A brave new workless world
How would you feel if you no longer had to work? Ecstatic? Empty? Relieved? Anxious? All of the above? Economists and other thinkers have long debated the function of work in shaping human identity. Sigmund Freud considered work “indispensable,” and Adam Smith thought it “toil and trouble.”
Daniel Susskind, an Oxford professor and former government advisor, believes that work “is so entrenched in our psyches that there is often an instructive resistance to contemplating a world with less of it, and an inability to articulate anything substantial when we actually do.” His argument in , a useful and farsighted book on the subject, is
