Giving Everyone a College Degree?

In one of his later novels, Friday, Robert Heinlein tells us that, after the recognition that people with bachelor's degree made on average 30 percent more than non-degree holders a referendum in California granted all of the state's high school graduates a bachelor's degree in the name of eliminating "undemocratic advantage."

The protagonist and narrator of that novel tells us she "can't see anything wrong with it," but, while Heinlein's politics changed through the course of his life, and were at times idiosyncratic or even ambiguous (in part because he was not above backing away from an opinion he gave in the face of backlash), given the period of Heinlein's life in which he published the book, and what he had to say about American education elsewhere, this bit seemed to me obviously satirical--an elitist right-winger's sneer at the ruin of education by a bunch of hare-brained "liberals" with egalitarian notions.

Still, there seems to me a basis for criticizing the proposal from other standpoints--the more obvious for something vaguely reminiscent of that having happened not just in California but the whole country in recent decades. After all, consider what the ultimate object of the California legislation was in Heinlein's story--helping those who are socioeconomically less well-off. As American history itself shows there are many ways to do that--for example, with laws regarding wages and benefits, broadening the room for maneuver enjoyed by organized labor, the improvement of public services, transfer payments, etc., all of which those broadly identifying as liberals once championed. However, instead those who passed for "liberals" in America (reflecting their meritocracy-mindedness, and their accommodation of themselves to a neoliberal outlook in which the other measures were less acceptable than before) increasingly fixated on "sending everyone to college" what they presented as a vision of uplift of the underprivileged.

Not everyone went, of course. But the percentage of people with degrees expanded enormously--nearly four in ten American adults now having a B.A.. By contrast incomes did not expand in the same manner. This was, of course, partly a matter of the consistently lousy growth record of this period--but even relative to growth workers' incomes simply did not move up, with, in spite of the notion that a degree is a magical amulet protecting the bearer against a global economy that is dark and full of terrors, the majority of B.A.-holding college graduates suffering from the same trend as everyone else. Of course, some of this was a matter of students getting degrees unlikely to be remunerative (thus the horror story of Columbia University film school graduates with which the Wall Street Journal regaled the country not so long ago), but even that can seem a matter of the fetish of which some have made college--and the broader reality of a credentialing crisis in which degrees are requiring larger investments and delivering diminishing returns as a growing number of B.A.-holders competed for a much less rapidly growing number of jobs actually requiring B.A.s; in which "sending everyone to college," far from helping resolve the Social Question, worsened it with a credentialing crisis and the burdening of graduates with trillions of dollars worth of student debt, such that the supposed uplift, as might be expected given its unbelievably half-baked nature, has in itself become a source of crisis for all involved.

The Post-Work Society, and the Possibility of "Enough": Are Human Wants Insatiable?

In considering the prospect of a post-work society one important question is "Given rising productivity can we imagine a world in which a critical mass of human beings feel they have enough things, sufficiently so that striving after the gain of more things will cease to be central to their lives?"

The standard reply of those who determine the orthodoxy in the field of economics--those who teach in the colleges (especially the colleges where those who get tenured professorships are likely to themselves be trained), those who edit the field's journals and publish in them, those who get prizes like the Nobel--and those who get hired as consultants or appointed to high public office--is "No. Never. Don't even think about it." Indeed, they go to great lengths in arguing why we should not even think about it, dismissing essential physical needs and material realities in favor of a relativistic subjectivism they are prepared to push to preposterous extremes. Thus will they tell us that a billionaire's desire for "one more ivory backscratcher" is no less a "need" than the need of someone literally starving to death for food, and its lack no less painful; and make much of how, for example, we might be able to give everyone a house, but there will only be so many lots around Lake Como, and that this will mean scarcity oppressing us as much as before we gave everyone a house; etc., etc., etc..

In considering such absurdities it seems relevant here that the economists in question espouse a dark, misanthropic view of human nature, and with it a pessimism about the prospects for a free, comfortable, happy life for very many of those on the planet--a view which is not without significant political implications. After all, if human wants are as infinite and insatiable--and relative--as they say then there is no getting off the treadmill of getting and spending, no end to the Rat Race and its ugliness, and no point to any reforms, whose benefits would only be lost on the grubby little can't-ever-satisfy-them bastards they see the general public as being.

