In Praise of Idleness (1932)

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

by hemapani • 11 years ago

84 24 11 years ago

zpub.com

capisce2• 11 years ago

I love this essay by Bertrand Russell. It's just a shame it remains a utopia for the typical person.

perfunctory2• 11 years ago

probably for a typical person (whatever that means) but definitely not for a typical HN reader.

howeyc• 11 years ago

I always like the idea Bertrand Russel raised where if a company realizes it needs half its staff that it would be best to instead reduce all staff to half-hours worked then previous.

Not sure if this is the essay or not. Sorry for the off-topic if it's not this essay.

Too bad with the current additional requirements on employers it's not that simple (health insurance, social security, etc...). Plus the fact that I'm sure some people would prefer not to have 3 places of employment to fill X-hours per week of pay and would rather have 1 employer (simplicity, less commuting, etc). Still, a nice idea in theory.

Maybe if most work was able to be done remotely, and work was done on a contract basis?

anaphor• 11 years ago

I think the point was that once technology reaches a certain point where it's easy and efficient to do things we need (like produce clothes and food) then it's better to reduce everyone's hours by half or so (and keep paying them a living wage) rather than producing tons of useless crap and making everyone work 50 hours a week.

trimtab• 11 years ago

Perhaps, but the organization that is providing the work is still likely to want to make, sell and profit from as much crap as it can along with all the other crap makers.

Al-Khwarizmi• 11 years ago

Implement basic income and universal healthcare, via taxes. Remove pensions for retirement and unemployment (obsoleted by basic income). With this, and taking into account that a minimum wage is not needed with basic income either, you take away all the overheads of hiring a worker. Want to hire someone to work 1 hour a day for $30? Fine, as long as they agree. You then pay taxes for your earnings, and not for hiring people.

mamon3• 11 years ago

Main problem with introducing basic income is that you are effectively punishing hard-working people for their effort (with taxes) and reward people that don't want to work with the free money. Unless you have millions of slaves or immigrants (or, futuristically thinking, robots) at your disposal this will make your country go bankrupt very quickly. Which is a common problem with socialism, but made exponentially worse.

arstin• 11 years ago

This is a great essay. And obviously pertinent!

tuix• 11 years ago

Some interesting comments from the past:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1396167

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1187681

saintx• 11 years ago

Although it's a pleasant read, it doesn't take into account opportunity cost. Everything I do every day requires me not to do something else. There are valuable jobs that aren't urgent that never get done until I automate my way out of my current role. Russell always did treat economics as a zero sum game, when in reality it's quite expansive.

There are also jobs that need doing today and are physically possible to do, but nobody is doing them because we haven't invented them or realized they are possible yet. The Romans could have employed scientists to photograph the surface of Pluto. Physics haven't fundamentally changed since then. Only our understanding of what is possible has changed. A thousand years from now, people will marvel at all the jobs we in the early 21st century could have been doing to advance the quality of life for people around the world (and indeed all life on Earth), had we only known those things were possible.

In Praise of Idleness (1932)

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