Work

James Suzman’s book title sounds to us like an order. This is exactly the subject of this book. How did we get to today’s attitude towards ‘work’, including our work ethic?

The author starts with nature. Work dissipates energy and increases entropy in accordance with the laws of nature. Strange things happen: male masked weavers (birds) make and break their nests endlessly for no other apparent reason than to show off for the female masked weavers. The energy they dissipate in doing this is in no relation to the functional outcome of their work.

The author then considers work in an anthropological view. Our ancestor hunter gatherers only ‘worked’ for meeting their instant needs. It is through the agricultural revolution that man started working for meeting his future needs and it is at that point that slavery originated. The author then describes the evolution of ‘work’ and its meaning in the industrial revolution with the intellectual contributions of people like Thomas Robert Malthus, Benjamin Franklin, John ‘Saint’ Lubbock, John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith.

The author points to a few aberrations in society’s attitude towards work. The agricultural and industrial revolutions have brought us to a certain work ethos and a corresponding belief in merit as the right measure for work reward. Yet the highest earners are not the hardest workers but the largest owners of assets, being thereby the largest receivers of dividends and bonusses. It is not the labour effort that pays off, but the market value of the ‘work’ one seems to offer to society. Other related aberrations are the silly ‘war for talent’ and the cases of karoshi in Japan.

The author also points to Parkinson’s law according to which work inevitably expands to fill the time available for its completion. Bureaucracies will always generate enough internal work to justify their existence. Many people don’t have meaningful work anymore but fill their time with the rope of their house mortgage around their neck. The author concludes that many of our core assumptions about economy and work are an artifact of our past and we could free us from them to imagine and create a better future.

I refer to my blogs: Ode to Industry, Full Time could be Less and Revolution is in the Air.