Russell on idleness

[cloquewerk]

My sister linked to this essay by Betrand Russell entitled "In Praise of Idleness". Some of these thoughts have been in my head for years now, well summed up in a hypothetical example:

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight

Comments

[anonymous]

Game theory. Russell's idea won't work because sooner or later one of the pinmakers will produce more than his half-share of pins and then take out some ads, hoping to increase his income by selling more than the other guy.

If *everyone* was content to be "half-happy", then everything would be fine. But some aren't, so it doesn't work for the others either.

--apenwarr

[cloquewerk]

Well that was Russell's point--that our world is not sensible. A pinmaker who takes a chance and overproduces, hoping to sell more, will possibly end up rich or will fold his business, throwing his employees out of work. You've essentially just said what Russell said.

I dunno what you mean by "half-happy" though. A larger point of his essay is that our modern attitude to work is crazy, that our notion of earning our bread means that we should do any sort of paid work, even if it's useless or even downright harmful, resulting in most people being unhappy for no good reason.

Maybe it's all a result of our overpopulated, overcomplicated, impersonal world and there's nothing we can do about it without either evolving into a new species or a return to small communities, but few things are written in stone about "human nature".

[anonymous]

By "half-happy" I mean that people making pins *half* the time are, in this simplistic scenario, depending on their preferences, either unhappy while making pins, or unhappy while being idle. This leads them to try to optimize their happiness one way or the other.

Someone who only works 4 hours a day may feel that he will be even happier if he works 8 hours a day, makes twice as much money, and then gets to take vacations in the Bahamas every year. It only takes one person like that to ruin it for everybody: by overproducing pins, he drives the others (who considered themselves "happy enough") into bankruptcy.

This isn't really much of a reflection of human nature. If one single outlier can ruin it for everyone, then it's simply an unstable system and you're being unrealistic if you expect it to be sustainable no matter what your species are like or how small your communities are.

You could make it illegal to overproduce pins, of course. But I doubt that would make everyone happy either.

--apenwarr

[slajoie]

> You could make it illegal to overproduce pins, of course. But I doubt that would make everyone happy either.

Actually, milk production in Canada has been regulated for a long time. Fixed prices, production quotas, import tariffs/limits etc. The whole market is entirely planned. You don't hear too much noise about people wanting jobs as dairy farmers and not being able to get them, while those who do have those jobs are plenty busy. Seems to work out just fine.