A World

without Work?
Technology, Automation,
and the Future of Work

A Compilation of Essays Presented at the

2016 Values & Capitalism Faculty Retreat

www.valuesandcapitalism.com
 A World
without Work?
Technology, Automation,
and the Future of Work

A Compilation of Essays Presented at the

2016 Values & Capitalism Faculty Retreat
 Contents

Introduction....................................................................................1

The Impossibility and Challenge of a World without Work........... 3

Steven McMullen

Democracy in a World without Work .......................................... 13

Peter C. Meilaender

More Than Fiction: Picturing a World without Work in Utopian

and Dystopian Novels................................................................ 23
Mary Manjikian

What Is Your Narrative? Human Purpose and the Future

of Work ..................................................................................... 37
Kevin J. Brown

iii
 Introduction

For those who believe in the biblical narrative, work is a fundamental

aspect of human life. Even before the Fall, “the Lord God took the
man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it”
(Gen. 2:15). We are called to be productive, to develop things, to use
our powers to make order out of disorder—in other words, to mirror
our Creator. Of course, after the Fall work remains, but it becomes
more difficult: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful
toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life” (Gen. 3:17).
However, we now find ourselves at a new turning point in his-
tory, in which the future of work as we understand it is in jeopardy.
Since the Industrial Revolution, improvements in technology have
led to the automation of many jobs that could once be done only by
human hands and minds. This largely happened incrementally, but
today, advancements in technology appear to be coming in leaps and
bounds. All these developments have led (and will almost certainly
continue to lead) to a more prosperous society—but they have also
fundamentally decoupled productivity and job growth.
In light of these realities, what is the future of work? Will job
growth come in new sectors that we cannot yet imagine? Will peo-
ple use increased leisure time in productive ways? Most importantly,
what are the social, political, and spiritual implications of a world
without work?
The following essays, written by members of Values & Capital-
ism’s Academic Network, offer thoughtful responses to these ques-
tions. They certainly do not give us all the answers, but because they
come at the topic from various perspectives—economic, political,
theological, and literary—they provide helpful insights into the
opportunities and challenges of an ever-innovating world.

Tyler Castle
Senior Associate, Values & Capitalism
1
 The Impossibility and Challenge of a
World without Work

by Steven McMullen, Hope College

In 2009 Google began road testing one of their latest far-reaching

projects: self-driving cars. In the years that followed, the company
clearly demonstrated that computers can be better drivers than
humans. After 1.8 million hours of test-driving, their cars have never
been ticketed, and all accidents have been caused by humans.1
Visible technological breakthroughs such as this have rekindled
old fears about machines taking jobs and leaving humans with noth-
ing productive to contribute. The latest wave of technological angst
prompted articles in the Atlantic, Fortune, and the Guardian, among
others.2 A central fear is that the next wave of technology might
be the one that makes human capabilities obsolete, replaced by
more efficient, less expensive, and more compliant machines. Derek
Thompson writes, “What may be looming is something different: an
era of technological unemployment, in which computer scientists
and software engineers essentially invent us out of work, and the
total number of jobs declines steadily and permanently.”3
Fears of this kind are not new. The original Luddites were
19th-century textile workers who feared that the introduction of
new looms would make their skills obsolete. Every generation
since has seen this type of concern. As technology progresses and
more tasks are automated, there is a visible loss in employment
even as we collectively reap the benefits. Each new wave of tech-
nology produces earnest prophets of the demise of human labor.
And yet, contrary to these fears, even in the midst of extraordi-
nary technological progress, the total amount of work available for
3
4 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

people has continued to increase. The Luddites, old and new, have
been consistently wrong.4
The long pedigree of this category of fears, sometimes called the
“Luddite fallacy,” is the result of a common error in economic think-
ing. While the benefactors of technological improvements are dif-
fuse, those who are hurt are concentrated and visible. This makes it
far easier to count the costs than the benefits, even if the benefits of
a technological improvement far outweigh the costs.
Some evidence of this comes from a recent study of 140 years of
census data from England and Wales.5 When technological advance-
ment diminished employment opportunities in agriculture and
manufacturing, this freed up resources for growth in other sectors,
especially in services. While it is possible to focus on only the pau-
city of jobs available for aspiring farmers, the growth in other sectors
is closely connected.
The declining prices of manufactured goods and food items and
the increasing productivity of workers created growing demand for
services that were deemed luxuries to previous generations. The
result is more accountants, more bartenders, and more hairdressers
per 1,000 people in England and Wales, precisely because the popu-
lation is now wealthy enough to afford their services.6
It is impossible to predict where new jobs will open up if truck
drivers are all replaced with self-driving semi trucks, but both his-
tory and economic theory point toward continued opportunities for
workers.7 Because most technological changes are gradual, they alter
the employment landscape indirectly, by changing economic incen-
tives. People constantly adjust to these changes by investing in new
skills, moving to different jobs, and adopting new tools. The mass
unemployment envisioned by today’s Luddites is unlikely to occur
as long as people are free to move to those occupations with better
opportunities.

Inequality, Unemployment, and Education

A close examination of the labor-economics literature reveals that a

mass of disaffected and unemployed truck drivers should not be our
 STEVEN MCMULLEN 5