Still, if the insatiability of human wants is an article of faith for economists (whose teaching is, of course, seen by many as a faith masquerading as science), it does seem fair to say that others have made a case that the matter is exactly the opposite of the way that such economists tell us it is, the "law of diminishing marginal returns" (ironically, another concept from economics, and indeed its mainstream) operative here. The implication of this argument is that for people who are really poor more money and more consumption (money for food, money for shelter, money to relieve pressing physical wants) really do make for more satisfaction and contentment and "happiness"--while in line with the aforementioned "law" the further away one is from being so poor the less does added money and consumption improve their sense of well-being.

In short, no matter how much orthodox economists sneer, it would seem plausible that that extra ivory back-scratcher really does mean less than that food for the starving person, the house for someone who is homeless mean less than the view of Lake Como for the already well-housed.

Indeed, one study of note suggested that we might hit a point at which simply having more money contributes little to one's sense of subjective well-being, concluding that after a country's per capita National Income hit $13,000 in the terms of a generation ago (or, after adjustment for inflation, $25,000 or so in today's terms) more growth does not in itself produce a sense of greater well-being. Going by World Bank figures at present over thirty countries are above that mark in nominal terms (pretty much all the North American, West European, East Asian and Australasian nations we call "advanced industrial" or "developed"). Dozens more do so when we go by Purchasing Power Parity (with states like Russia or Chile making the cut). Additionally those countries that do not make the cut are often not very far short of it (with the world average closing on $19,000 by the latter measure last year).

Does this mean that anyone whose country has $25,000 a year per capita can sit back content in the knowledge that life is as good as it gets? Of course not, innumerable other factors complicating the issue. People may well be personally poor in a society that is rich--and still left with unmet material needs of such a kind that a bit of money would mean a real improvement in their sense of well-being. A lot depends on how wealth is distributed, and perhaps even more fundamentally on how the provision of essentials is organized. (After all, we know from experience that even in a relatively affluent society--such as the U.S., with a per capita income nearly three times what the study identified as the requirement--a significant fraction of the population may suffer hunger, homelessness and other fundamental material lacks, with all their associated misery.) Still, the existence of scientific evidence that human needs may start being sated at a level well below what millions have, and minute next to what a handful have, is a powerful rejoinder to the preachers of want and misery as humanity's eternal lot.

Can Political Centrism Survive the Digital Age?

Previously discussing centrism I have stressed how much it has been a creation of the mid-century period, and especially of Cold War anti_Communism, such that it seems to me more useful to think of centrism as a species of conservatism (specifically, the more flexible, adaptable, bend-rather-than-break, pick-its-battles side of the conservative tradition, rather than the heels-digging variety associated with the hard right) rather than mere middle-of-the-roadness, or "practical" non-philosophy.

However, it also seems to me that centrism was a product of the mid-century media universe as well, with this evident in its attitude toward public discourse—centrism's sense of what are s legitimate boundaries, with certain viewpoints, certain modes of argument, acceptably "pragmatic," "pluralist" and "civil," and others not, and in line with the sense that the dialogue had to be carefully managed, carefully gatekept, against the latter. Those espousing this view seem to think it a great thing that the sources of information, the forums in which that information and the views based on it could be discussed, were few in number, making them more easily manageable, and the public dialogue along with them. Others took a more critical view of the matter, but it does seem worth noting that those unsatisfied with the center had few alternatives, enabling the center "to hold."

By contrast, with broadcasting given way to the Internet and its opportunities for innumerably more "channels" of communication, those dissatisfied with the center find it easier to present and to access such alternatives today--and are perhaps given more reason to do so with the center, in spite of being defined by its facilitation of compromise, actually less given to compromise of any kind. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that with the mainstream so often seeming to speak in a single voice on many issues, and offer a lame "both sidesism" when it does not, those looking for any other view at all find themselves going elsewhere--and perhaps very easily pulled toward views far more extreme than they might otherwise have interested themselves in simply because the range of what centrism deemed allowable was so limited and so unsatisfactory.

In such a situation centrism would seem to be backfiring--and quite frankly the way centrists pine nostalgically for that earlier age in which everybody watched three channels that offered pretty much the same thing seems to bespeak their lack of ideas about how to cope with the present situation, which may be a feature, not a bug. After all, one way of coping with the situation would be to reconsider how the boundaries of the legitimate have been drawn, engaging with rather than simply shutting out anything that does not fit within the very tight confines of today's centrist-gatekept discourse. But in that event centrism would become something other than it has been--ceasing to be centrism.

