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> I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous ... That's a privileged position.

> I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous ... That's a privileged position. I benefited from a work ethic of a grandfather that knew poverty and hunger, via a father that grew up in the depression. They would both be known as workaholics in this age, as they frequently, or usually, worked from pre dawn to post dusk for the necessities. My father stood in awe of his father's capacity for work, and I'm in awe of my father's. My own child, if I had one, would be less impressed with his father's work ethic, as I also grew up in a privileged position, without poverty or hunger, due to my father's work. It would be better for a child to inherit my father's work ethic than mine. Not for any virtue other than its capacity to promote thriving and survival in an unstable future.

andrei_says_ 7y ago
> I benefited from a work ethic of a grandfather that knew poverty and hunger... I am not sure who these virtues serve in an economy maximizing extraction from the people contributing the work. The working class will always be pushed as much as possible, to the point of breaking, with no benefit to the workers themselves. > It would be better for a child to inherit my father's work ethic than mine. It may be good for them, but only if they work in a scenario where the work adds value for them. Currently someone who knows to define boundaries and not destroy their own life and health in order to let more be extracted from their effort, is a better option.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  > > I benefited from a work ethic of a grandfather that knew poverty and hunger... > I am not sure who these virtues serve in an economy maximizing extraction from the people contributing the work. The working class will always be pushed as much as possible, to the point of breaking, with no benefit to the workers themselves. I call a bit of baloney on the last quoted sentence. You are significantly overstating your case. (You have one, but you're overstating it.) Still you have a bit of a point, from the point of view of the workers as a class. From the point of view of an individual worker and his/her family, though, hard work leaves them better off than they would be in the absence of the hard work. That leaves the worker and the family in a better position then they otherwise would be. Hence, "I benefited..."
  - andrei_says_ 7y ago
    hard work by definition is hard on the person performing it. When there’s no return on it, it’s just being hard on oneself for no benefit. creating the habit to assess the benefits is more important than blindly working hard. Otherwise it’s just getting sick, exhausted, and having no life for no rational reason.
    - grawprog 7y ago
      >When there’s no return on it, it’s just being hard on oneself for no benefit. If I didn't work hard every day I'd have no home, no food, I wouldn't be able to respond to this comment because I'm using a phone with internet I pay for with my work, I wouldn't be sitting on a ferry right now on my way from visiting family because I paid for the fare with money from my work. I'm not sure I understand the logic behind no returns. Sure it doesn't make me rich, but it stops me from being homeless and starving and provides me with what I need to love comfortably and not worry most of the time.
      - andrei_says_ 7y ago
        The logic of no returns: it is very common in the US for salaried workers to put over 60 hours per week but only get paid for 40. It is also very common to continue to respond to emails during non-work hours and vacation days. hard work for free, with no returns for the person performing it.
        jpindar 7y ago
        It's you (and perhaps your choice of employer) who choose it measure work in hours. I choose to measure it in some combination of effort and results, depending on the circumstances.
        grawprog 7y ago
        That's the thing, I don't work for free. If I'm working i expect to be paid. If an employer wanted me to answer emails or do other things outside the time I'm at work it'd get added to the hours. I've done consulting work, I'm fairly good at tracking hours and i've told employers that have asked me this before, fairly bluntly, that I'm being paid for it or not doing it and it's always either been I don't do it or they pay me.
rayiner 7y ago
This is a lovely sentiment. I’m in awe of my own father’s capacity for work. He grew up in a village in Bangladesh and raised us in privilege in America. Russell I should add, was born into aristocracy, and was a romantic and communist sympathizer. > Russell expressed great hope in "the Communist experiment." However, when he visited the Soviet Union and met Vladimir Lenin in 1920, he was unimpressed with the system in place. On his return he wrote a critical tract, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. He was "infinitely unhappy in this atmosphere—stifled by its utilitarianism, its indifference to love and beauty and the life of impulse." Although critical of its implementation in Soviet Russia, he still believed "that Communism is necessary to the world." The world has tremendous labor to be done. Billions of people yearn to live the kind of comfortable life Russell lived. That won’t come to pass through idleness.
- lordlic 7y ago