primary concern. As technology advances, some workers are made

more productive, because they are given better tools, and some
workers are made less productive, because they are pushed out of
skilled employment toward low-skill jobs.
As a whole we are net beneficiaries of technology, but for those
workers whose skills are made obsolete by a new technological
change, opportunities in the labor market diminish. Economists
have documented a broad pattern of skill-biased technologi-
cal change, in which new technologies complement the work of
highly skilled labor but replace the work of low-skilled labor. The
result is increased wage inequality and higher returns to invest-
ment in education.8
If technological change consistently increases the value of par-
ticular skills and education, then the education system becomes an
increasingly important part of the economy. Unfortunately, Claudia
Goldin and Lawrence Katz have documented that, in the US, the
educational system continually improved until only the 1970s and
1980s.9 After that point, high school graduation rates plateaued,
and educational outcomes started to diverge, with the most well-
prepared students moving into college and graduate school, while
many others in their cohorts failed to graduate from high school.
As long as education outcomes improved faster than technology,
wage inequality remained constant. When education improvement
stagnated, inequality immediately began to increase. The demand
for highly educated workers has continued to grow, but our ability
to produce such workers at increasing rates has slowed to a crawl.
This broadly supports one of the primary concerns about tech-
nological advancement: that a gradual change in technology will
result not in mass unemployment but in ever-rising inequality.10
Low-skilled and middle-skill workers become less valuable to firms
that can employ machines to do much of their work.11 If this is our
concern, then the historical record of technological advancement is
less uniformly positive.
There is not an historical precedent for machines replacing
workers and leaving them idle. There is, however, a number of
examples of technological change resulting in decreased living
6 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

standards for the bottom of the income distribution and gains for
the top. This was often the result in early phases of industrializa-
tion and has likely been going on in the US economy over the last
30 years.

Skill Depreciation and Labor Force Participation

In addition to rising inequality, some fear that improving tech-

nology will bring more uncertainty in the labor market, because
firms and workers have to adjust to an ever-changing techno-
logical environment. Workers may invest in skills early in their
lives, expecting to be able to use those skills for a long career.
Rapid technological change can disrupt those plans and require
that workers constantly learn, adapt, and change occupations.12
Firms, too, will be less likely to invest in the long-term future
of a worker who may not be useful to them once the technol-
ogy in their industry shifts. If workers are not able to adapt, or
are unwilling to accept decreases in pay, they may opt to leave
the labor market entirely. If technological advancement requires
ever-increasing skill to manage, then many workers could be left
behind as the economy changes.
This is broadly consistent with another labor-force trend: in the
midst of technological growth and growing income inequality, we
also observe the number of people who show up for work each
day declining. Labor force participation has grown steadily among
women but declined for adult males consistently since the early
1970s. Men are leaving the labor force at younger ages, and long-
term unemployment rates have slowly increased.
Some fear that structural unemployment, where workers find
that there is no demand for their skills and so opt out of the labor
force, has increased permanently. This story is complicated, how-
ever, by the fact that low-education workers, while less likely to
participate in the labor force, have not been leaving the labor
force any faster than high-education workers. The new structural
unemployment is equally likely to occur, it seems, across the skill
distribution.
 STEVEN MCMULLEN 7

Technological Utopia?

For every Luddite that fears a new era of technologically induced

poverty, there is usually a technology optimist that foresees a bright
future in which humans rest in a life of leisure while machines
toil to meet our every desire. Since technological advances always
correspond to an increase in productivity, there is more wealth to
go around. Moreover, when workers move toward more leisure
throughout the economy, it is usually a result of wealth, not poverty.
As standards of living increase, people have delayed full-time
entry into the labor force, moved to retire before health requires it,
and decreased total hours worked. Some scholars have even argued
that, in our status-driven economy, people work more than is good
for them, and we should tax labor heavily to encourage people to
move toward more leisure.13 In this view, work is unpleasant, and
the sooner we eradicate it the better.
The optimists and pessimists both see the same future: less work.
But their description of the future looks radically different. Opti-
mists tend to imagine a future in which the gains from technological
advances are widely shared, so that even those with little to offer in
the labor market will still live a rich life of leisure. Pessimists, on the
other hand, imagine a world in which a small segment of the work-
force reaps most of the gains from technological advancement and
others are left in poverty.
Which future is the most likely? History gives us examples of
each. In the history of the US economy, the gains from technology
have been widely shared when we were able to equip the general
population with the skills to take advantage of the new technologies.
Replicating that success will be a challenge in the future.
It is possible, however, to imagine a future in which automation
provides noticeable improvements in standards of living for those
with low skill levels. The extraordinary changes in agricultural
technology have resulted in a huge demographic movement away
from agriculture toward other industries, but this has not resulted
in poverty. Because these technological improvements resulted in
lower prices for basic food items, the gains were shared across the
8 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

population. The true distributional impact, then, depends not only

on the resulting wages but also the purchasing power of the aver-
age person. This logic applies equally well to technological advances
in medicine, mass media, sanitation, and other areas that directly
impact daily life and are widely consumed.

An Abundance of Good Work

If we envision work as toil—something unpleasant that we engage

in only because it allows us to purchase the goods we need—then
a future with less work can seem appealing. More time outside of
formal labor, it might seem, could free people up for more creative
endeavors and more investments in their families and community.
This, however, is an unhealthy and largely dishonest vision of the
labor market. This vision rests in a reductionist view of labor that
sees work as only a means to an end. Moreover, it pushes toward
an equally reductionist view of humanity. If the highest end that
humans can aspire to is leisure and consumption, then work must
be viewed in a negative light.
In fact, humans find their highest end not in consumption, but
in creative service to those around them. Work, therefore, is best
envisioned as a vocation that is worth a significant investment. It is
true that not all jobs clearly contribute to the common good, nor are
all jobs personally fulfilling. At the same time, much of our leisure
time is clearly wasted. In their daily work, people often gain much
of their self-regard and establish their place in a community. People
may, in fact, have the opportunity to do more good in the workplace
than they do outside it.
The labor market builds communities of people with specialized
skills in ways that other areas of life rarely do, and so work can pro-
vide people with the best opportunity to tangibly serve people around
them.14 Our true challenge is not to avoid work but to figure out how
to do the most good possible as we participate in commercial life.
Many of the biggest challenges we face today are not the kind of
problems that can be solved with more leisure time. If work increas-
ingly requires specialization, so too does public service. A brief
 STEVEN MCMULLEN 9

