What happens when two neighboring countries have a conflict but one of them decides to work less and is comfortable with less economic growth. The other keeps pushing harder and ends up with excess money that they put into their military. Now they can invade their neighbor.
Economic power generally leads to military power. Maybe the world shouldn't be this way but it is.
The broken window fallacy, now with crop failures and artillery.
You can, of course, argue that it's wrong for humans to want that. The author refers approvingly to some hunter-gatherer societies where people do 20-25 hours of what we would call labor tasks a week because they simply don't demand any products or services beyond mere subsistence. But there's a hidden judo move here, where he talks a lot about their subjective enjoyment and satisfaction, in order to avoid squarely confronting the fact that their lack of productivity means their material conditions are much, much worse than ours.
In general, if you keep an eye out in detailed anthropological literature, you'll find a lot of similar alarm bells. I just found this matter-of-fact paragraph from Daniel Everett I was vaguely remembering, which is written in a neutral to approving tone and yet clearly describes the men of the Pirahã hunter-gatherers pushing their wives into prostitution (https://web.archive.org/web/20190808091528/https://www.edge....):
> It depends on the river trader, but sex is also a very common trade item. So you see these foreign babies being raised among the Pirahã. It's mainly the husband who works out the deal. Single women can negotiate on their own; wives wouldn't make that offer unless their husband negotiated it. In their dealings with outsiders, men take the lead, and the women won't usually come around unless they're called by Pirahã men. But promiscuity is not a problem for the Pirahã. It doesn't violate any values that they have.
Yet I know a CEO who suggested implementing a four-day week if the least productive 10% of workers came in an extra day instead. Just bonkers.
So .. why wouldn't these horrible CEOs who want to leech everything possible out of their employees gladly/immediately choose to implement 4 day work weeks, when they would supposedly make their employees more productive for the same cost? Why would they refuse to take that?
Option A: 800 employees working 5 days per week.
Option B: 960 employees working 4 days per week (and producing more than the 800)
I don't like it, but I understand why we ended up here...
Now, as far as reducing the hours we work, there's a problem. If we decide to take our productivity gains to work only 20 hours per week, someone else can "undercut" us by working 30. Or 40. And so on.
And part of the obsession with job creation is the fact we've taken on so many immigrants who need jobs lest they become a major drag on the economy.
Anyhow, if we want to work less, it's almost inevitable it has to come through government regulation. Put a cap on how many hours a job can require. Minimum vacation amounts. Etc... but then how do you deal with entrepreneurs? Or ensure that a single job can provide a decent standard of living even if it's a low productivity job. And so on...
I can almost smell the marijuana. Why don't more people go live with these egalitarian hunter-gathers if it's all so hunky-dory? Apparently you don't even need to hunt or gather according to the article. You can just "play", all day every day for millions of years, without writing anything down, without sharing and advancing knowledge and science, without inventing airplanes or ships or going to the moon, without electricity, air conditioning, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, computers, running water, manufacturing and distribution networks that bring you your specific clothes and random trinkets, antibiotics, vaccines, and on and on.
The article asserts there's no evidence that Einstein wouldn't have put pen to paper without work. Just who is going to manufacture billions of pens and pencils and paper "for fun", on roads paved "for fun" delivered by boats, trains, and truckers for fun? And all of those people were fed, had doctors and teachers and spent most of their lives in buildings built "for fun"? And someone collected all of their trash once a week? Someone cleaned all the toilets?
I worked on free and open source software for years without making a penny. I understand that we may create things "for fun" and many people genuinely want to improve the plight of our fellow man and donate money and/or time to charities.
However, I also recognize that somebody has to move your Amazon packages. Imagine if anybody could just call out every day or nobody had to move your package unless they really felt like it would be fun. No bosses or hierarchy anywhere.
On the one hand, humans are pretty adaptable. We had colonized a large part of the world even before the invention of agriculture. Some adaptations, like loss of skin pigmentation in Europeans, happened relatively quickly, we think.
On the other hand, other adaptations, like the ability to digest lactose into adulthood relied on specific mutations that still haven't spread through the whole population.
I suspect that we would be happier with less work, and more time socializing, singing and dancing, and more time in nature, but how would you ever prove it?
What?