Last week I posted a draft outline for my planned book on “The Coming Information Age” with a proposed chapter on the “Unbundling of the Job.” This is an idea that first occurred to me when I attended a workshop at MIT on Work and Value in the Digital Economy at MIT in late 2012. At the time here is what I wrote:
Do people need jobs or can we deliver what jobs provide some other way and in a potentially unbundled fashion? The “jobs of a job” include income, structure, social connections, meaning, and at least in the US, access to healthcare.
Let me elaborate on this idea here. Whenever I mention the idea of a Basic Income as a way of addressing the impact of technology on the labor market someone will reply “but people have to work!” (usually in an exasperated voice). When you then ask “why?” you get one of the following:
1. Because people need structure in their lives. The benign interpretation of this is a genuine concern about people being bored if they don’t have work. It is more likely though a secular variant of “idle hands make the devil’s work” – a longstanding suspicion that people will be up to no good if they aren’t working.
2. Because people need companionship and communication. It is absolutely the case that historically work was where we spent most of our waking time and was therefore the fulcrum for companionship and communication outside and possibly ahead of the family.
3. Because people need meaning and they get meaning from work. In the US it is common to ask people “what do you do?” to find out what kind of work they do. This is often followed (implicitly) by a conclusion about what kind of person they are based on their work.
4. Because people need healthcare. Thankfully with the Affordable Care Act we have started to unbundle healthcare from the job. By doing so we have moved healthcare into category #5 below.
5. Because people need to pay for food, housing, etc. That last objection is of course what the Basic Income is designed to address. I will write more about the math of that in a world of technological deflation.
None of these are really about work qua work. Rationales 1-3 completely ignore that other activities and networks can also meet those needs. More fundamentally they reflect a view that people are not capable of truly living in freedom, where freedom includes choosing what to spend one’s time on. We have come to hold this limited and pessimistic view as a result of centuries of systems that relied on the control of (most) people’s time and effort first for agrarian and then for industrial production.
In the upcoming posts I will write about alternative ways to address these needs without a traditional job. As a quick preview: people are creative (and will be more so if we change our education system) and will find interesting things to spend their time on. And importantly in an unbundling based on a Basic Income there can and will still be a market for labor – it is just that people will be in a very different bargaining position.