survey of the many materials an intellectual needs from the world

indicates that much good work is left to be done and that there is
room for any person to devote their lifetime to worthy projects. If
technology leaves people without jobs, it is not because there is no
good work for them to do. If work is service to those around us, then
truly a world without work is impossible.
This high view of human labor does not diminish worries about
the effects of technology. On the contrary, it raises the stakes. The
prospect of technological change making a person’s skills obsolete is
a real one. In this view, the greatest tragedy of a modern technolog-
ical age is not the prospect of poverty; it is the prospect that a large
portion of our population could be left without a clear opportunity
to serve those around them. The challenge then is to build an econ-
omy in which people are equipped to do good work and then have
the opportunity to do work that is genuinely good.
It is tempting, in the face of technologically induced wealth and
inequality, to turn to public redistribution to allow all to share the gains.
If progress is measured in terms of only material gains, and if work
is only a toil to be avoided, then this approach would make sense.
But if productive labor is a central part of how we flourish as
human beings, then a generous public safety net is solving only half
the problem. The state might be able to keep people from material
deprivation, but it cannot create opportunities to invest their skills
in the lives of those nearby. Such opportunities are best found in the
family, private commercial activity, religious vocations, and civic life.
If the specter of technological obsolescence cannot be eliminated
by state redistribution, what role can public policy play in shaping
a healthy labor market? At least two opportunities remain. First, the
government can play an important role in investing in the skills and
capabilities of citizens. Education is becoming more important as
technological progress accelerates, even if schools are not able to
predict and directly teach technology-specific skills. A broad liberal
education can give workers the foundation necessary to move to
new careers when technologies shift the labor market.
Unfortunately, uncertainty about jobs tends to push schools and
parents toward specific vocational training programs. Moving in that
10 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

direction, however, does students a disservice. Such programs too

often prepare students for a job that may be obsolete in a decade,
while neglecting the skills that could prepare them to adapt when
those career opportunities end. It may well be that a future of rapid
technological change will have to be one in which formal education
becomes a lifelong endeavor.
Another positive role the state can play is to create a set of insti-
tutions, laws, and policies that shield individuals from the pain of
creative destruction, even as products and firms are forced to com-
pete. Instead of trying to shield firms or industries from pressures to
innovate, the government should invest in aiding worker transitions.
This could take the form of investments in midcareer educa-
tion, the separation of health benefits from employment, short-term
unemployment insurance, or increased ease in starting a small busi-
ness. Such measures would keep the proper goal front and center:
keeping people engaged in creative and productive enterprises that
serve the common good. This goal should never be confused with
the false corollary that is “protecting local businesses.”

Conclusion

With rapid technological progress comes the prospect of economic

changes that eliminate whole ways of life. The agricultural work
that once defined American culture is now, because of technological
change, a specialized calling for a small fraction of the population.
Manufacturing industries have seen similar disruption, as automa-
tion replaces careers with computers. We should not minimize the
tragedy that is Youngstown, Ohio, or Flint, Michigan. The loss of
stable employment because of economic shifts has real casualties,
measured in lives, vocations, and communities.
This concern should not be grounds to fear a wholesale replace-
ment of people with machines, however. The best evidence about
technological progress points not to mass unemployment but more
frequent skill depreciation and career disruption. Instead of trying
to protect a way of life that assumed a particular kind of career—a
40-year tenure with a large, stable firm—we should focus on making
 STEVEN MCMULLEN 11

work transitions easier, so that technological disruptions are less

likely to cause permanent inequality.

About the Author

Steven McMullen is an assistant professor of economics at Hope Col-

lege. Special thanks to Kaylee Kish for assistance in the research for
this essay.

Notes

1. Adrienne LaFrance, “When Google Self-Driving Cars Are in Acci-

dents, Humans Are to Blame,” Atlantic, June 8, 2015, www.theatlantic.com/
technology/archive/2015/06/every-single-time-a-google-self-driving-car-
crashed-a-human-was-to-blame/395183/.
2. Derek Thompson, “A World without Work,” Atlantic, August 2015,
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/
395294/; Geoff Colvin, “Humans Are Underrated,” Fortune, August 1, 2015;
Charles Arthur, “Artificial Intelligence: ‘Homo Sapiens Will Be Split into a
Handful of Gods and the Rest of Us,’” Guardian, November 7, 2015, www.
theguardian.com/business/2015/nov/07/artificial-intelligence-homo-sapiens-
split-handful-gods?CMP=share_btn_link; and Heather Stewart, “Robot
Revolution: Rise of ‘Thinking’ Machines Could Exacerbate Inequality,”
Guardian, November 4, 2015, www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/
nov/05/robot-revolution-rise-machines-could-displace-third-of-uk-jobs.
3. Thompson, “A World without Work,” 52.
4. Yongsung Chang and Jay H. Hong, “Does Technology Create Jobs?,”
SERI Quarterly 6, no. 3 (July 2013): 44–53.
5. Katie Allen, “Technology Has Created More Jobs Than It Has
Destroyed, Says 140 Years of Data,” Guardian, August 18, 2015, www.
theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/17/technology-created-more-jobs-
than-destroyed-140-years-data-census; and Ian Stewart, Debapratim
De, and Alex Cole, Technology and People: The Great Job-Creating Machine,
Deloitte, 2015, www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/uk/Documents/
finance/deloitte-uk-technology-and-people.pdf.
6. Allen, “Technology Has Created More Jobs Than It Has Destroyed.”
12 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

