What is wrong with work and education and what should we strive for

Useless work

Remember economist John Maynard Keynes's prediction that we will only work 15 hours a week as early as 2030? That the level of our prosperity will exceed all expectations and we will exchange an impressive share of our wealth for free time? In reality, it happened differently. Our wealth has grown significantly, but we do not have a lot of free time. Quite the opposite. We work harder than ever. […]

But there is one more piece of the puzzle that does not fit into place. Most people aren't involved in colorful iPhone cases, exotic herbal shampoos, or iced coffee and crushed cookies. Our addiction to consumption is largely satisfied by robots and fully wage-dependent Third World workers. And while productivity in agriculture and manufacturing has boomed in recent decades, employment in these sectors has fallen. So is it true that our work overload is driven by the urge to consume out of control?

Graeber's analysis suggests that countless people spend their entire working life doing what they see as meaningless jobs as a customer call specialist, HR director, social media promoter, PR, or one of the hospital administrators. universities and government agencies. This is what Graeber calls useless work.

Even the people who do it recognize that this activity is essentially superfluous.

The first article I wrote about this phenomenon generated a flood of confessions. "Personally, I would rather do something really useful," one stockbroker replied, "but I cannot accept the decline in income." He also talked about his "amazingly talented former classmate with a Ph. D. in physics" who develops cancer diagnostics technologies and "earns so much less than me it is overwhelming." Of course, just because your job serves an important community interest and requires a lot of talent, intelligence and perseverance does not guarantee that you will be swimming in money.

And vice versa. Is it a coincidence that the proliferation of high-paying, useless jobs coincided with the boom in higher education and the development of the knowledge economy? Remember, making money without creating anything is not easy. To get started, you will have to master some very bombastic but pointless jargon (absolutely necessary when attending strategic intersectoral symposia to discuss measures to enhance the beneficial effects of cooperation in the Internet community). Everyone can clean up garbage; a career in banking is available to a select few.

In a world that is getting richer and where cows are producing more milk and robots are producing more products, there is more room for friends, family, community work, science, art, sports and other things that make life worth living. But it also has more room for all sorts of nonsense.

As long as we are obsessed with work, work and work again (even with further automation of useful activities and outsourcing), the number of redundant jobs will only grow. Just like the number of managers in developed countries that has grown over the past 30 years and has not made us a cent richer. In contrast, research shows that countries with more managers are in fact less productive and less innovative. Half of the 12,000 professionals surveyed by Harvard Business Review said their work was “meaningless and insignificant,” and just as many said they did not feel connected to their company's mission. Another recent survey found that as many as 37% of UK workers believe they are doing useless work.

And not all new jobs in the service sector are meaningless - not at all. Take a look at health care, education, fire departments and police and you will find a ton of people walking home every night knowing, despite their modest earnings, that they made the world a better place. “As if they were told: 'You have a real job! And besides all that, do you have the audacity to demand the same level of pensions and medical care as the middle class?”- writes Graeber.

It is possible in another way

All of this is especially shocking because it takes place within the framework of a capitalist system based on such capitalist values as efficiency and productivity. Politicians tirelessly emphasize the need to cut the state apparatus, but they are largely silent about the fact that useless jobs continue to multiply. As a result, the government, on the one hand, is cutting back on useful jobs in health, education, and infrastructure (which leads to unemployment), and on the other, investing millions in the unemployment industry - training and supervision, which are long gone. are seen as effective tools.

The modern market is equally indifferent to utility, quality and innovation. The only thing that matters to him is profit. Sometimes it leads to amazing breakthroughs, sometimes it doesn't. Creating one useless job after another, be it a telemarketer job or a tax consultant, has a solid rationale: you can make a fortune without producing anything at all.

In such a situation, inequality only exacerbates the problem. The more wealth is concentrated at the top, the greater the demand for corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and high-frequency trading specialists. After all, demand does not exist in a vacuum: it is shaped by constant negotiation, determined by the laws and institutions of a country and, of course, by the people who manage financial resources.

This may also explain why the innovations of the past 30 years - a time of rising inequality - have fallen short of our expectations.

“We wanted flying cars, and instead we got 140 characters,” jokes Peter Thiel, who described himself as a Silicon Valley intellectual. If the post-war era gave us such wonderful inventions as the washing machine, refrigerator, space shuttle and oral contraceptives, then recently we have an improved version of the same phone that we bought a couple of years ago.

