So put down your easels and notebooks and get to… Mining and Mineral Engineering, Metallurgical Engineering, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration and, uh, Petroleum Engineering. That’s what you should be doing because, clearly, whether your college education is ”useless” or not is measurable by yearly income only, and not the graduate’s contribution to society or self-fulfillment. If you’re not good at math, too bad.
If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.— Simon Sinek
The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with "career" be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?
Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.
Imagine a Republican saying this: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
These heretical thoughts would inspire horror among our friends at Fox News or in the tea party. They’d likely label them as Marxist, socialist or Big Labor propaganda. Too bad for Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president, who offered those words in his annual message to Congress in 1861.
...In scores of different ways, we paint investors as the heroes and workers as the sideshow. We tax the fruits of labor more vigorously than we tax the gains from capital — resistance to continuing the payroll tax cut is a case in point — and we hide workers away while lavishing attention on those who make their livings by moving money around.
Consider that what the media call economics reporting is largely finance reporting... Workers are regarded as factors of production. At best, they’re consumers; at worst, they’re “labor costs” cutting into profits and the sacred stock price...
With the worker disappearing from our media and our consciousness, isn’t it only a matter of time before Labor Day falls off the calendar? As long as it’s there, it should shame us about our cool indifference to the heroism of those who go to work every day.
Every society has its gift economies—you probably don’t pay a relative for babysitting, for instance—but young people working for free en masse is something new and frightening. What’s amazing is how quickly we’ve become inured to it, how naturally we’ve accepted the idea of “investing in ourselves,” bartering for connections and resume line-items. It’s a useful reminder that the notion of work is hardly an eternal verity—more like a shifting, uneven landscape, fought over and redefined in every culture and in every age, in spite of hallowed old chiselings in stone.
As the company explains in its "Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture", a 128-slide PowerPoint presentation that has spread like samizdat literature on the internet: "We should focus on what people get done, not how many hours or days worked..."
...ever more companies are realising that autonomy isn't the opposite of accountability – it's the pathway to it. "Rules and policies and regulations and stipulations are innovation killers. People do their best work when they're unencumbered," says Steve Swasey, Netflix's vice-president for corporate communication. "If you're spending a lot of time accounting for the time you're spending, that's time you're not innovating."
...In his new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, New York University scholar, Clay Shirky, argues that when we design systems that assume bad faith from the participants, and whose main purpose is to defend against that nasty behaviour, we often foster the very behaviour we're trying to deter. People will push and push the limits of the formal rules, search for every available loophole, and look for ways to game the system when the defenders aren't watching. By contrast, a structure of rules that assumes good faith can actually encourage that behaviour.
So if you think people in your organisation are predisposed to rip you off, maybe the solution isn't to build a tighter, more punitive set of rules. Maybe the answer is to hire new people.
...within the bounds of normal worklife, the data are overwhelming clear that for most Americans, work in and of itself brings happiness-- regardless of how much income it generates... if gross national happiness is our goal, the American formula of hard work appears to function pretty well...
...economists frequently refer to the "labor-leisure trade-off," in which people have to decide whether to work or not, and if so, how much. It is true enough that these decisions exist. But economists usually make the further assumption that time spent in leisure gives us pleasure, while time spent in labor gives us pain-- and that we only work because it is necessary to earn money, which we want in order to meet other desires... this assumption is... inconspicously embedded in a lot of economic policy... An easy conclusion to be sure-- but, as evidence has shown, an incorrect one...
To the extent that work gives people a sense that they are in charge of their lives, it will bring them joy. If work-- or the lack of work-- strips people of control, it will bring misery.
A Child's Introduction to Ballet: The Stories, Music, and Magic of Classical Dance (Book & CD)
100 Most Dangerous Things in Everyday Life and What you Can Do About Them