  > The world has tremendous labor to be done. Is that so? There's already enough housing for everyone, with more empty houses than homeless people. Hunter-gatherer societies worked half or less as much as we do today, and they didn't have the benefit of industrialization. Production gets more and more efficient, but the workweek never gets shorter. Is this reasonable? > Billions of people yearn to live the kind of comfortable life Russell lived. That won’t come to pass through idleness. Idleness is the kind of comfortable life Russell lived. The alternative of working your fingers to the bone for your employer is a tragic waste of human potential.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    > Idleness is the kind of comfortable life Russell lived. Russell was born into a wealthy British family. He grew up in the household of a former prime minister and inherited an earldom. He was able to enjoy idleness due to the labor of other British (not to mention the labor of Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis who enriched the British empire). Maybe one day we’ll invent replicators and be able to provide everyone—not only in Britain but in India/Bangladesh/Pakistan—with the comfort of Russell’s idle existence. Until then there is much labor to be done!
crispinb 7y ago
> Not for any virtue other than its capacity to promote thriving and survival in an unstable future. It does not have this capacity. The overconsumption fetish (and its close ally, overwork) has brought the world's ecosystems to the brink of collapse. They have made the future critically unstable. If we had cultivated instead a cultural ethic of sufficiency, with so-called 'productivity' gains invested in increased leisure and sociality rather than multiplying raids on complex sustainable evolved systems to build crude unsustainable technological ones, we'd be in much better shape now.
hos234 7y ago
Personality type has a big role to play here. Certain personality types can't become workaholics. Let them go find their own path, and while they do that, some tolerance for whatever work-in-progress philosophy they might spout, is not a bad thing. Nobel winner Richard Thaler - "I would never deny being lazy, but did Danny(Daniel Kahneman) thinks that my laziness was my single best quality? To this day, Danny insists it is. My laziness, he claims, means I only work on questions that are intriguing enough to overcome this default tendency of avoiding work.' "thriving and survival in an unstable future" doesn't mean following just one route. Nature shows us there are a whole bunch of routes. From the cactii to the banyan tree you can find value in all of them or what best suits you.
failrate 7y ago
The article posits that the "privileged position" should be the common position: that poverty and hunger can and should be eliminated, and then from a position where everyone is so privileged to not starve to death, good work that advances the human race may arise from those people who still work despite it not being required to survive.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  I wonder if it would be possible to cut everyone working hours and just hire more people. Its possibly less efficient to have 2 people working on what would be 1 persons task but it would hopefully make things more equal for everyone.
- mjfl 7y ago
  Ah I see. All we need to do is eliminate scarcity. That shouldn't be too hard.
  - jdbernard 7y ago
    When some of us individually have a greater net worth than groups of countries, yeah you'd think it wouldn't be too hard.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      The entire wealth of the world is only about $46,000 per person (this includes things like the value of homes, personal assets like cars, etc.)
      - jdbernard 7y ago
        To be a little less tongue-in-cheek it seems to me that it is less a problem of scarcity and more a problem of distribution. Food, for example, is this way. Land, by and large, is also.
        deleted 7y ago
jodrellblank 7y ago
I feel you missed a key part of the essay; "From the beginning of civilization until the industrial revolution a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family [..] Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system" Lord Russell is praising the kind of hard work your father and grandfather did, that work is the cause of everyone considering work a virtue in itself. Rather, it is the system where millionaires and billionaires, oil barons and railway tycoons, landlords and ladies sail over the 'depression' untouched, when tractors and factory engines were boosting productivity, and still the working classes were working dawn to dusk for basic survival, much of the value of their work accruing to others and supporting government arms, and them being told it was all OK because of the inherent virtue of 'work', he criticises. "and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technic has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community." He admits leisure is a perogative of privileged classes, while you criticise his essay on the grounds that he is privileged; but he argues that it shouldn't be a privileged position, it should be everybody's chance to benefit from industrialisation and automation, and not have to work dawn to dusk when others don't have to.
djrobstep 7y ago
I'm skeptical that you genuinely read and engaged with the source material, as it draws the exact opposite conclusion.
throwawaycanada 7y ago
Have the ability and work ethic to do that is good. Actually spending your whole waking life at work is bad. You only get one life.
trevyn 7y ago
>I also grew up in a privileged position, without poverty or hunger, due to my father's work. Serious question: What, if anything, did he expect in return?

