No more work Why full employment is a bad idea

James Livingston, 1949-

Book - 2016

For centuries we've believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance--in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn't work, you didn't eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself. In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In this book, James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem--why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that "full employment" is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for... any problem, moral or economic. The result is a witty, stirring denunciation of the ways we think about why we labor, exhorting us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world--and showing us that we can afford to leave that world behind.

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Subjects
Published
Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press [2016]
Language
English
Main Author
James Livingston, 1949- (author)
Item Description
"This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Fund of the University of North Carolina Press."
Physical Description
xiv, 111 pages ; 19 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781469630656
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Review by Choice Review

Livingston (Rutgers) is ready to quit working, and thinks everyone should be. In a remarkably short book chock full of big ideas, he argues that technology and economic progress now pose a grand opportunity and dilemma: we could liberate ourselves from work, relying on machines for our sustenance, except that income is linked to the labor market. The emerging disjunctions pose multilevel challenges--to our ideologies, economies, policies, ethics, and ultimately to the meaning of our humanity. Many books have already sounded alarms about the "rise of robots," the "end of work," or a "jobless future," and Kathi Weeks (The Problem with Work, Duke, 2011) gives a deeper and fuller account of work issues. Livingston's discussion of surprisingly profound philosophical issues could benefit from more careful definitions and fewer dualistic alternatives; and, as is often the case, it suffers from a mismatch between the magnitude of the problem raised and the modesty of the solution proposed. The argument is unrivaled, however, in its audacity and brashness, all in a delightfully amusing little essay that is guaranteed to delight undergrads and provoke them to question their individual and collective future. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --A. B. Cochran, Agnes Scott College

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.