7. Alex Davies, “The World’s First Self-Driving Semi-Truck Hits the Road,”
WIRED, May 5, 2015, www.wired.com/2015/05/worlds-first-self-driving-
semi-truck-hits-road/.
8. Claudia Dale Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race between Education
and Technology (Harvard University Press, 2008); David H. Autor, Lawrence
F. Katz, and Melissa S. Kearney, “Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Revis-
ing the Revisionists,” Review of Economics and Statistics 90, no. 2 (April 18,
2008): 300–23, www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/rest.90.2.300;
and David Card and John DiNardo, “Skill-Biased Technological Change
and Rising Wage Inequality: Some Problems and Puzzles,” Journal of Labor
Economics 20, no. 4 (2002): 733–83.
9. Goldin and Katz, The Race between Education and Technology.
10. Stewart, “Robot Revolution”; and Arthur, “Artificial Intelligence.”
11. Didem Tüzemen and Jonathan Willis, “The Vanishing Middle: Job
Polarization and Workers’ Response to the Decline in Middle-Skill Jobs,”
Economic Review - Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City 100, no. 3 (2013):
5–32.
12. R. H. Mabry and A. D. Sharplin, Does More Technology Create Unem-
ployment?, Cato Institute, March 18, 1986, http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.
org/files/pubs/pdf/pa068.pdf.
13. Robert H. Frank, “Positional Externalities Cause Large and Prevent-
able Welfare Losses,” American Economic Review 95, no. 2 (May 1, 2005):
137–41.
14. Arthur C. Brooks, The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Hap-
pier, and More Prosperous America (New York, NY: Broadside Books, 2015).
 Democracy in a World without Work

by Peter C. Meilaender, Houghton College

In his essay “A World without Work,” Derek Thompson entertains

the possibility that an economy transformed by technological innova-
tion might soon demand so little human labor that large numbers of
working-age Americans could find themselves unable to find or hold
steady jobs.1 Because work, for many people, constitutes an import-
ant source of personal fulfillment, Thompson recognizes that such
a world would pose not only economic but also significant cultural
challenges—challenges, indeed, for which no past experience could
have adequately prepared us. Peering into his crystal ball, he ponders
several possible scenarios for what such a world might look like, label-
ing them “consumption,” “communal creativity,” and “contingency.”
One might initially find the notion of a world without work
implausible—certainly that was my own instinctive reaction. Insofar
as work is (in part) the curse of Adam, we can hardly expect that
large numbers of us will come to be spared of it. As God says to
Adam in Genesis 3, “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you
shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring
forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of
your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground.”2
If we take this punishment seriously, we might well be tempted to
long for a world without work, but surely not to expect one. Never-
theless, Thompson’s thesis deserves more consideration than I was
initially inclined to give. In a world where cars may soon drive them-
selves, how many jobs are there that we are prepared to say with
confidence cannot be done by machines? I suspect that my inability
to imagine certain jobs being mechanized may have less to do with
the limits of technology than with those of my own imagination.
13
14 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

In this essay, at any rate, I want to assume that the world Thomp-
son envisages truly is possible and to ask, drawing on the thought
of Aristotle, what it would mean for us politically. Thompson, in
my view, fails fully to appreciate the likely political consequence
of a world without work, which would be no less than the end of
democracy. Obviously, it may be that none of the potential futures
he envisions will actually come to pass, in which case such a dire
prediction would fortunately become moot. Still, to the extent that
his thesis has any plausibility, we ought to take a more hard-headed
look not only at its economic but also its likely political conse-
quences, lest we be overly complacent about the kinds of transfor-
mations it would entail.
Thompson devotes about half his essay to imagining three pos-
sible futures that could emerge if technology gradually displaces
increasing numbers of workers, leaving them without meaning-
ful, full-time, paid employment. Of the three, one is clearly more
optimistic than the others and represents the option for which
Thompson thinks we should begin to prepare ourselves. The first
of these possible futures he labels “consumption.” This is perhaps
a misleading name, and we might better call it (adopting another
word Thompson uses) a future of “leisure.” In this world, the loss
of work is a blessing, a true escape from the curse of Adam. Rec-
ognizing that much work is drudgery and toil, we might rejoice
at the prospect of an economy productive enough to relieve many
people of that burden. Instead of being driven by the need to
work, we could freely devote ourselves to whatever activities give
our lives meaning.
Although Thompson does not quote it, there is more than a
whiff here of the communist utopia described by Karl Marx in
The German Ideology, where it becomes “possible for me to do one
thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish
in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner,
just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman,
shepherd or critic.”3 Thompson, fortunately, is more realistic than
Marx about how the new leisured masses would in fact be likely to
spend their time—not in the amateur polymath’s hunting, fishing,
 PETER C. MEILAENDER 15

and criticism, but instead “watching television, browsing the inter-

net, and sleeping.”4 The Marxist fantasy would in reality be a world
of couch potatoes.
The third scenario Thompson describes—I shall return shortly
to the second—is, even more clearly than the first, unappealing.
In this world of “contingency,” to use his label, the high-tech econ-
omy does not enable significant numbers of people to enjoy lives
of newfound leisure, either in cultural criticism or merely sleeping.
Instead, it leaves them trapped in a precarious existence, seeking
one unpredictable, poorly paid form of short-term employment
after another. Thompson attempts to find a silver lining in this
scenario, noting that it could create new opportunities for a kind of
entrepreneurship-from-necessity, in which people enjoy the free-
dom and independence of piecing together different kinds of work
at different times, working no more than necessary to get by. His
model for this is a woman he meets who has given up adjunct
teaching in order to take a part-time job as a hostess in a café, in
her spare time organizing literary and artistic events and trying to
sell her books of poetry.
Yet this silver lining really seems to presume that the first sce-
nario, of hunter-critic leisure, would impinge on the world of con-
tingency, filling in those gaps in the day when one is no longer able
to find paid employment. If so, then what remains truly distinctive
about this scenario, as opposed to the first, is the worrisome emer-
gence of what Thompson, quoting the Youngstown historian John
Russo, calls the “precariat”—a “working class that swings from task
to task in order to make ends meet and suffers a loss of labor rights,
bargaining rights, and job security.”5
But it is the second of his three scenarios, “communal creativity,”
that most clearly captures Thompson’s fancy and that appears to hold
out the most hope that a world without work, though not a leisured
paradise, could nevertheless prove to be productive and meaningful.
Here he imagines the underemployed coming together in cooperative-
style artisan communities, where they could teach, learn, and prac-
tice various trades; share information and equipment; develop work-
ing friendships and new forms of solidarity; and inaugurate a new
16 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