andrei_says_ 7y ago

> I benefited from a work ethic of a grandfather that knew poverty and hunger... I am not sure who these virtues serve in an economy maximizing extraction from the people contributing the work. The working class will always be pushed as much as possible, to the point of breaking, with no benefit to the workers themselves. > It would be better for a child to inherit my father's work ethic than mine. It may be good for them, but only if they work in a scenario where the work adds value for them. Currently someone who knows to define boundaries and not destroy their own life and health in order to let more be extracted from their effort, is a better option.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
> > I benefited from a work ethic of a grandfather that knew poverty and hunger... > I am not sure who these virtues serve in an economy maximizing extraction from the people contributing the work. The working class will always be pushed as much as possible, to the point of breaking, with no benefit to the workers themselves. I call a bit of baloney on the last quoted sentence. You are significantly overstating your case. (You have one, but you're overstating it.) Still you have a bit of a point, from the point of view of the workers as a class. From the point of view of an individual worker and his/her family, though, hard work leaves them better off than they would be in the absence of the hard work. That leaves the worker and the family in a better position then they otherwise would be. Hence, "I benefited..."
- andrei_says_ 7y ago
  hard work by definition is hard on the person performing it. When there’s no return on it, it’s just being hard on oneself for no benefit. creating the habit to assess the benefits is more important than blindly working hard. Otherwise it’s just getting sick, exhausted, and having no life for no rational reason.
  - grawprog 7y ago
    >When there’s no return on it, it’s just being hard on oneself for no benefit. If I didn't work hard every day I'd have no home, no food, I wouldn't be able to respond to this comment because I'm using a phone with internet I pay for with my work, I wouldn't be sitting on a ferry right now on my way from visiting family because I paid for the fare with money from my work. I'm not sure I understand the logic behind no returns. Sure it doesn't make me rich, but it stops me from being homeless and starving and provides me with what I need to love comfortably and not worry most of the time.
    - andrei_says_ 7y ago
      The logic of no returns: it is very common in the US for salaried workers to put over 60 hours per week but only get paid for 40. It is also very common to continue to respond to emails during non-work hours and vacation days. hard work for free, with no returns for the person performing it.
      - jpindar 7y ago
        It's you (and perhaps your choice of employer) who choose it measure work in hours. I choose to measure it in some combination of effort and results, depending on the circumstances.
      - grawprog 7y ago
        That's the thing, I don't work for free. If I'm working i expect to be paid. If an employer wanted me to answer emails or do other things outside the time I'm at work it'd get added to the hours. I've done consulting work, I'm fairly good at tracking hours and i've told employers that have asked me this before, fairly bluntly, that I'm being paid for it or not doing it and it's always either been I don't do it or they pay me.

rayiner 7y ago

This is a lovely sentiment. I’m in awe of my own father’s capacity for work. He grew up in a village in Bangladesh and raised us in privilege in America. Russell I should add, was born into aristocracy, and was a romantic and communist sympathizer. > Russell expressed great hope in "the Communist experiment." However, when he visited the Soviet Union and met Vladimir Lenin in 1920, he was unimpressed with the system in place. On his return he wrote a critical tract, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. He was "infinitely unhappy in this atmosphere—stifled by its utilitarianism, its indifference to love and beauty and the life of impulse." Although critical of its implementation in Soviet Russia, he still believed "that Communism is necessary to the world." The world has tremendous labor to be done. Billions of people yearn to live the kind of comfortable life Russell lived. That won’t come to pass through idleness.