Revisiting Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire: The Domestic Dimension

In considering Emmanuel Todd I have mainly been attentive to his more geopolitically-oriented work--books like The Final Fall and After the Empire. However, from the standpoint of his form of cultural analysis (which sets great store by family structures and the societal values implicit in them, by fluctuations in figures on birth and mortality below the threshold of what usually commands the attention of the geopolitically-minded, etc.), there were significant connections between domestic and foreign political behavior. This certainly extended toward the matter of inclusion and exclusion, with Todd seeing a U.S. becoming less universalist and more exclusionary abroad (in its foreign policy approach in the late '90s and early '00s) taking the same course domestically, its "Othering" of foreign countries, cultures, immigrants, etc. matched by its doing the same at home with its minorities. Moreover, Todd argued that this differentialism was not separate from a broader movement toward inequality, socioeconomic as well as ethnic; that the "diversity"-singing identity politics was part of the same line of development, rather than a means of addressing it, in its stress on difference over similarity; and that widening inequality generally was endangering American democracy. (Indeed, just as Todd had noted an uptick in infant mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1970s as indicative of increased stress, he remarked a similar uptick among African-Americans in the late '90s as, while not proof of some American collapse in the Soviet manner, at least suggestive of the collapse of certain hopes of society's moving beyond its old racial divisions.)

Todd's analysis of America's domestic life, of course, has been just as unwelcome as his views on the country's foreign affairs. Indeed, one can point to single remarks of Todd's about feminism that would singlehandedly suffice to get him barred from the mainstream of the American media (as when he wrote of America as "pays des femmes castratrices"--translated in the English-language edition as "country of castrating women")--while I suspect that his latest (Ou en Sont-Elles?, specifically addressing the matter of gender) will not help his case with the American media. But all the same, given the ever greater difficulty of ignoring the divisions in the country I suspect that at least a few are giving Todd's reading of America's domestic life a second look.

The Prospect of German and Japanese Rearmament

Recently considering the "rearmament" of Germany and Japan I argued that the two countries' governments' intentions of elevating their military spending might end up coming to little because of, apart from the limited nature of the announced plans (shooting for 2 percent of GDP, versus, for example, the 4 percent long the average of the far larger U.S.), their limited and declining shares of the world's economic-industrial output and populations (especially its military-age population); the extremely high cost of military capability; the limitations of their existing military establishments, which in Germany's case has numerous claims on additional funding ahead of any expansion of the forces; and the domestic obstacles in the way of additional militarization, extending beyond the outlay of money. The result is that the extra money being talked about might not end up changing things all that much (and that recognition of this may be one of the reasons why so much of the commentariat is so supportive, the anxieties seen in the '90s at such a course so absent).

However, it does seem to me there are two possible objections to all that, namely:

1. Calculations of GDP at market exchange rates between dollars and their currencies understate their economic weight because their currencies are undervalued; and

2. In Germany's case one may not just be talking about a change of course on the part of Germany the nation-state, but a bigger shift on the part of a larger German-led bloc.

In answer to the first objection there is the limited extent to which any undervaluation of their currencies makes a difference. Consider, for instance, the claim made a few years ago that the euro has been undervalued by as much as 20 percent in Germany's case. The result would be that the country's $3.8 trillion economy should be thought, perhaps, a $4.5 trillion economy--and that 2 percent of that difference going to defense would be an extra $15 billion a year. This would not be nothing--but it would not affect things very much at the level of the regional and global balance of power.

Of course, Japan's economy is larger, and so is the degree by which some (by no means the most extreme of the "Japan is doing far better than it lets on" crowd) hold the yen to be overvalued--a $5 trillion economy with a currency recently claimed to have been undervalued by as much as 40 percent. The implication is that one could think of it as really a $7 trillion+ economy--a difference that would be more consequential (with 2 percent of the difference coming to $40 billion+, far more than Japan is expected to spend on defense this coming year, and 2 percent of the total a hefty $140 billion+). Still, it would mean only so much in the increasingly high-cost international security arena of the "Indo-Pacific," especially given Japan's insular position and demographic limits (with the oldest population in the world outside Monaco, almost 1 in 3 of its people a senior citizen these days)--while this is, again, a goal toward which the government would like to work over the next five years rather than a settled matter.