era of fine craftsmanship, of the sort once widely practiced but now
largely extinct as a consequence of industrialization.
Thompson’s portrayal of this best-case scenario is, to be sure, less
than fully persuasive. For one thing, here again we sense his inability
to imagine a positive vision of the nonworking future that does not
in the end rest on at least some semblance of the Marxist utopia of
talented amateurs freed to indulge their passions. Furthermore, it
is not entirely clear why we should think of this vision as tied to
the potential decline of work. If people want to give up their day
jobs or begin working part-time as skilled smiths, photographers, or
cooks, nothing prevents their doing so right now; indeed, the Inter-
net, by opening up larger potential markets, has made this kind of
small-scale artisanal business much more feasible. Still, it is easy to
understand the appeal of a world in which “tens of millions of peo-
ple,” instead of just sleeping and watching television, “make things
they enjoy making—whether physical or digital, in buildings or in
online communities—and receive feedback and appreciation for
their work.”6
Lurking behind all three scenarios, however, is a fundamental
problem that Thompson notices but does not adequately address. In
any of these possible futures, the unemployed or underemployed—
whether they are enjoying a leisured existence of hunting, fishing,
and napping; bouncing precariously from one poorly paid short-
term gig to the next; or engaged for much of their time in some artis-
anal craft—will still need to eat, be clothed, have a place to live, and
receive medical attention when necessary. If they are not themselves
earning a steady income, who is to pay for all these things?
The answer, presumably, is the rest of us. Through various forms
of government redistribution, those who are still able to maintain
productive, paid employment will support those who are not.
Thompson hints obliquely at this early in his essay. After introduc-
ing the labels “consumption,” “communal creativity,” and “contin-
gency,” but before explaining what these scenarios would be, he
comments briefly, “In any combination, it is almost certain that
the country would have to embrace a radical new role for govern-
ment.”7 Only fairly late in the article, however, in a section titled
 PETER C. MEILAENDER 17

“Government: The Visible Hand,” does he clarify what this would

amount to. “Deciding how to tax profits and distribute income
could become the most significant economic-policy debate in
American history,” he writes.8
The most important element of this decision, he suggests,
would be to supply all adults with a universal basic income—a
proposal that in the past, he rightly observes, has won support
from both sides of the political aisle. And then he notes, in a pass-
ing remark that I believe is one of the most important but under-
stated comments in the essay, that the politics of this could prove
divisive: “[T]he politics of universal income in a world without
universal work would be daunting. The rich could say, with some
accuracy, that their hard work was subsidizing the idleness of mil-
lions of ‘takers.’”9
Indeed. Not only could the rich say this, but they surely would,
and the probable result would be nothing less than the end of
democracy as we know it. To understand this, we might learn from
Aristotle’s discussion of different types of governments. In Books
III and IV of the Politics, Aristotle develops a careful typology of
regimes. He initially generates a list of six regime types, based on a
twofold distinction: first, that between just governments that pursue
the common good and unjust ones that pursue the private interests
of the rulers; and second, that among governments in which rule is
held by either one, a few, or many persons.
The distinction based on the number of rulers, however, quickly
gives way to a more important one: whether the rich or the poor
are dominant in a given regime. And Aristotle focuses the bulk of
his discussion on three regimes in particular: oligarchy, democracy,
and polity. Thus oligarchy is the rule of the wealthy (who are usu-
ally few in number) in their own interest, whereas democracy is the
self-interested rule of the free-born, nonslave poor (who are usually
many). Polity, which Aristotle tells us has no commonly recognized
name because it is rare, represents a middle ground, achieved either
by balancing the rich and the poor against each other, so that neither
group’s claims can predominate entirely, or (less commonly) by the
creation of a large middle class.
18 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

Why does Aristotle, in classifying regimes, so quickly replace the

criterion of the number of rulers with that of wealth and poverty?
Because what is truly important about each regime is that it rep-
resents a distinctive claim about justice that shapes the political order
and its laws. And these turn not on the number of those in power
but rather on the reasons they claim to deserve power. Speaking at
one point of oligarchic and democratic understandings of justice,
Aristotle remarks that

they all [that is, both oligarchs and democrats] grasp justice of a sort,
but they go only to a certain point and do not discuss the whole
of what is just in the most authoritative sense. For example, justice
seems to be equality, and it is, but not for everyone, only for equals.
Justice also seems to be inequality, since indeed it is, but not for
everyone, only for unequals. . . . [S]ince they are both speaking up
to a point about justice of a sort, they think they are speaking about
what is unqualifiedly just. For one lot thinks that if they are unequal
in one respect (wealth, say) they are wholly unequal, whereas the
other lot thinks that if they are equal in one respect (freedom, say)
they are wholly equal.10

This may initially sound somewhat cryptic, but in its context—as

part of an attempt to delineate what is distinctive about different
types of regimes—Aristotle’s meaning is clear enough. In any given
city, he suggests, we can imagine various groups present, all claiming
for themselves the right to rule. Confronted by the competing claims
of their opponents, each group is driven to offer some justification
for why it deserves to rule—driven, that is, to advance its own dis-
tinctive conception of justice.
These competing claims, Aristotle argues, are all partially,
though only partially, correct. What does he have in mind? The
wealthy oligarchs, presumably, say something like this: “It is not
right for people who are unequal to receive merely equal treat-
ment. If the city needs some task to be accomplished—equipping
an army, say, or constructing a public building—who will foot the
bill? We will. If our plans go astray and the city suffers, who has
 PETER C. MEILAENDER 19

