Join 📚Jof’S Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
The world in which we live has created a curious state of affairs in which we have moved from looking to flee from work (as demonstrated by the workers’ struggles of the 1960s and 1970s) to one in which work and our ability to maximise it has come to sit at the very core of our identity (Berardi, 2009). The shift that Berardi identifies here is one from something that used to be imposed via a hierarchy and which was a clearly defined task performed in exchange for wages to an increasingly digital and virtual workplace in which labour becomes a much more differentiated and mental process. In the case of the latter, what it means to be productive in such a workplace is much less clear and more troubling for the self.
The Experience Society
Steven Miles
Rejecting Longtermism does not mean we shouldn’t care about the future. All it really requires is that we apply a *discount rate* to the future — one that increases over time. Just as we mourn tragedies that occurred 50 years ago more deeply than we do tragedies that occurred 750 years ago, our responsibility to people who will live 50 years from now is greater than our responsibility to those will live 750 years from now.
Against Jackpot-Longtermism - by Dave Karpf
Against Jackpot-Longtermism
Dave Karpf
__By the late 1980s, OECD economists had come to recognize that, given slower economic growth rates, firms were unlikely to invest sufficiently to increase the capital stock in line with what was required to generate new high-productivity, high-wage jobs. It therefore seemed “inescapable” that “a reasonably rapid growth of employment would require the creation of many jobs which use a **below-average amount of capital** to support them, and for which—in consequence—the supportable real wage would be correspondingly modest.”__ Looking to the United States, where unemployment rates fell because “the average real wage of the new jobs” was held “below the average real wage of existing jobs,” the OECD began to advocate this perverse job- creation strategy everywhere. OECD economists could never have foreseen that the period of economic stagnation would last this long. However, they should have predicted the socially dislocating effects that would follow from this policy.
Automation and the Future of Work
Aaron Benanav
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