In answer to the second objection it seems worth acknowledging the arguments some have made in regard to Germany's weight extending well beyond its borders. Not long ago Emmanuel Todd offered a picture of a "German economic space" over which Germany is essentially dominant in Central Europe (Austria, the Benelux countries, Czechia, even Switzerland and ex-Yugoslav Slovenia and Croatia) and, to a lesser extent, the Baltic region (Poland, Sweden, the ex-Soviet Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia)--making the $4 trillion economy more like the economy of an $8 trillion bloc, which with the help of a deferential France was a basis for levering the $16 trillion bloc that is Europe in its desired direction (as the continent's "taskmaster" pursuing a "project . . . of power" in which it "enslave[s] the debt-ridden countries of the South . . . put[s] to work the Eastern Europeans," etc.). Even if one accepts the claim at face value, however, it is far from clear that Germany's economic influence over that larger space can be translated into military power to any meaningful (never mind comparable) degree--even the German-dominated "core" of this space, never mind the larger Union, which remains less than the sum of its considerable parts from the vantage point of military power.

The result is that in the end, important as the shift may be in symbolic terms--and unhappy as it is for what it says about the hopes of movement toward a less war-like world to which those countries' original post-war constitutions spoke, in however imperfect a manner--the judgment about the limits of the development seem to me to still stand.

Making Predictions in Precarious Times

I suppose that, certainly within the lifetimes of those living on this planet today, there has not been a period when people did not feel that modern life was precarious. Still, while modern war; viral epidemic; economic calamity; ecological catastrophe; are not novel concerns it has been rare that any of them have been felt so keenly as we feel them now, let alone feel all of them so keenly at the same time as the U.S. President himself draws comparisons between the present moment and the Cuban Missile Crisis; as we continue grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic; as decades of creditism and speculation and the disruptions of war and disease come to a head in a historic burst of price inflation; as anthropogenic global warming proceeds virtually without serious governmental efforts at curbing emissions or offsetting or mitigating their effects.

Amid all that speculating about what tomorrow might bring--to say nothing of the harder business of making forecasts--seems even chancier than before, so much so that to speculate about the littler things of life underlain by the big things--to speculate, for instance, about how nice self-driving cars might be as we dread the escalation of perhaps the most dangerous international crisis in human history--can seem pointless or trivial to the point of being an embarrassment. Still, the problems of everyday life remain with us--and will remain in the absence of the worst, as we can only hope they will.

How Does Britain Stand as a Manufacturing Power Among the Group of Seven Advanced Industrial Nations ?

After World War Two Britain was probably the world's third-largest industrial power--and after the U.S., the second such power in the non-Communist world by a long way.* (Indeed, in 1948 Britain accounted for almost a quarter of world manufacturing exports.) This was, admittedly, a matter of the weakness of most of its rivals in the immediate post-war years more than Britain's strength. (Even before the war Britain had long been falling behind the competition, while the war years saw its plant and infrastructure badly run down, and its aftermath financial bankruptcy that made rectifying the situation difficult.) And the situation did not last as those others recovered, and outstripped Britain, with the U.S. extending its lead, and others not only catching Britain up but overtaking it. Thus was there a German miracle, and a Japanese miracle, while France had its "Les Trente Glorieuses," and Italy boomed similarly. And even in the less booming times that followed many of the others (particularly Germany and Japan) went on doing better, all as still other powers in their turn moved up the ranks--notably South Korea which, from the standpoint of total manufacturing output ($459 billion), was of 2018 behind, among the G-7, only the U.S. ($2.33 trillion), Japan ($1.04 trillion) and Germany ($796 billion) to go by the United Nations' National Accounts data.

The result is that among the original G-7 Britain has slipped from the second to the sixth place in aggregate output, ahead only of Canada ($256 billion to $170 billion), which has a population not much more than half Britain's size (37 million to Britain's 67 million), while in terms of per capita output it is at number seven ($3800)--and if we were to give South Korea a seat at the table Britain would drop out of the seven and end up in eighth place, with just half the U.S. level of per capita output ($7100), and well under half the per capita output of Germany ($9600), South Korea ($9000) and Japan ($8200) in the aforementioned year.

