Ryan Avent is right to warn that we may be heading towards a world without work (Journal, 19 September). Unfortunately, mainstream economists are not listening. Indeed, in the past, automation has not caused lasting unemployment. Instead, it has made products and services cheaper, which raises demand for them and other products, and eventually creates new jobs. But past rounds of automation replaced human and animal muscle power. That was fine for the humans, who could go on to jobs that were often more interesting and less dangerous, using their cognitive faculties instead of just muscle power. It didn’t work out so well for the horse.
Now the machines are replicating and even improving on our cognitive abilities. Self-driving cars are just the start. Maybe we will evolve an economy of what Silicon Valley types call “radical abundance”, where machines do all the boring jobs and humans concentrate on having fun. Or maybe there will be a more dystopian outcome.
One thing is sure: technological unemployment is not impossible. We should be discussing it and working out how to handle it if it does happen. The Reverse Luddite fallacy could be dangerous for all of us.
Calum Chace
Author of The Economic Singularity
A new economic model is necessary to address the impact of reducing job prospects. Some of the means of addressing this would be to remove the ability of banks to create debt money and to charge interest on it; to deflate the property bubble so that those owning it do not use it as a means to extract wealth from those who do not; to judge corporations’ success – and reward them for being so – by how well they balance their impact upon all stakeholders (employees, customers, investors, owners, community and environment) rather than exploiting the majority of them for the excessive benefit of a few. Three-day working weeks would be the norm.
This would not only mean that the gap between those in and out of work was not so drastic (and the lives of the latter so desperate), it would stimulate a culture in which non-work time would be treated as the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to our communities (supporting the young, old or infirm) or to engage in the stewardship of our environment, thereby increasing the prospect of fulfilling Avent’s vision of the world two centuries from now.
Dave Hunter
Bristol
Ryan Avent raises issues well understood by anyone contemplating retirement or already embarked upon it. The transition from paid work to unremunerated activity is potentially challenging and requires fundamental changes in attitude to make it genuinely liberating. For many, identity is too much a function of work, and shedding routine and status is painful, although profoundly therapeutic. The sine qua non of subsequent contentment is, unsurprisingly, financial security, as he suggests. If freedom from paid work is the future, we may need concepts of the state and its relationship with wealth creation that will make Corbynista policies look like the Conservative party manifesto.
John Price
Eastleigh, Hampshire