James Suzman - Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time

Work

ALSO BY JAMES SUZMAN

Affluence Without Abundance

Why should I let the toad work

Squat on my life?

Cant I use my wit as a pitchfork

And drive the brute off?

Philip Larkin, Toads

Contents

Illustrations

Introduction: The Economic Problem

PART ONE IN THE BEGINNING

To Live is to Work

Idle Hands and Busy Beaks

Tools and Skills

Fires Other Gifts

PART TWO THE PROVIDENT ENVIRONMENT

The Original Affluent Society

Ghosts in the Forest

PART THREE TOILING IN THE FIELDS

Leaping off the Edge

Feasts and Famines

Time is Money

The First Machines

PART FOUR CREATURES OF THE CITY

The Bright Lights

The Malady of Infinite Aspiration

Top Talent

The Death of a Salaryman

The New Disease

Conclusion

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

A Note on the Author

Illustrations

A male masked weaver in the final stages of completing a nest

An Acheulean hand-axe

Ju/hoan hunters kit

Relative brain sizes of ancestral humans

Reconstruction of a 70,00075,000-year-old Nassarius shell necklace recovered from Blombos Cave in South Africa

Independent centres of plant domestication

Reconstruction of a Natufian stone sickle

A monolithic zookeeper at Gbekli Tepe

Neolithic Middle East

The Oberkassel Puppy meets Aibo

Timeline indicating estimated dates and location of major animal domestications

10,000-year-old skeleton of a 1,000kg, two-metre-tall auroch recovered from Vig in Denmark in 1905

Proportion of the population living in urban areas 15002016

The worlds oldest pay-record: a cuneiform tablet documenting payment of workers in beer c.3000 BC

An aelopile the first steam engine as described by Hero of Alexander in AD 50

Changes in weekly working hours in the UK, USA and France 18702000

Graph showing real GDP per capita in the USA nearly doubles between 1980 and 2015 but real median incomes stagnate

Changes in household income USA 19452015

Clarks tri-sector model indicating how service-sector sector employment offset declines in primary and secondary industries

Introduction

THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM

The first industrial revolution was coughed out of the soot-blackened chimneys of coal-fired steam engines; the second leapt from electric wall sockets; and the third took the form of the electronic micro-processor. Now we are in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution, born of the union of a host of new digital, biological and physical technologies, and we are told that it will be exponentially more transformative than its predecessors. Even so, no one is yet quite sure how it will play out, beyond the fact that ever more tasks in our factories, businesses and homes will be undertaken by automated cyber-physical systems animated by machine-learning algorithms.

For some, the prospect of an automated future heralds an era of robotic convenience. For others, it is another fateful step on the journey towards a cybernetic dystopia. But for many, the prospect of an automated future raises only one immediate question: what will happen if a robot takes my job?

For those in professions that have up to now been immune from technological redundancy, the rise of the job-eating robots manifests in the mundane: the choruses of robotic greetings and reprimands that emanate from the ranks of automated tellers in supermarkets or the clumsy algorithms that both guide and frustrate our adventures in the digital universe.

For the hundreds of millions of unemployed people scraping a living in the corrugated-iron margins of developing countries, where economic growth is driven ever more by the marriage of cutting-edge technology and capital and so generates few new jobs, automation is an altogether more immediate concern. It is also an immediate concern for ranks of semi-skilled workers in industrialised economies whose only option is to strike to save their jobs from automata whose principal virtue is that they never go on strike. And, even if it doesnt feel like it just yet, the writing is on the wall for some in highly skilled professions too. With artificial intelligence now designing better artificial intelligence than people can, it looks like we have been tricked by our own ingenuity into turning our factories, offices and workplaces into devils workshops that will leave our hands idle and rob our lives of purpose.

If so, then we are right to worry. After all we work to live and live to work and are capable of finding meaning, satisfaction and pride in almost any job: from the rhythmic monotony of mopping floors to gaming tax loopholes. The work we do also defines who we are; determines our future prospects, dictates where and with whom we spend most of our time; mediates our sense of self-worth; moulds many of our values and orients our political loyalties. So much so that we sing the praises of strivers, decry the laziness of shirkers and the goal of universal employment remains a mantra for politicians of all stripes.

Beneath this lies the conviction that we are genetically hard-wired to work and that our species destiny has been shaped by a unique convergence of purposefulness, intelligence and industriousness that has enabled us to build societies that are so much more than the sum of their parts.

Our anxieties about an automated future contrast with the optimism of many thinkers and dreamers who, ever since the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, believed that automation was the key that would unlock an economic utopia. People like Adam Smith, the founding father of economics, who in 1776 sung the praises of the very pretty machines that he believed would in time facilitate and abridge labour, or Oscar Wilde who a century later fantasised about a future in which machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. But none made the case as comprehensively as the twentieth centurys most influential economist, John Maynard Keynes. He predicted in 1930 that by the early twenty-first century capital growth, improving productivity and technological advances should have brought us to the foothills of an economic promised land in which everybodys basic needs were easily satisfied and where, as a result, nobody worked more than fifteen hours in a week.

We passed the productivity and capital growth thresholds Keynes calculated would need to be met to get there some decades ago. Most of us still work just as hard as our grandparents and great-grandparents did, and our governments remain as fixated on economic growth and employment creation as at any point in our recent history. More than this, with private and state pension funds groaning under the weight of their obligations to increasingly aged populations, many of us are expected to work almost a decade longer than we did half a century ago; and despite unprecedented advances in technology and productivity in some of the worlds most advanced economies like Japan and South Korea, hundreds of avoidable deaths every year are now officially accredited to people logging eye-watering levels of overtime.

Humankind, it seems, is not yet ready to claim its collective pension. Understanding why requires recognising that our relationship with work is far more interesting and involved than most traditional economists would have us believe.