NY Times article :
How could the futurologists be so wrong? George Jetson, we should recall -- the person many of us cartoon-watchers assumed we would someday become -- worked a three-hour day, standard in the interplanetary era. Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler predicted that by 2000 we would have so much free time that we wouldn't know how to spend it.
Economic globalization obviously has a great deal to do with the change. It has leveled the playing field all over the world, so that the have-nots can now compete more equally with the haves, especially if they are willing to work harder, longer and for lower wages, which so many of them are. And the haves, in turn, find that they have to pick up the pace just to stay even.
But there may be a more insidious force manifesting itself -- something along the lines of an evolutionary law that says, paradoxically, the more you try to simplify or eliminate work, the more of it there is to do. Scholars estimate that medieval peasants, for example, worked between 120 and 150 days a year....The Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Robert William Fogel has studied what he calls the "efficiency of the human engine" and found that the mechanical advances of the Industrial Revolution were paralleled by an equal increase in the human body's size, strength and endurance. In his view the great growth industry of the 19th and 20th centuries was the capacity for work itself.
The more work we do, apparently, the more we're able to do, and though Fogel himself takes a sort of Toffler-like view of the 21st century, predicting that leisure will become the next great growth industry, there's little evidence of that right now. Working hours in America -- the nation in the world with by far the most efficient human engines -- have risen steadily over the last three decades. And far from complaining, we have adopted a superior, moralizing attitude that sees work not as a necessary evil, a means to an end, but as an end in itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment