I have seen a lot of talk lately about work, idleness, UBI, jobs programs, and the like.
I really need to write a for-serious essay about this stuff. But for now, my thoughts aren’t quite that organized, so have a rambling Tumblr post.
Interesting, but you REALLY need to at least gesture towards the habits of the idle rich and regular retirees when considering what people might get up to under a lack of material demands that they work.
So, travel, extreme sports, cooking for fun, gardening (also for fun, often hobby gardening of non edible plants, up to low key plant breeding), bird watching, going to museums, going to concerts, skiing, boating, going on safari, hunting (deer or big game), fashion and being fashionable as a freaking hobby, eating neat food, going back to college for fun…
Oh, and side note of no real material import: cooking is absolutely a kind of performance, fulfilled by being eaten by an appreciative consumer, ideally one that can fully appreciate what has been done. I’ve seen professional chefs cooking for each other and it’s a trip: people showing off knife work and techniques and little tricks and pulling stuff out that the general public doesn’t appreciate.
That aside, my inclination is that in “heaven” under no material constraints, various activity programs ought to be offered, but not be obligatory, although probably there will be mother hen types who enjoy dropping in on people for essentially wellness checks and social services type stuff to make sure that they’re doing ok even though they haven’t been to any events or activities lately.
…I mostly agree with all of this, as far as it goes. And to the extent that the answer to the Problem of Idleness is “turns out our welfare beneficiaries will act like idle upper-middle-class retirees do now,” well, that’s dandy and I don’t think too many people have a serious problem with that outcome.
Obvious objections to this scenario include:
* A full-time lifestyle of international travel and extreme sports and gourmet food is very expensive; it is very easy to imagine landing in a place where we can pay people not to work but we can’t pay them that much, at least for a good long while.
* The upper classes do not constitute a representative sample of humanity; other groups of people are likely to have different values and different temperaments. Giving a rich person’s worth of money to a poor person probably won’t result in the poor person suddenly “acting rich.” And, indeed, you do see this to some extent with lottery winners etc.
* Maaaaaaaaybe the voracious experiential consumerism of the idle upper classes isn’t actually as totally-fulfilling as we might hope.
So it’s worth thinking about answers to those issues. And if they’re not needed, then hooray, they’re not needed.