Work’s bad! Leisure solves everything

The Dutch journalist and basic income advocate Rutger Bregman’s case for UBI, meanwhile, is pitched not as a way to stave off a still grimmer future, but as our best shot at utopia. Advances in science, technology, and medicine mean that the prospects for human thriving are better than ever—and yet political ambitions have faded into technocratic tweaks, dreams of the good life answered with waves of consumer junk. Is this really the best we can do? Why is it that when just about anything seems technically possible, we seem unable to imagine anything genuinely inspiring? For Bregman, basic income represents the way to true human fulfillment—the post-work utopia that we need and that we can, in fact, achieve. It is a utopia for realists. This utopia—to not have to work so much or so hard; to pass time in leisure rather than labor; to do what one wants rather than what one’s told—is perhaps the oldest of all. The medieval Land of Plenty was, in the words of one poet, where “money has been exchanged for the good life,” and “he who sleeps the longest earns the most.” And for more than a century, it’s seemed within reach. Karl Marx, Benjamin Franklin, John Stuart Mill, Oscar Wilde, and John Maynard Keynes all looked at soaring productivity with the certainty that it would soon be high enough to satisfy people’s needs and wants with just a few hours of work a week. In the 1960s, with automation on the rise, it seemed so imminent that the question wasn’t whether people would have more leisure time—it was what they would do with it. Would we get bored? Waste all our time in front of the TV? Lose our purpose in life? Such worries now seem charmingly naive. “We aren’t bored to death,” Bregman warns, “we’re working ourselves to death.” But it’s not because the likes of Keynes and Mill were wrong—they just didn’t account for politics. Instead of increasing leisure for working people, productivity gains went into growing profits for owners of capital. The 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession only made things worse. These days, instead of relaxing into a life of leisure, most people are working more in a desperate attempt to cling to their jobs, or working less than they need to support themselves. Work is bad enough on its own. But Bregman argues convincingly that working less could also help solve any number of other problems—stress, climate change, disasters, unemployment, wealth inequality. In fact, increased leisure time is as close to a silver bullet as they come: “is there anything that working less does not solve?” Bregman asks. Instead of making people work to earn a living, then, why not just give them money—a universal basic income? Experiments consistently show that having adequate income makes you happier, healthier, and even smarter. Giving poor people money—whether it’s to homeless men in London or quarry workers in Nairobi—turns out to be good for everyone. It reduces crime, child mortality, malnutrition, and teen pregnancy, and increases gender equality, educational outcomes, and economic growth.