch ballgames, or travel.  We, therefore, engage in Faustian Bargains of our own: we are willing to put up with wasting away our lives doing things we really do not want to do, and cursing our daily lives, all because we can earn a few dollars in order to spend on things that we think will bring us happiness?

There is an argument to be made against the prototypical life of hard work as the inevitable lot of humanity. In 1974 the Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins published Stone Age Economics. He proposed the idea that individuals in many “simple” societies, far from working themselves to death merely to exist in their nasty, brutish and short lives, were actually members of the “original affluent society”. He suggested that, in those parts of the world where co-operation and social exchange were paramount, once people had done the few days’ hard work of felling a tree and carving out a canoe, there were large amounts of free time to lie about daydreaming, exploring, telling stories: doing “culture” or just skiving. You’d fish in the canoe you’d made, and by preserving and sharing the catch with others, who also shared theirs with you, you could then take a few days off before you needed to get any more. Decent members of those communities did what they needed to do and then when they didn’t need to do it, they stopped.
Only when you worship the idea of accumulation and status based on its perceived wealth-giving properties do you have to work hard all the time. Accumulation was hampering; you had to carry it about with you when you moved from camp to camp, or find ways of storing and securing it if you were sedentary. Without the idea of surplus as a value beyond its use value, when you needed/wanted something you got it, and when you had it, you enjoyed it until it was time to get some more.

What a bizarre existence that we have designed for ourselves!

Leisure, not doing, is so terrifying in our culture that we cut it up into small, manageable chunks throughout our working year in case an excess of it will drive us mad, and leave the greatest amount of it to the very end, in the half-conscious hope that we might be saved from its horrors by an early death.

This weekend, ask yourself this question: what do you really want in life before that death happens?  Surely it is not the latest iPhone, is it?  Your wish is not to watch the latest movie, right?  So, what exactly are you so busily spinning the wheels for?  Sit down for a while. Figure it out. You will reward yourself with a rich rest of your life, even if that only means doing nothing at all.