Russell's 'In Praise of Idleness'

 Bertrand Russell thought the world would be a better place with a 20-hour workweek. In his essay “In Praise of Idleness,” he wrote:

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody, and no unemployment — assuming a certain very modest amount of sensible organization.

The essay contains a hypothetical case. Imagine that a factory produces enough pins for the world with all employees working eight-hour shifts. A new invention makes the process twice as efficient. Pins are cheap. Undercutting a competitor’s price won’t affect buying patterns. The world needs only so many pins.

You know what corporate managers would do in such a case. They would lay off half the workers. The shareholders would pocket profits. The managers would enjoy bonuses.

But, as Russell points out, there’s an equally logical alternative. The managers could simply reduce the amount of work required to earn a salary.

The reason we don’t do that is because most of us think that work is good for people. And if a little work is good, a lot is even better.

The corporate owners of the pin factory, for example, would argue that 40 hours of work is good morally for the workers. That’s not true. Perhaps the owners inherited their shares of the factory and have never actually worked themselves. 

Russell defined work as moving matter about. As he put it, work is not inherently good. A certain amount of it is necessary for us to survive. But it “is emphatically not one of the ends of human life.”

Russell was a logician, and he objected to a logical problem with the popular belief. Production and consumerism are two sides of the same coin. They are logically linked, and cannot be unlinked without contradiction. If you believe it’s good to produce twice as much as you need, you must also believe it’s good to consume twice as much as you need.

Of course, we don’t believe that. There are many obvious problems with consuming twice as much as much as you need, whether we’re talking about beer, food or hydrocarbons.

But we persist in believing only half of our logically connected story. We believe overproduction is heroic while overconsumption is not.

It’s the story we heard growing up and cling to with both fists. But it can’t possibly be true.