All this being the case it can seem that Britain's standing as a manufacturing power has receded greatly, sufficiently so that its G-7 membership can, like its United Nations' Security Council membership, seem a legacy of past rather than present capacity (and harder to justify as other nations are left out, like South Korea in the G-7 case). Indeed, after four decades of Britain not merely lagging others' progress, but seeing its output decline, Britain is now so far down in the "league tables" that countries that would still normally be regarded as developing are overtaking it--with China a signal example. In the 1950s its slogan with regard to industrial development was "Exceeding UK, Catching up USA." China would seem to have attained that first object sometime in the 1970s, certainly to go by Paul Bairoch's much-cited data set (which as of 1980 gives China a 5.2 percent share of world output, against Britain's 4 percent). That was, of course, a matter of a very low level of "per capita" industrialization in a country with almost eighteen times' Britain's population (1 billion to 56 million). However, it now looks as if China, which now accounts for perhaps as much as a third of world production, while Britain accounts for less than 2 percent of it, is now in the process of overtaking Britain's output in per capita terms as well. Where in 2004 China's per capita manufacturing output was a mere 11 percent of Britain's, it was 71 percent of that figure in 2018--and 76 percent of it in 2020 ($2700 to $3500 in current U.S. dollars).

One can easily picture China closing the gap before the end of the decade, even were its growth to continue slowing--while if one takes the common view that China's currency has been undervalued, and Britain's overvalued, it may even be the case that China has already done so.

* Paul Bairoch's figures have Britain, circa 1953, if only about three-quarters as big a producer as the Soviet Union, three times as industrialized in per capita terms--and about one-and-a-half times as industrialized as Germany.

A Choice of Conservatisms?

A decade ago considering Kevin Phillips' version of the argument that American electoral patterns follow a decades-long cycle it seemed to me that rather than an alternation between right and left what we tended to have was an alternation between different versions of the right--one more elitist, the other more populist. The 1932-1968 cycle seemed to me an exception which I attributed to the special circumstances of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, with the left a factor.

Reviewing the political history I have rethought that somewhat. Certainly there is no question that there was a shift of the center leftward during that period. Still, it seems to me a mistake to think of New Deal/Cold War liberalism as "left." Rather it was centrism--which is to say, conservatism again (in its assumptions about human beings and society, its pessimism about and hostility to radical change, etc.), but of that form of conservatism which is prepared to make compromises to preserve the deeper structure of society rather than simply dig in its heels in the face of pressures for change. It looked like the left because in American life the bar for what counts as compromise, and as leftishness, is set very low. (For all the talk of big government in the U.S. the role of government in the economy, the expansion of the welfare state, etc. never went anywhere near so far as in Europe, while even at its most radical-seeming anti-capitalism and socialism never became part of the mainstream. The 1960s, for instance, saw a "War on Poverty" without reference to capitalism or class as such, while that "War" was scarcely begun before it was stopped. Right-wingers sneered about "anti-anti-Communists" more than they did Communists, at least when not hurling the term about as a hyperbolic epithet. And so forth.)

The result is that even in that liberal heyday between the 1930s and 1960s American politics, as before and after, remained a choice of forms of conservatism, but with, reflecting the political pressures of the day and the arguable demands of modern life, the more compromising version of that conservatism embraced by the mainstream of both of the country's political parties. Thus did we end up in a situation where Richard Nixon, whom '70s-era leftists could imagine as the would-be Evil Emperor in an America going fascist, come to look too liberal to survive a Democratic Party primary a few decades on.

What Might Education Be Like in a Post-Work World?

When we talk about a post-work society we usually have in mind the problem of adults--how they will get money to live, and what they will do with their time.

We never "think of the children."

By this I mean that we rarely give much consideration to the fact that our ideas about education are almost entirely oriented to the demands of work as we know it.

A principal reason why schools exist is to "babysit" the young so that their parents can, in a world where home and workplace were separated in a way they had not been in the pre-modern world of the peasant and artisan, go work for a paycheck.

Moreover, those schools are organized in the expectation that the students will one day go to work themselves, on very particular terms. Consider the classical image of modern education, with its bells and rows and ditto sheets and the rest. In ways even more fundamental to the curriculum than the strictly defined academics (especially beyond the rather minimal literacy and numeracy required) there is a training in deference to authority figures placed on them by a bureaucratic organization whose heads are remote; attentiveness to time generally and punctuality in reporting to work specifically; uncritical acceptance of assigned physical placement and diligent performance of assigned, repetitive, often arduous tasks with no intrinsic interest to the person performing them; the tolerance of silence and tedium and delay of the meeting of one's physical needs (eating, the use of the bathroom) to allotted times to avoid disruption to the working process; and the identification of self with "boss" and "workplace."

And students are enjoined to strain themselves to the utmost to get good grades, etc. precisely because this is supposed to be their best chance of securing a better lot in the work force later in life, determining whether or not they end up working-class laborers or middle-class professionals and managers (with, perhaps, a shot at something more).

