posted
Some of my favorite sci fi stories include hypothetical societies where the citizens have large amounts of leisure time and production and services are provided mostly through automation. I'm curious how these civilizations look from an economic-science perspective.
The examples I'm thinking of are settings like the Spacer planets from Asimov's Robot novels, or (in a more dramatic example) the Culture from Iain M. Banks's stories. In these stories the characters spend very little time on activity we'd now call "work" (labor that earns them money). Most of the things that need doing are done by robots with a small amount of human management.
It's not always clear from the stories how the details work out, but it seems like there are a couple of ways to make the transition to a "leisure society" like this. First, you could incrementally reduce the work week (from 40 to 30 hrs, 30 to 20, and so on), keeping a large percentage of the population employed but using only a little bit of each person's labor. Alternatively, the people who work could work full days (by our present-day definition), the small amount of extremely-profitable human labor could be heavily taxed, and a guaranteed income paid to everyone from the taxes and the income from publicly-owned robot production.
In the limit, one might have a society like Banks's Culture where the surplus of automated production is so great that there's not much scarcity at all, and most things are treated as free public goods, leading to very little actual economic exchange.
Anyway, the idea of a civilization like this is very appealing to me. Not a utopia, perhaps, but a far more attractive system than the one we live in. I'm curious whether those of you who know more economics than I do can point out some possible stumbling blocks in the way of building a successful leisure society.
(I'm less interested in debating whether it's of intrinsic value to work for your money. I'm pretty certain that it's not, and in any case I don't expect to be convinced otherwise. I do believe it's valuable to do worthwhile things with your time, but hobbies and family activities can be just as valuable as careers in this way, if not more.)
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posted
We really don't know how such a thing would work, economically. At the moment, there's no possible ethical way to transform to such a system: the only way a leisure society could have a level of consumption similar to western world consumption patterns is if it defined many of the producers out of society. Of course, we already do to some extent, but we're also not trying to cut back on our production, and the parts of our production we exchange for parts of their production make both groups better off.
Now, the question becomes, will it ever be possible? A group (perhaps ten thousand?) of fit and educated members of western society, combined with a moderate amount of capital for machines to assist, could live at a high middle class standard . . . of perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago (neglecting certain baubles like large jewels that aren't easy to produce internally and trade at a high premium outside). The thing is, nowadays we'd consider the standard of even a hundred years ago abysmal, and would be remarkably dissatisfied with the standard of just fifty years ago (neither of which would, I think, be attainable anyways at, say, ten hours a week per person; fifty years ago I could at least imagine some people liking, especially as they'd still have access to modern medical care belike). The people at the time living in that strata of society considered the standard quite nice, of course.
This makes me suspect that people of a time will almost always view the standards of their time as sufficiently superior to the standards of even a century back to be unwilling to make that accommodation.
However, there have been periods when that hasn't been true in societies, long periods. At least, as far as standard of living is concerned: generally the culture of a time is viewed as superior to the past's, but that is less of an issue. Whether we shall ever return to such a period is not something I have any idea about. Certainly there seems to be something qualitatively different about the world after the industrial revolution, but what that means long-term is very up in the air.
That is, in some ways I imagine a period of near-stagnancy with only improvements in certain of the technologies needed for such an endeavor to be the more likely scenario for arriving at it than increase.
I think that for increase to be a feasible scenario to arrive at such a place, we must either talk about a time unimaginably far in the future (thousands of years, mayhap), or conjecture an increase in increase, akin to the Singularity some spread the gospel of (though I think based on faulty assumptions).
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This is what the zeitgeist movement is about, if the whole thing were to happen,I suspect there would be as much leisure time as you wanted, but as lazy as that may sound I believe people would do things even if no MONEY was involved at all, I've worked my whole life so far without having done anything requiring incentive to do work.
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Rawrain, that sort of sounds like Star Trek's thing. People working not because they have to, but that they want to better themselves and those around them.
Posts: 3134 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
Would the ideal be a planet/race-wide leisure society, or just a small number of people participating in this? I'm not an economist by any means, but I have a hard time imagining anything like this being possible unless the population was fairly small and controlled, and the culture was largely homogeneous.
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quote:Would the ideal be a planet/race-wide leisure society, or just a small number of people participating in this? I'm not an economist by any means, but I have a hard time imagining anything like this being possible unless the population was fairly small and controlled, and the culture was largely homogeneous.
This is only a little bit a question for economics. Ultimately, the trick is finding/creating a society of people who are happy with what they can produce given a much-reduced employment of hours towards production, and are willing to distribute things as needed to people to meet that end. Both of those are just questions about what the group's preferences are, and economics can only be studied in the context of a set of preferences. That is, whether such a set of preferences can exist, and how to get there, are both outside of economics.
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posted
For Us The Living by Robert Heinlein delves pretty deep into the economics aspect of this type of society. Pretty good read.
Posts: 688 | Registered: Nov 2008
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posted
Since the economics haven't been fully tackled yet, I'll add more of my own thoughts on the subject.
I can think of two overall ways you can build a leisure society as described.
You either build an automated city (or automated planet) and place controls on how many people can populate it and outer bounds on how they can behave.
