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[–]EthnocratArcheofuturist 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Excellent post. One of your best. I agree wholeheartedly.

Anyway, you really should read Veblen because he warned about the capacity of the price system to create excessive waste. That's what these bullshit jobs really are, waste. It's what you get when business people run the system. If engineers ran the system it would be infinitely more efficient. The system is inherently wasteful because of both intrinsic obsolescence and planned obsolescence. Veblen already described these problems over a hundred years ago, and it's only gotten exponentially worse over time. Just look at advertising. He always attacked advertising as being a misallocation of resources, but today most corporations actually spend more money on advertising that they do on R&D. That's insane. The waste is literally everywhere. The system is saturated with it. Not to mention the disastrous impact this has on the environment.

As far as automation and leisure are concerned, Keynes made the argument that today we would enjoy a 15-hour workweek. I highly recommend his prescient essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. The reason why we don't have a 15-hour workweek is because of neoliberal globalization and financialization. That process started in the 1970s. If we continued on the path of the 1950s and 1960s we would have had a 15-hour workweek by now. The elites deliberately derailed the path towards The Jetsons for a path towards global Brazil. The reality of the matter is that only some kind of fascistic order can create a leisure society. It demands economic interventionism, protectionism, eugenics, and environmentalism. In short, all the great ideas of the American Progressive Era, which Veblen was an expression of. Both liberalism and communism will never achieve such a utopian society for obvious reasons.

By the way, shorter workweeks are actually more productive. Several companies all over the world have experimented with a 30-hour workweek and the results were overall positive. There's literally no reason whatsoever why we're still working ourselves to death.

EDIT: Greg Johnson made similar arguments in this video: https://www.bitchute.com/video/FXBeWFobFhpM/.

[–]Nombre27 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Can't wait for Dr. Johnson to do a TED talk.

[–]Nombre27 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Standardized 40 hour work weeks are simply a manifestation of Parkinson's Law.

"work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

[–]EthnocratArcheofuturist 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Hunter-gatherers only worked a couple of hours a day, and a lot of rich people don't work at all. It's not a law. It's propaganda.

[–]Nombre27 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

You've missed the point. It isn't propaganda, it's an observation of human behavior.