lordlic 7y ago
> The world has tremendous labor to be done. Is that so? There's already enough housing for everyone, with more empty houses than homeless people. Hunter-gatherer societies worked half or less as much as we do today, and they didn't have the benefit of industrialization. Production gets more and more efficient, but the workweek never gets shorter. Is this reasonable? > Billions of people yearn to live the kind of comfortable life Russell lived. That won’t come to pass through idleness. Idleness is the kind of comfortable life Russell lived. The alternative of working your fingers to the bone for your employer is a tragic waste of human potential.
- rayiner 7y ago
  > Idleness is the kind of comfortable life Russell lived. Russell was born into a wealthy British family. He grew up in the household of a former prime minister and inherited an earldom. He was able to enjoy idleness due to the labor of other British (not to mention the labor of Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis who enriched the British empire). Maybe one day we’ll invent replicators and be able to provide everyone—not only in Britain but in India/Bangladesh/Pakistan—with the comfort of Russell’s idle existence. Until then there is much labor to be done!

crispinb 7y ago

> Not for any virtue other than its capacity to promote thriving and survival in an unstable future. It does not have this capacity. The overconsumption fetish (and its close ally, overwork) has brought the world's ecosystems to the brink of collapse. They have made the future critically unstable. If we had cultivated instead a cultural ethic of sufficiency, with so-called 'productivity' gains invested in increased leisure and sociality rather than multiplying raids on complex sustainable evolved systems to build crude unsustainable technological ones, we'd be in much better shape now.

hos234 7y ago

Personality type has a big role to play here. Certain personality types can't become workaholics. Let them go find their own path, and while they do that, some tolerance for whatever work-in-progress philosophy they might spout, is not a bad thing. Nobel winner Richard Thaler - "I would never deny being lazy, but did Danny(Daniel Kahneman) thinks that my laziness was my single best quality? To this day, Danny insists it is. My laziness, he claims, means I only work on questions that are intriguing enough to overcome this default tendency of avoiding work.' "thriving and survival in an unstable future" doesn't mean following just one route. Nature shows us there are a whole bunch of routes. From the cactii to the banyan tree you can find value in all of them or what best suits you.

failrate 7y ago

The article posits that the "privileged position" should be the common position: that poverty and hunger can and should be eliminated, and then from a position where everyone is so privileged to not starve to death, good work that advances the human race may arise from those people who still work despite it not being required to survive.

baroffoos 7y ago
I wonder if it would be possible to cut everyone working hours and just hire more people. Its possibly less efficient to have 2 people working on what would be 1 persons task but it would hopefully make things more equal for everyone.
mjfl 7y ago
Ah I see. All we need to do is eliminate scarcity. That shouldn't be too hard.
- jdbernard 7y ago
  When some of us individually have a greater net worth than groups of countries, yeah you'd think it wouldn't be too hard.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    The entire wealth of the world is only about $46,000 per person (this includes things like the value of homes, personal assets like cars, etc.)
    - jdbernard 7y ago
      To be a little less tongue-in-cheek it seems to me that it is less a problem of scarcity and more a problem of distribution. Food, for example, is this way. Land, by and large, is also.
      - deleted 7y ago

jodrellblank 7y ago

I feel you missed a key part of the essay; "From the beginning of civilization until the industrial revolution a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family [..] Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system" Lord Russell is praising the kind of hard work your father and grandfather did, that work is the cause of everyone considering work a virtue in itself. Rather, it is the system where millionaires and billionaires, oil barons and railway tycoons, landlords and ladies sail over the 'depression' untouched, when tractors and factory engines were boosting productivity, and still the working classes were working dawn to dusk for basic survival, much of the value of their work accruing to others and supporting government arms, and them being told it was all OK because of the inherent virtue of 'work', he criticises. "and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technic has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community." He admits leisure is a perogative of privileged classes, while you criticise his essay on the grounds that he is privileged; but he argues that it shouldn't be a privileged position, it should be everybody's chance to benefit from industrialisation and automation, and not have to work dawn to dusk when others don't have to.

djrobstep 7y ago

I'm skeptical that you genuinely read and engaged with the source material, as it draws the exact opposite conclusion.

throwawaycanada 7y ago

Have the ability and work ethic to do that is good. Actually spending your whole waking life at work is bad. You only get one life.

trevyn 7y ago

>I also grew up in a privileged position, without poverty or hunger, due to my father's work. Serious question: What, if anything, did he expect in return?