The End of Meaningful Work: A World of Machines and Social Alienation

Daniel Drew, 5/18/2015

Martin Ford explained, "In 1998, workers in the US business sector put in a total of 194 billion hours of labor. A decade and a half later, in 2013, the value of the goods and services produced by American businesses had grown by about $3.5 trillion after adjusting for inflation - a 42 percent increase in output. The total amount of human labor required to accomplish that was...194 billion hours. Shawn Sprague, the BLS economist who prepared the report, noted that 'this means that there was ultimately no growth at all in the number of hours worked over this 15-year-period, despite the fact that the US population gained over 40 million people during that time, and despite the fact that there were over thousands of new businesses established during that time.'"

Blasi told Fortune Magazine, "We could have a future where technology creates a low feudal serf class - people with low wages or flat wages or high structural unemployment. Or, we could have a future where we have a smaller workweek and citizens broadly have more capital ownership."

Blasi explained to PBS, "John Adams favored distribution of public lands to the landless to create broad-based ownership of property, then the critical component of business capital in the largely agricultural U.S. Current levels and trends in inequality would almost certainly have terrified the founders, who believed that broad-based property ownership was essential to the sustenance of a republic."

The History Channel explains, "Formed in March 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps, CCC, was one of the first New Deal programs. It was a public works project intended to promote environmental conservation and to build good citizens through vigorous, disciplined outdoor labor. Close to the heart of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the CCC combined his interests in conservation and universal service for youth. He believed that this civilian 'tree army' would relieve the rural unemployed and keep youth 'off the city street corners.'"

One writer named Hayley Krischer shared a frightening story about her five-year-old daughter:



The other day, I pointed out the pink sunset between the cluster of bare winter trees behind our house to my five-year-old daughter, and she turned to me, her face blank and said,



"Is that real?"



"What do you mean, honey? It's the sunset."



"No, I mean is that fake, like is this something we see on TV, or is it actually happening?"

Even Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations and the one who popularized the Invisible Hand, said, "When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters...No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable."

Economist Joseph Stiglitz said, "The reason the Invisible Hand often seemed invisible was because it wasn't there."