the most to lose? We do. We therefore deserve a greater share in

decision-making authority than those with nothing to contribute
and nothing to lose.”
The democrats, on the other hand, who are comparatively poor
but are nevertheless free citizens, reply along these lines: “But we are
not merely your slaves. All of us have been born free. And it is not
right for those of equal status to receive unequal treatment. There-
fore we all deserve to have an equal share in governance.”
Neither argument, says Aristotle, is entirely correct. Just because
people are unequal in wealth need not mean they should also be
unequal in political rights; just because people share an equal free-
born status need not mean they should all carry equal influence in
public affairs. Both groups lay hold of part of the truth, but a city
governed simply by oligarchs or simply by democrats will fall short
of a more complete justice.
Aristotle is describing here an argument about justice that goes
on at the heart of every political order. And we need to apply his
insight to Thompson’s vision of a world without work to see the
full danger implied by that vision to a political order such as Amer-
ica’s. For Thompson is suggesting that we imagine ourselves grad-
ually becoming a society in which paid, productive labor is the
province of only one segment of the citizenry, the wealthy, who are
asked in turn to support everyone else. What Aristotle’s analysis
reveals is the deep unlikelihood that such an arrangement will be
sustainable over time, because it will eventually prove impossible
to persuade those doing the supporting that they are not being
done an injustice.
To be clear, I do not think it is impossible that the wealthy in
Thompson’s scenario could be persuaded to supply the poor with
a minimum basic income. Perhaps they would decide it was worth
it simply to buy off the poor—to pay this price as the necessary
cost of maintaining a system from which they benefit. What I do
think is impossible is that the wealthy would continue to regard
these dependents as their equals or that they would remain con-
tent over time to share political power equally with those poorer,
dependent compatriots.
20 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

There is, I suppose, one scenario in which they might do this:

if the poor were sufficiently numerous to threaten revolution were
their political liberties taken away. This is to imagine a world in
which the poor in effect bully the rich into maintaining their equal
political status, which could then be exploited to extort a continued
or perhaps increased minimum income. This, of course, is precisely
what Aristotle thought went on in a democracy—which he num-
bered among the unjust regimes for this reason.
If we were feeling optimistic, we might imagine this as a kind
of polity in Aristotle’s sense, a constitutional order that maintains a
rough approximation of justice because the rich and the poor are
balanced against each other with neither consistently able to domi-
nate. Viewed from the perspective of modern political history, how-
ever, this would be a step backward. For if in the classical world the
great political problem was the conflict between rich and poor, one
of the great achievements of modern politics—which combines lib-
eral democracy in the political realm with market capitalism in the
economic—has been to create a large middle class. Modern politics
has made possible the regime that Aristotle thought was so rare: a
polity created not merely through the stalemate of opposing forces
but rather through the presence of a decisively influential, moderate
body of citizens who are not inclined toward the unjust desire to
dominate. As Aristotle says in his discussion of polity, a city charac-
terized by a large middle class

. . . must of necessity be best governed. Moreover, of all citizens,

those in the middle survive best in city-states. For neither do they
desire other people’s property as the poor do, nor do other people
desire theirs, as the poor desire that of the rich. And because they are
neither plotted against nor engage in plotting, they live out their lives
free from danger.11

From a political perspective, therefore, any of the three scenarios

Thompson envisages for a world without work would be likely to
produce major changes in our democratic order. Although he rightly
senses that these new worlds would provoke important political
 PETER C. MEILAENDER 21

changes, he radically underestimates, in my view, the likely severity

of the transformation.
Democracy as we have come to know it cannot long survive
a situation in which one portion of the population is expected
permanently to subsidize the existence and activities of another.
Citizens will not accept such a situation as just. And they will be
right—or, at least, they will have rightly understood a part of jus-
tice. Fervently must we hope, therefore, and fondly should we pray,
that none of Thompson’s three imagined futures comes to pass, for
a democratic government half productive and half unproductive
cannot long endure.

About the Author

Peter C. Meilaender is a professor of political science and the chair

of the department of history and political science at Houghton Col-
lege. He is the author of Toward a Theory of Immigration (Palgrave,
2001). His recent research focuses on politics and literature, and he
is currently completing a monograph on the political thought of the
19th-century Swiss author and pastor Jeremias Gotthelf.

Notes

1. Derek Thompson, “A World without Work,” Atlantic, June 8, 2015,

50–61, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-
work/395294/.
2. Gen. 3: 17–19.
3. Quoted in Gilbert C. Meilaender (ed.), Work: Its Meaning and Its Limits
(Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 30.
4. Thompson, “A World without Work,” 55.
5. Ibid., 58. “Precariat” is Russo’s term; the rest of the passage quoted is
from Thompson.
6. Ibid., 57.
7. Ibid., 55.
8. Ibid., 59.
9. Ibid., 60.
22 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

10. Aristotle, Politics, tr. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing

Company, 1998), 79. I have omitted some italics and capitalization from
the quotation.
11. Ibid., 120.
 More Than Fiction:
Picturing a World without Work in
Utopian and Dystopian Novels

by Mary Manjikian, Regent University

A good book can do many things. It can allow us to take a break

from our work to escape into a great story. It can also move us to
political action, helping us develop empathy for individuals and
groups through vicariously experiencing their circumstances and
struggles. And a certain type of fiction known as speculative fic-
tion can help us imagine future scenarios in our own country or
in another country and then use these visions to make sense of
the social, political, economic, and cultural implications of events
occurring in our own societies.
Thus, if we—as political scientists, theologians, economists, and
philosophers—wish to speculate about the shape and meaning of a
future world in which much of the manufacturing and service work
is carried out by automated or robotic processes, it makes sense for
us to look back at a number of older classic novels in speculative
fiction that have already looked ahead to consider these processes
and what they mean.
Beginning in the early 20th century, many popular American and
British dystopian and utopian novels dealt specifically with the phe-
nomena of work and leisure. Taking place at some point in the near
or distant future, these novels presented a world in which many eco-
nomic and political problems had been solved—including issues of
poverty and shortages of goods—often through automation. As a
result, people in the future appeared to live in a paradise where they
had vast amounts of leisure time.
23
24 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

The sociologist Edward Granter uses the phrase “a dream of ease”

to describe the fact that so many popular novels written during this
time attempted to make sense of the advances of the Agricultural and
Industrial Revolutions, which were beginning to displace workers
in both urban and rural areas.1 These speculative novels delineate
a number of visions of a future world without work, which may
be useful as we consider current technological developments that
threaten, according to some estimates, to eliminate 47 percent of all
jobs within the next 50 years.2 What can these earlier novels tell us
about work and how we can conceive of work in the future? What
lessons do they hold for us?
These future novels often paint one of two pictures: a utopian or
postmaterialist vision in which all individuals will be able to substi-
tute meaningful work for drudgery or servile labor and where the line
between work and play will be eliminated; or a dystopian vision in
which leisure itself will become an instrument of repression and control.
Each vision puts forth an image of the individual, his relationship
to his work, and his understanding of the meaning of the work and
its place in society. The utopian vision holds a promise of what a
future world without work might look like and the ways in which
it could enrich us as a society, while the dystopian vision holds a
warning of what the future might look like if leisure is improperly
conceived of or provided.

