No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad IdeaFor centuries we've believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance--in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn't work, you didn't eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself. In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In this book, James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem--why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that "full employment" is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for any problem, moral or economic. The result is a witty, stirring denunciation of the ways we think about why we labor, exhorting us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world--and showing us that we can afford to leave that world behind. |
Contents
| 1 | |
1 The Family Assistance Plan and the End of Work | 13 |
2 Labor and the Essence of Man | 29 |
3 Love and Work in the Shadow of the Reformation | 45 |
4 After Work | 67 |
Coda | 96 |
Acknowledgments | 105 |
Notes | 109 |
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Alain de Botton already American answer anyway Arendt automation become brother's keeper called capitalism capitalists century character consumer culture corporate income created crisis cybernation Daniel Bell David Ellerman detach income Dick Cheney Donald Rumsfeld economic necessity economists Edsall Family Assistance Program freedom Freud Fuck full employment function G. W. F. Hegel growth guaranteed annual income Hannah Arendt Heather Ross Hegel ideal insisted intellectual intentionally left blank Jersey journalists Keynes labor market labor power leisure less liberal living wage machine Marx means ment modern Nixon’s Family Assistance Nixon’s FAP ourselves percent poiesis political poverty line principle of productivity private investment problem produce value profits Protestant work ethic question Reformation Richard Sennett Rumsfeld and Dick sense slave morality social labor socially necessary labor society There’s thing transfer payments wage labor Wassily Leontief welfare women workers York