In fact, it is becoming more and more profitable not to innovate. Just imagine how many discoveries were not made due to the fact that thousands of bright minds wasted themselves on inventing super-complex financial products, which in the end brought only destruction. Or spent the best years of their lives copying existing pharmaceuticals in a way that only slightly differs from the original, but still enough for a brain-spirited lawyer to write a patent application, after which your wonderful public relations department will launch a completely new one. a campaign to promote a not-so-new drug.

Imagine that all these talents were invested not in the redistribution of goods, but in their creation. Who knows, maybe we would already have jetpacks, underwater cities and a cure for cancer. […]

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If there is a place in the world from which to begin the search for a better world, then this is the classroom.

While education may have fostered useless jobs, it was also a source of new and tangible prosperity. If we list the top ten most influential professions, teaching is among the leaders. Not because the teacher gets rewards like money, power, or position, but because the teacher largely determines something more important - the direction of human history.

It may sound pretentious, but let's take an ordinary elementary school teacher who has a new class every year - 25 children. This means that in 40 years of teaching, it will affect the lives of thousands of children! Moreover, the teacher influences the personality of students at their most pliable age. They are, after all, children. The teacher not only prepares them for the future - he also directly shapes this future.

Therefore, our efforts in the classroom will pay dividends for the whole society. But almost nothing happens there.

All significant discussions related to the problems of education relate to its formal aspects. Methods of teaching. Didactics. Education is consistently presented as an aid to adaptation - a lubricant that allows one to glide through life with less effort. In an educational conference call, an endless parade of trend experts predicts the future and what skills will be essential in the 21st century: the key words are creativity, adaptability, flexibility.

The focus is invariably competence, not value. Didactics, not ideals. “Ability to solve problems”, not problems to be solved. Invariably, everything revolves around one question: what knowledge and skills do today's students need to succeed in the labor market tomorrow - in 2030? And this is a completely wrong question.

In 2030, savvy accountants with no conscience issues will be in high demand. If current trends continue, countries like Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland will become even larger tax havens where multinationals can more effectively evade taxes, leaving developing countries even more disadvantaged. If the goal of education is to accept these trends as they are, rather than to reverse them, then selfishness is doomed to be the key skill of the 21st century. Not because the laws of the market and technology require it, but only for the reason that, obviously, this is how we prefer to make money.

We should ask ourselves a completely different question: What knowledge and skills should our children have in 2030?

Then, instead of anticipation and adaptation, we will prioritize management and creation. Instead of thinking about what we need to make a living from this or that useless activity, we can think about how we want to make money. No trend specialist can answer this question. And how could he do it? He just follows trends, but does not create them. It is our task to do this.

To answer, we need to examine ourselves and our personal ideals. What do we want? More time for friends, for example, or for family? Volunteering? Art? Sport? Future education will have to prepare us not only for the labor market, but also for life. Do we want to rein in the financial sector? Then perhaps we should teach the budding economists of philosophy and morality. Do we want more solidarity between races, genders and social groups? Let's introduce the subject of social science.

If we rebuild education based on our new ideas, the labor market will happily follow them. Let's imagine that we have increased the share of arts, history and philosophy in the school curriculum. You can bet that the demand for artists, historians and philosophers will increase. This is similar to how John Maynard Keynes envisioned 2030 in 1930. Increased prosperity and increased robotization will finally enable us to "value ends over means and prioritize good over good."

The point of a shorter work week is not so that we can sit and do nothing, but so that we can spend more time doing things that are truly important to us.

After all, it is society - not the market or technology - that decides what is really valuable. If we want all of us to become richer in this age, we need to free ourselves from the dogma that any work has meaning. And while we're on the subject, let's get rid of the misconception that high wages automatically reflect our value to society.

Then we may realize that it is not worth being a banker in terms of value creation.

The value of work for society is not always equal to its demand: Rutger Bregman, "Utopia for the Realists"

The Dutch writer and philosopher Rutger Bregman is called one of the most prominent young thinkers in Europe. In Utopia for the Realists, he introduces the ideas of a universal basic income and a fifteen-hour work week. And also provides evidence of their possibility and necessity, offering a new look at the structure of society.