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Shantastic Marie

In Praise of Leisure - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...132251

leisure Thesis inequality

shared by Shantastic Marie on 19 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • fruits of their labor would be distributed more evenly across society
  • John Maynard Keynes
  • 1930 called "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren."
  • ...54 more annotations...
  • As technological progress made possible an increase in the output of goods per hour worked, people would have to work less and less to satisfy their needs
  • dream of a workless future was always there in the background of his thinking
  • The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
  • great book
  • He asked something hardly discussed today: What is wealth for? How much money do we need to lead a good life?
  • Making money cannot be the permanent business of humanity, for the simple reason that there is nothing to do with money except spend it.
  • A great crisis is like an inspection: it exposes the faults of a social system, and it prompts the search for alternatives
  • near-unanimous commitment to growth at almost any cost.
  • The first defect is moral
  • banking crisis
  • present system relies on motives of greed and acquisitiveness
  • divides societies into rich and poor
  • crisis has exposed capitalism's palpable economic problems
  • inherently unstable
  • When it goes wrong, as it did in 2008, we realize how inefficient, wasteful, and painful it can be
  • motivational basis of capitalism was "an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals."
  • economics for the sake of its practical influence, philosophy for the sake of its ethical imagination. It's time to revive the old idea of economics as a moral science, a science of human beings in communities, not of interacting robots
  • free-market economy both gives employers the power to dictate hours and terms of work and inflames our innate tendency toward competitive, status-driven consumption
  • now that we have at last achieved abundance, the habits bred into us by capitalism have left us incapable of enjoying it properly
  • Opposition to the growth juggernaut has gathered pace in recent years
  • failing to make us happier
  • environmentally disastrous
  • senseless
  • we need to distinguish between short-term policies for recovery after the worst depression since the 1930s, and long-term policies for realizing the good life
  • we are not in favor of idleness
  • Leisure
  • "purposiveness without purpose,"
    • Shantastic Marie
      Shantastic Marie on 19 Jun 12
       
      What's so bad about idleness?
  • It is only our culture's poverty of imagination that leads it to believe that all creativity and innovation—as opposed to that specific kind directed to improving economic processes—needs to be stimulated by money
  • The image of man as a congenital idler, stirred to action only by the prospect of gain, is unique to the modern age
  • Economists, in particular
  • We cannot expect a society trained in the servile and mechanical uses of time to become one of free men overnight
  • Insofar as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period
  • cult of efficiency
  • work is less boring than pleasure
  • Keynes put it well: "Dangerous human proclivities can be canalized into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunities for moneymaking and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandizement."
  • "the game" should be subject to rules and limitations which do not move society away from the good life
  • Much lower stakes will serve the purpose equally well, as soon as the players are accustomed to them
  • To promote, as a matter of public policy, a positive idea of the good life is by definition illiberal, perhaps even totalitarian
  • Perhaps the chief intellectual barrier to realizing the good life for all is the discipline of economics, or rather the deathly orthodoxy that sails under that name in most universities across the world
  • We are condemned to dearth, not through want of resources, but by the extravagance of our appetites
  • The perspective of poverty, and with it an emphasis on efficiency at all costs, is built into modern economics
  • For Alfred Marshall, Keynes's teacher, economics was the study of the "material prerequisites of well-being," a definition that preserved the Aristotelian and Christian concept of wealth as a means to an end
  • scarcity at the center of economics and brackets out judgments of value
  • scarcity is a permanent feature of the human condition
  • think of scarcity in relation to needs, not wants
  • Flagrant manifestations of insatiability
  • widely viewed as pathological
  • problem is that a competitive, monetized economy puts us under continual pressure to want more and more
  • economists would become as useful as dentists
  • aim of policy and other forms of collective action should be to secure an economic organization that places the good things of life—health, respect, friendship, leisure, and so on—within reach of all. Economic growth should be accepted as a residual
  • Robert Skidelsky
  • Edward Skidelsky
  • How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life
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