But what about when all that stops being relevant? When the parents no longer need the kids babysat while they are at work, and an upbringing centered on training to work in a nineteenth century mill, or competing in the "Rat Race," ceases to be justifiable? It would seem logical that the way we educate the young would change with this.

Of course, so far I have talked about what we will need less of in our educations--and not what we will need more of, which is a harder thing to guess at, given the uncertainties about how such a society will be arranged. One should also acknowledge that education is an area where people tend to be extremely conservative, sticking with what they think is tried and true rather than rationally adapting education to current needs (hence, that nineteenth century mill worker-training in the twenty-first century; and one might add, the endurance of "Classical education" at the level of the ultra-privileged, long after it ceased to make any sort of practical sense), with all it implies for the likely slowness of change.

Still, it does seem easy to imagine that, especially in light of the technological changes we have already seen, and which will be much more advanced in a post-work society (otherwise we would never have achieved one), it is plausible that we will see school continue its shift from centralized physical locations, away toward remote learning at home, especially with parents more likely to be there. We may see at least a partial increase in the automation of teaching, while parents also become more involved, possibly making for much more individualized instruction.

One result is that we could see students acquiring knowledge and skills much more quickly. We might see this as enabling them to learn more--or be content with having simply imparted a "required" amount of academic training in less time, with pushing the learning effort beyond the point of diminishing returns having, again, lost its justification. Indeed, it is plausible that rather than everyone having to grind in the same way as hard as they can for as long as they can (longer, in fact, as they burn themselves out) as in today's often mindless scramble after "success" we might see educational choices become more personalized, fitted to the potentials--and limitations--of the individual, and in the process not only produce a freer, healthier, happier generation, but one that might even be better-educated at the irreducible skill level for all the reasons discussed here, not least that they would have experienced education as something other than the grueling, discouraging thing that is the experience of so many today.

Toward a Post-Work World?

The idea of a "post-work" society--a society where persons generally have the option of a life not centered on work for wages as a condition of physical survival and membership in social life, and where they may actually take that option without harm to society or themselves--is by no means new, but interest in the idea has risen and declined in line with intellectual shifts, not least in the possibility of automating work tasks. About a decade ago, in the wake of the publication of the famous Frey-Osborne study (and the generally confused communication of that study's finding to the public), a surge of progress in the training of neural nets in pattern recognition, and spectacular promises about application of that progress in ways touching daily life (full self-driving by 2017!), a great many of those "experts" to whom the mainstream pays attention expressed expectations of a great wave of automation in the workplace.

Of course, the expectations proved overblown, and anyway, much else seems to have a higher place on the agenda now. Amid endless "supply chain" problems we are acutely conscious of how little automation there has actually been, and how remote progress remains in many areas. Still, the technical work proceeds--while it may be that other factors besides automation will play their part in producing a "post-work" situation.

There is, for example, the prospect of automation interacting with other technical possibilities, as with dramatic drops in the cost and material throughput of many essentials (of the kind that, for example, the RethinkX think tank argues are imminent in the areas of energy, food, transport and materials)--implying a sharp drop in the need for human labor (for instance, as we set about consuming precision fermentation-produced food, using Transportation-as-a-Serviceand living in printed houses).

Alongside the prospect of our being able to produce more with less human labor there is also the possibility that much of our "production" is simply irrational from an economic standpoint, and that it might be dispensed with by some sort of rationalization, whether emanating from the market (if technical or managerial developments made its uselessness too obvious or unaffordable, or makes it easier for business to cut it out), or from the political arena (where some now advocate a zero-growth, or "degrowth," economy, which would likely mean people working less--and such work an obvious place to make cuts, while it seems that we are looking at the emergence of a movement which is "antiwork" as such).

Moreover, were such a process to get going one could picture synergies swiftly accelerating it. (Certainly it has long seemed to me that much of our consumption is specifically required by our working lives--our academic credentialing, work clothes, transportation, day care, etc.. Stop working and one can consume that much less, which would in turn mean much less demand for many goods and thus people to produce them, etc., etc..)

Will such factors prove to be enough to make a post-work world happen any time soon? I have no idea. But I can say that where some equate the right to live with the misery of "alienated labor", and dread the prospect of "the lower orders" having the time and energy to think of anything but scraping together a living, I can very easily picture a post-work world being a far happier and saner one than the world in which we are living now.