> Of course, the real question here is whether productivity is what one should be ultimately aiming at.
This is a very good question also for the society as a whole. We are technically able to sustain the whole population with a fewer and fewer percentage of people working on holding up our living conditions (food, water, heat, housing, network communication, etc.).
On top of that we (as a society) create lots of bullshit work which we again try to perform as efficiently as possible. And as soon as productivity increases, we work hard to create more demand for more of the same nonsense, and if that doesn't work anymore, we invent a new type of bullshit.
Why are we doing that? (Well, I'm aware of the typical cynical answer: reducing violence and crime, but there must be a better way to achieve this.)
What if we concentrate on improving our living conditions, and on top of that, everyone who wants to work just picks their favourite problem and tries to find a solution for it, valuing quality over being the first, valuing long-term solutions over short-term minded crap?
What do you expect? The natural course for "the leisure majority class" would be a colorful ever-varying ever-shifting mixture of play, hobbyist endeavours, gamble, drugs, bohemian lives, sports, creative outputs of all kinds, a mild occasional flavour of anarchy. Actual human weathers instead of perpetual eternal grey September. Either "we, collectively", or our grown structures don't seem to prefer that.
Make-work and bureaucracy and petty in-fights and peer politics are the fallback behavioural patterns --- almost everywhere people aren't, mentally speaking, "fighting for a cause" (whether it's a small firm trying to survive or grow to 'more leisurely levels', or collectively-militarily, or post-war reconstruction, or faked-but-masterfully-orchestrated as Big Consulting somehow manages to ;)
How do we decide who gets to be part of the leisure class and who gets to be part of the working class? Assuming we decide that we cut the bullshit work and let everyone not working live on something like UBI.
This is a very good question also for the society as a whole. We are technically able to sustain the whole population with a fewer and fewer percentage of people working on holding up our living conditions (food, water, heat, housing, network communication, etc.).
On top of that we (as a society) create lots of bullshit work which we again try to perform as efficiently as possible. And as soon as productivity increases, we work hard to create more demand for more of the same nonsense, and if that doesn't work anymore, we invent a new type of bullshit.
Why are we doing that? (Well, I'm aware of the typical cynical answer: reducing violence and crime, but there must be a better way to achieve this.)
What if we concentrate on improving our living conditions, and on top of that, everyone who wants to work just picks their favourite problem and tries to find a solution for it, valuing quality over being the first, valuing long-term solutions over short-term minded crap?