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John Maynard Keynes predicted in the 30s that the combination of extension of industrial production, healthcare, and education/family planning would result in c
by naravara 4y ago
John Maynard Keynes predicted in the 30s that the combination of extension of industrial production, healthcare, and education/family planning would result in cutting work hours in half and dramatically expanding leisure.
This isn't the fall of society, it's indicative of society advancing. People not working a job doesn't mean they're not working, it means they're putting energies towards things that don't earn them a wage. If you put your time into gardening that's still work, it's just on your own initiative instead of an employers'.
- rhacker 4y agoAll of that only works for software developers that, at this point, are sleeping on keyboards.
- naravara 4y agoThe benefits of progress tend to be lumpy and unevenly distributed to start. But I expect these niceties will eventually trickle out to other fields as people change industries or see how their peers' work lives differ. There's probably a lot of societal-level interventions needed to bring cost of living under control to make it more viable as well. For example, in my home-town where rents are cheap it's actually hard to staff barbers or beauticians because the pay is good enough to where people can work for maybe 8 or 9 months and have that cover their bills and expenses for a year if they're frugal. Now it helps that the local economy is really uneven as well, so you have a base of doctors and lawyers earning very high incomes to underwrite these service providers. But that seems pretty familiar for tech-towns like Silicon Valley too, the key difference is cost-of-living. Instead of having all that high-earner money being sunk into real-estate and rents it's sloshing over into the service sector.