Why do you work? There will be different answers to this simple question. Some people will say they work to earn the money required to enjoy the good things in life. Others will say that they work because it gives meaning to their life. Most will dish up some combination of these two views, with work being seen as both a means to enjoy a good life as well as the very essence of a meaningful life.
That brings us to the next question. What will a world without work possibly look like—a happy place where human beings are free to focus on what really matters to them or an emotional desert in which our lives are stripped of meaning?
This column usually drifts away from its usual concerns at the end of every year, to cover some broader issues that get crowded out by the news cycle. These questions about work are getting aired because this year saw the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that were available to a wide audience, and the subsequent debates about what it would mean for jobs that were already threatened by automation.
Ten years ago, Victoria Chick published a paper titled ‘Economics and The Good Life: Keynes and Schumacher.’ Chick was an economist who mostly worked outside the professional consensus. As the title of her paper suggests, she looked at how economists look at the good life through the writings of John Maynard Keynes and E.F. Schumacher. The former is well known as one of the giants of modern economics, while the latter had a brief period of popularity in the last quarter of the 20th century for his Buddhist economics.
Keynes wrote The Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren in 1930, a brief optimistic tract about the distant future at a time when the world was facing immense economic difficulties. His vision of a world of abundance and leisure, when cultivation of the art of life will be more important than an endless pursuit of the means of life, was at odds with the huge misery and unemployment that was spreading across most of the world. “The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance," wrote Keynes, “But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes… Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well." What Keynes was optimistically predicting was a life freed from the need to work out of necessity, so that human beings could find meaning—and the true values of religion—in their lives.
Chick writes that Schumacher approached the problem of a good life from an altogether different angle, especially on whether we should think of work as a means or an end. “The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal: it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.…" wrote Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful, his best known work, first published in 1973.
Keynes believed we work because we have to. Schumacher believed we work because it helps us grow into who we are. Keynes did not go into the question of whether people would use free time to pursue higher ends or sink into boredom (or watch TikTok videos). The way that Schumacher charted may well turn out to be a poverty trap that’s especially harsh on the poor. But there is no doubt that these two economists framed an important question that gets a new relevance in the new age of automation, robotics and artificial intelligence.
There is still too much poverty, want and lack of opportunity across the world that can only be addressed with higher economic growth. But recent technological developments also create reasons to ponder the big question that Keynes and Schumacher had raised in their writings.
Niranjan Rajadhyaksha is executive director at Artha India Research Advisors.
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Why do we work? This question arises again as AI eyes our jobs
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26.12.2023
Why do you work? There will be different answers to this simple question. Some people will say they work to earn the money required to enjoy the good things in life. Others will say that they work because it gives meaning to their life. Most will dish up some combination of these two views, with work being seen as both a means to enjoy a good life as well as the very essence of a meaningful life.
That brings us to the next question. What will a world without work possibly look like—a happy place where human beings are free to focus on what really matters to them or an emotional desert in which our lives are stripped of meaning?
This column usually drifts away from its usual concerns at the end of every year, to cover some broader issues that get crowded out by the news cycle. These questions about work are getting aired because this year saw the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that were available to a wide audience, and the subsequent debates about what it would mean for jobs that were already threatened by automation.
Ten years ago, Victoria Chick published a paper titled ‘Economics and The Good Life: Keynes and Schumacher.’ Chick was an economist who mostly worked outside the professional consensus. As the title of her paper........
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