Aweh dearly beloved fellow ruminants & groupies in day 30 of no lock down.
Period as an ivory tower academic 36 days
According to Nerine, my wife, I am very lazy, and she should know. Bertrand Russel wrote a famous essay, “In praise of idleness”. https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/. Russel suggests that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work and that on the contrary, the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work. This essay was published 90 years ago in 1932.
Russel proposes that there are two kinds of work. First, labour which involves building things that is unpleasant hard work, and poorly paid. Second, there is the pleasant and well-paying job of telling others to do the work and advising them how to do the work. This is called management. He missed the third category of work which is those who teach those who tell and advise the workers what to do. That is what I now do. It’s not as well paid as the second category but it’s not unpleasant. It also allows me to do what I do best. Pontificate endlessly and say what I like.
Then there are the idle rich. Their idleness is only rendered possible by the work of others. These are the people who need to preach the gospel of the virtue of work most fervently because their comfortable idleness depends on others working.
Russel argues that it is not work that is good but that it is in fact leisure that is good. We should seek to work less, and technology affords us the means to achieve this. We should strive to create a society where people only need to work four hours a day and concentrate on leisure. Prior to the industrial revolution, all that hard work could generally offer you was a subsistence existence for you and your family. The idle rich were landowners and the route to riches was by securing land ownership generally by inheritance or war. If you were born a peasant, the route to riches was incredibly hard and unlikely.
Let me elaborate on an example Russel chooses and point out the flaws in his reasoning. Suppose that a certain number of people are employed to make pins for the global market. Then a machine is invented which means that you can make the same number of pins with half the people. He then suggests that everyone could then work four hours a day end enjoy more leisure. That is, of course, not what happens in practice. What happens is that the executives of Pinco, the global leaders in pin manufacturing, employ management consultants like Bain or McKinsey (who I teach) to “restructure” the business and right-size the workforce. McKinsey does an in-depth analysis to justify their very high fees and conclusively demonstrate that the lower-level workers were unmotivated, unproductive, and lazy. With the new pin machines, they propose getting rid of the bottom and least productive 70 percent of the workers. They also demonstrate that the remaining 30 percent of the workers need to work harder and require significant further management supervision. Fifty percent more managers are required. After the restructuring profits improve and the shareholders approve a McKinsey benchmarked, bonus of 100 times the annual pay of the workers for each of the top executives.
Why does this happen you may ask? I would suggest the answer is because people are insatiable and the higher up you are in the management chain the more insatiable you need to be. That’s what creates success. The system selects people who are hard-working and insatiable. Genuine concern for those at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy? Not so much. Feigned concern? Of course.
In the 21st-century land ownership is not where the biggest fortunes are being made. There are now any number of self-made billionaires. Finance and investing, and technology accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s billionaires. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2021/04/08/how-billionaires-got-so-rich-in-2021/?sh=dd0fa192c014. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is an insatiable driven workaholic narcissist amassing money, power, and influence. He is also changing the world.
Lest you think that I am suggesting this reality is all bad it is not. It is these people who create entirely new industries and drive innovation and create employment for the workers from the Pinco’s of this world who were laid off. There has been astonishing progress in my lifetime, and I pick just three examples among many. My middle-of-the-road BMW outperforms a Lamborghini of 30 years ago. My 60-inch 4K Samsung Qled TV is incomparably better than the bulky 32-inch cathode ray tube TV I had 30 years ago. The LED lighting in our home uses 10 times less electricity than the halogen lights they replaced, and they last far longer. All of this has required a lot of hard work led by insatiable narcissists.
I would suggest that it is the insatiability of our desires coupled with hard work that has propelled humanity from an obscure primate dwelling in Africa to being the dominant apex predator of the earth. Insatiability has made us what we are.
So, is insatiable narcissism all good? I’m afraid not. It’s a double-edged sword. Until the 20th century, our planet was essentially infinite. Our impact on the planet was sufficiently small that we could continue with exponential population, economic, and associated consumption growth. Billions have been lifted out of poverty, lifespans have been improved and a middle-class Joe or Jane can live a lifestyle far surpassing that of royalty in the Middle Ages. This has been fantastic for humanity until it wasn’t. We are now bumping into the limitations of our finite planet.
Sustainable exponential economic and consumption growth in the centuries ahead, on a finite planet, is an oxymoron. I covered this topic in a previous blog. https://ruminantpinkfriday.com/2022/01/07/ruminations-regarding-sustainable-economic-growth-oxymorons-and-the-malthusian-debate/.
Lest you think that I criticised Elon Musk for being an insatiable narcissist (which he is) let me also confess that I am also an insatiable narcissist. I’m just not nearly as good at it as he is. My weak excuse for this is that I’m lazy.
For humanity to continue to flourish we now need to completely break down and rebuild our industries and infrastructure to be carbon neutral. This is not a task for the idle. It is also going to involve trade-offs and sacrifices that insatiable humans are going to struggle to come to terms with.
Is there virtue in being idle? Perhaps, but I’m insatiable.
Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions and please keep them coming.
Regards
Bruce
Ruminant Pink Friday 