We’ve been talking about an increase in productivity producing an increase in leisure for a long time, but instead, the “winner take all” world of Brynjolfsson and McAfee often seems to produce a “winner” class that works itself into an early grave by running 100-hour work weeks at astounding payscales, and a much larger “loser” class that works itself into an early grave by working 100-hour weeks in shitty, marginal, grey-economy jobs, trying to stitch together something like an income.
I think this is wrong. The “loser” class has less income to spend on expensive schools and health plans that pay for you to get an MRI if you complain of a bad headache. But the people in this class do not necessarily work 100-hour weeks. I think that Neal Stephenson’s depiction in The Diamond Age is more apt. Some people work a lot and save a lot, because that is what their values call for. Those are the Vickies. Some people work less and save less. They are the Thetes. Their lifestyle looks distasteful to the Vickies, but they do not starve or lack for toys.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Both Doctorow and Cowen link to pieces by Kevin Kelly, and each Kelly piece is worth reading.
I think you are right at present. Whether this holds for the next 20-30 years is another matter.
I really don’t think economics has spent enough time thinking through what will happen when things keep getting faster as we engineer more and more friction out of the economy. There will probably be far more disruption in the next ten years than there was in the previous ten.
We have always had old patterns falling apart and new ones forming, but the faster the churn, the harder it is to maintain equilibrium.
Technology advances always require a little more intellect and discipline to take advantage of, and this inevitably separates those who can pull it off from those who can’t. It will be fascinating to see if the world will continue to maintain an economic equilibrium the way it has for the past 100 years.
Good articles all, but sometimes this line of thought gets to me as it really is the central riddle we need to solve in the future. People are still dependent upon money for their economic access and participation, and as jobs decline, money in its present form also continues to decline for those who “lose out”, so we have to figure out how to transform economic activity at some point to prevent this from happening. Even as I have worked through non-monetary options for years (in services) that line of activity is not at all enough.
I think the main problem is that people like Doctorow have no sense of history or context. They blithely refer to the “loser” class in the US, without realizing that in most of the rest of the world and human history, they would give their left arm to join that lowly class in the US today. These blithely unaware commenters are invariably from the higher classes, and simply assume that there must be some magical way to raise everybody else to the luxury that they consider “normal,” and they are sufficiently dim that they imagine that income redistribution by the govt or some nebulous “de-marketized, non-market, non-commodity” economy would accomplish that goal, despite the former’s failure everywhere its been tried and the latter being meaningless.