Or you figure out a self-sustaining method of automation that can adapt to both individual and societal needs as they evolve and that can take over any functions that the society no longer wants to perform on its own. I see that as the "transcendent" culture that gets described in lots of modern sci-fi. The interface where all the minds meet that's also the infinitely fertile playground where anything can be done or created. I see that kind of society evolving organically, with perhaps some deliberate effort but mostly without any formal direction.
The automated city would be much more likely if you were deliberately trying to create a leisure society all at once. I guess one of the tricks of an automated city is figuring out what to automate and what to keep "manual." Like food production. You could go full protein paste for the masses or limit the automation to farming and basic food production. No humans doing that labor. They get what they want from the supermarket as before (or have it delivered by robot courier, etc.) and prepare it how they want. They are completely divorced from the source of their food, in other words. Sewage, water, garbage, infrastructure, and other necessities are all provided, of course. Is there advertising? Surely there are still services for sale. I imagine humans would keep that function. That requires constant labor. How about the design of products that humans still use, like furniture, clothing, communications interfaces, etc.? Would one look and feel be settled on, or would people actually have to work occasionally to produce new designs? Would there continue to be research into things like curing diseases and battling global warming, or would those all have been taken care of already? Who would produce the entertainment? I can see much of the production of a "holovid" being automated (robot gaffers, etc.) but someone still needs to direct it and someone still needs to write the next episode on a very regular basis. All of this is higher-level labor, perhaps, but still labor. Not to mention the very real labor of designing all these automated systems in the first place, and maintaining and updating them. Which brings me to the final question: would such a society expect to be self-sustaining, or would it rely on the labor and good graces of the world around it to exist?
Just a few thoughts.
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posted
Touching the Culture, it's worth pointing out that they are shown as going quite traditionally capitalistic when something appears that there is an actual shortage of, like physical-presence concert tickets. This looks to me like a real limitation on such societies; you can give everyone all the food they need, but you can't give everyone the one-and-only Doom Fortress on top of Mt Everest. (More seriously, you can't give everyone free access to the one-and-only Jerusalem.) So it seems to me that there would still be money of some sort. But it also seems that it would be earned only by artists, athletes, scientists, and others who can create genuinely-limited things. (Prostitutes, perhaps? Sex, especially sex with a particular person, would still be a limited resource. You can't give everyone the chance to sleep with Famous Hetaira X on any given night. At least, I hope not.) Even with genetic engineering, you can move the bell curve but you can't make everyone equally creative, intelligent, and hardworking. And if you could, would you want to?
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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advice for robots; is quite literally giving advice to robots >: if we do what you said then it will be matrics all over again.
Posts: 461 | Registered: Nov 2010
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posted
Thanks, a lot of interesting comments here.
Fugu, your main point is definitely apt. For a leisure society to come about, there will have to be a period in history where the benefits to standard of living from near-full employment are widely perceived as not much of an improvement over the standard of living that can be achieved without an equivalent amount of work.
Now it seems to me like the technology conjectured by Asimov -- truly adaptive, multi-use robots with most of the capacities of a human worker -- could very well create such a situation. Our standard of living is set by the quality of goods and services available (both of which robots can handle) and the quality of intellectual property available. After the development of all-purpose robots, the main use of human labor would be production of intellectual property. Now, in many cases people will do that sort of "work" for free. And in any case, only a few star actors and best-selling authors are all we need to satisfy the needs of the whole population, leading to the well-recognized stratification in those fields we have even today.
That sort of robot is a horrendously difficult technology to develop. But if it does come about, that's a case where pure technological increase seems likely to produce a leisure society.
quote:I think that for increase to be a feasible scenario to arrive at such a place, we must either talk about a time unimaginably far in the future (thousands of years, mayhap), or conjecture an increase in increase, akin to the Singularity some spread the gospel of (though I think based on faulty assumptions).
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the Singularity. Because the idea seems unbelievable to me as well, but just because of "common sense" rather than any informed expertise.
quote:Touching the Culture, it's worth pointing out that they are shown as going quite traditionally capitalistic when something appears that there is an actual shortage of, like physical-presence concert tickets. This looks to me like a real limitation on such societies; you can give everyone all the food they need, but you can't give everyone the one-and-only Doom Fortress on top of Mt Everest. (More seriously, you can't give everyone free access to the one-and-only Jerusalem.)
For sure. In the Culture, this issue is apparently ameliorated a lot by the fact that most people aren't psychologically very interested in particular "special" places or objects. There seems to be a cultural (ha) norm in play that if two things are intrinsically the same, they're of equal worth.
I personally wouldn't go in for that, but I wouldn't say it's impossible for such a meme to gain dominance.
The sex thing seems like less of a problem, since you could have the virtual experience of sex with anyone you desire. In fact, I'd say we're likely to have that same capability within our lifetimes.
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In "Look to Windward", physical-presence tickets for the concert sell out, and there's also a passage that deals with the snob appeal of having been there (wherever 'there' is) physically instead of virtually. And this seems reasonable to me: The one thing virtual <whatever> (including sex) cannot duplicate, is the knowledge that it's really real - short, at least, of editing your memory or consciousness. And that's another order of technology altogether. Besides that, personally I would not care to confuse myself that way.
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