Labors of Love: A Utopian World without Work

Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, written in 1974, is the utopian

novel that most often springs to mind when one contemplates a
future paradise in which individuals do not engage in servile labor
such as plowing a field, but instead devote their days to worthy work
that feels more like play. In this book, LeGuin describes life on two
planets in the Tau Ceti universe, Anarres and Urras. In these societ-
ies, she argues that:

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic
competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and
 MARY MANJIKIAN 25

the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the
heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the suc-
cessful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone
doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps
the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.3

In this future society, the distinction between work and play

has been erased, because people spend their recreational time in
leisure pursuits that are creative and self-fulfilling. They “work,”
but it is work as pleasure, characterized by the “flow” that Mihaly
Csikzentmihalyi has described, where time passes quickly as peo-
ple are fully engaged in an activity that makes them feel happy
and alive.4
LeGuin’s and Csikzentmihalyi’s visions of work as play actually
rest on a very ancient idea that can be traced back through Plato’s
notion of contemplation and the Old Testament Book of Genesis.5
For even within Judaism and later Christianity, we can identify an
understanding of the principle that rest can be good and restor-
ative. As the philosopher Josef Pieper notes in his seminal work,
Leisure: The Basis of Culture, even God rested on the seventh day,
and we can think of God “playing” as He engaged in the work of
creation, making things beautiful and creating a world that is not
purely utilitarian.6 We know also that the Roman Gods feasted,
rested, and celebrated.
In this vision of a future world without work, therefore, we
assume that nothing is inherently evil about not working or laboring.
Rather, taking time to rest, contemplate, and create can be restorative
and part of the natural order of things. Here Pieper points as well
to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that knowing and
philosophizing is work. He quotes Kant’s observation that “the law is
that reason acquires its possessions through work.”7
In this vision, then, the new world without work (or at least with-
out drudgery) is presented as an apogee of development or a sign
that we as a society have achieved a higher moral order. Here, a polit-
ical scientist would likely point to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and
the claims of Ronald Inglehart, who argued that individuals organize
26 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

and behave differently politically and socially depending on how

well their everyday needs are being satisfied.8
In this model of human development, the claim is made that
once our immediate physical needs have been satisfied, we can
proceed to a higher level of development in which we build
and seek to acquire other goods, including community and self-
fulfillment. Here, the capacity for contemplation is seen as a virtue
and as a mark of civilization, because it is this ability to contem-
plate our own surroundings and identity that separates humans
from mere animals.
It is a point that we have arrived at after a long struggle. It is a
sort of evolutionary peak, and it is not a position that we should
thus seek to reverse or give up. In contrast, apocalyptic scenarios
today often center on a situation, such as an electromagnetic pulse or
an absence of fuel, that threatens to reverse this progressive project,
throwing individuals and societies back to the Stone Age, to a world
in which they must once again return to work the fields, unaided by
electric light or modern machinery.
In the often socialist utopian vision, it is assumed that the advent
of new technologies will solve most of the world’s problems, includ-
ing shortages. There are apparently no more wars. In LeGuin’s vision,
there is no crime—because there are no shortages, and the state has
also ceased to exist. The job of most people is thus to figure out
how they can contribute to the world when most traditional forms
of employment have vanished.
Edward Bellamy puts forth a similar understanding of mankind’s
future in his much earlier speculative novel, Looking Backward, 2000–
1887, written in 1888. In this novel, he describes a socialist future
in which there are no shortages and there is an unlimited amount of
free time:

With a tear for the dark past, turn us then to the dazzling future, and,
veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race
is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis.
The heavens are before it.9
 MARY MANJIKIAN 27

In this vision of the future, the work that we will now be free to do
is contemplative and creative, often not focused inward but rather
contributing to the community. It will be matched to our gifts and
therefore self-enriching in a way that servile work is not.
Although the visions presented in science fiction are often avowedly
atheistic, this understanding is not inherently anti-Christian. Indeed,
Pieper notes that St. Thomas made a connection between leisure and
divine wisdom, suggesting that contemplation can lead one to begin
to glimpse and apprehend God.10 In this vision, then, leisure is not
the practice of idleness but rather the search for meaning. It is heroic.
It can be sublime.
This vision of the future, however, is not a completely optimistic
one. Rather, works such as Jim Crace’s 2007 novel, The Pesthouse, or
E. M. Forster’s 1909 novel, The Machine Stops, call our attention to
the precariousness of this new created world, which seems to depend
entirely on technological advances.11 In both works, the reader is
presented with dangers that might arise if these technologies were
to suddenly vanish: individuals might have become physically weak
and unable to protect themselves, or they might have no useful skills
to fall back on.
This notion appears as well in novels about peak oil, such as
James Kunstler’s A World Made by Hand, which describes a future
world that has gone backward, not forward, when technological
advances were abruptly halted.12 Such novels often wrestle with the
theme that something is precarious about all this leisure and the end
of self-sufficiency. They thus ask if it is entirely healthy for us to be
so dependent on others (including machines) to do the work that is
part of our own identities.
But what does this vision tell us about our own contemporary
situation? Arguably, we can see glimpses of the advent of this con-
templative type of leisure in such technologies as online education.
We can begin to imagine a world in which individuals are able to
better themselves and increase their overall education level through,
for example, taking a massive open online course. Here, it is possi-
ble that such technologies will severe the link between education
and productivity, because people might not judge their educations
28 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

in terms of utility or the acquisition of useful skills but rather regard

it is a type of play.
However, it is also possible to identify ways in which individuals
today have learned to waste their newly acquired leisure hours—
whiling away and filling the empty hours with activities such as
texting, recording and viewing television shows, and viewing por-
nography. That is, there is seemingly no guarantee that freeing
humans from drudgery will necessarily lead them to new heights of
contemplation or that individual humans would make the decision
to pursue this “better” type of leisure. Not surprisingly, dystopian
novels present and wrestle more fully with this understanding.

The Tyranny of Leisure

The second vision of a future world without work appears, not sur-
prisingly, much more sinister. In this dystopian vision, little tradi-
tional employment is available because many processes have become
automated—including, in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic novel Brave
New World, the “work” of childbearing.13 Individuals may work as
little as four hours per day, and the challenge for those in author-
ity becomes how to occupy citizens’ free time in ways that are not
socially disruptive.
In this scenario, the end of work is not an opportunity but rather
a crisis, a sentiment that appears often in contemporary writing as
well. For example, a recent article featuring an interview with the
noted economist and scholar Juliet Schorr speaks of a “profound
crisis” engendered by changing norms related to work and leisure.14
The fear is that underutilized and underemployed individuals
have the potential to destabilize a regime.15 And just as we can trace
the notion of leisure as contemplation back to the Old Testament,
so can we trace back the idea of leisure as idleness. Specifically, the
Old Testament Book of Proverbs tells us, “Idle hands are the devil’s
workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece.”16 Here the implication is
that individuals who have too much time on their hands are likely
to use it in unproductive ways, which are harmful to themselves and
to society. We can also consider sloth, one of the seven deadly sins.
 MARY MANJIKIAN 29

Finally, we might consider the ways in which hard work is

seen as a measure of one’s manhood and the resumption of adult
responsibilities, as opposed to playfulness, a quality that is seen as
belonging to only children. In this way, leisure can be associated
not with civilization and contemplation, but with social dangers,
laziness, and childishness.
Many dystopian novels thus present the idea that regular citizens
may not be equipped to handle their leisure in their own ways when
left to their own devices. We see this theme in Anthony Burgess’
1971 novel, A Clockwork Orange, which describes violent, unem-
ployed youth in Britain engaging in antisocial violence.17
We can also see the repetition of these themes in contemporary
political and sociological studies, which point to problems such
as the youth bulge in the Middle East, warning of the potentially
destabilizing consequences of a large number of unemployed
youths in Egypt.18 Youth unemployment in particular is impli-
cated in the rise of jihadism in Western Europe and the Middle
East, and it is known that youth are easier to recruit to terrorism
if they are unemployed.
The underlying theme of both political analyses and dystopian
novels is thus that something is frightening and potentially sub-
versive about individuals who enjoy vast amounts of unsupervised
leisure or unemployment. The waning of employment is seen as a
danger to be avoided, lest it lead to regime change.
In these dystopian worlds, free time is not regarded as a gift or a
positive incentive for the development of autonomy and individual
skills. Instead, not surprisingly, what comes about is a top-down set
of practices in which a strong state might attempt to steer people’s
time-use patterns, ensuring that their leisure or free time is spent in
socially accepted pursuits, usually of a group nature. Leisure thus
has a normative component, and as a result, use of leisure time is
often policed through surveillance practices. This understanding is
shown most clearly in George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel, 1984.
In this work, the main character, Winston Smith, comes under sus-
picion because of his wish to be alone during his off hours and his
penchant for having his own thoughts.19
30 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

In this set of novels, being amused is a top-down, hierarchical pro-

cess (much as the citizens were provided with bread and circuses by
their Roman rulers). Often taking place in a socialist paradise, there
is no sense that these individual’s work or leisure glorifies the Lord or
themselves. Leisure is not created, but produced and programmed.
In dystopian novels we often witness individuals relying on arti-
ficially manufactured leisure devices aimed at keeping the masses
quiet, subservient, and “happy”—but not in a meaningful way. In
Brave New World, Huxley describes “soma,” a type of drug that is
freely handed out to pacify the population. In 1984, Orwell describes
the citizen’s penchant for government-produced pornographic sto-
ries, which are manufactured in a near-constant stream using a sort
of kaleidoscope device that swaps out actors and scenes.
In this scenario, leisure becomes its own prison and is not a form
of expression but repression. Leisure becomes work. This under-
standing is presented most vividly in a 2012 short story by the
Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood. In “I’m Starved for You,” she
presents the story of Stan and his wife, who take jobs in a future
America with a company called Consilience.20 Consilience works
for the government, employing individuals in a scheme where they
spend one month as prison guards and the following month as
prisoners, thus performing both work and leisure simultaneously.
Because the state, as pictured in dystopian novels, so fears having
too many unemployed and too much leisure, it often undertakes
unusual measures to retain work, even when it is pointless, unnec-
essary, and meaningless.
Applying these lessons to our present situation might suggest
that, in a future world without work, we as citizens will be provided
with leisure and perhaps even encouraged or coerced to partake in
leisure activities under surveillance. Here we may make a connec-
tion with today’s overreliance on social media, noting that from the
time they are young, our children can spend all day photographing
themselves, sending tweets about the doings of celebrities, and con-
suming a great deal of written and visual information without any
subsequent personal or professional enrichment. Indeed, analysts
write about the selfie generation or the selfie nation, emphasizing
 MARY MANJIKIAN 31

the narcissistic nature of social media, which calls on us to contem-

plate not the universe but only ourselves. Such practices may serve
to divert our energies away from more socially useful ends.
We can also draw parallels between surveillance in dystopian
novels and our current unease with the ways in which we are being
surveilled. Here again, we can point to the need to share our lives on
social media and the desire to “prove” that we have spent our week-
ends productively. Did we bake something? Run a marathon? Are we
spending our leisure time exercising or eating cake?
Perhaps today’s emphasis on fat shaming derives from similar
attempts to establish normative patterns for how people should be
spending their leisure time. The idea that one could and should
have a normative stance on leisure activity appears again in the
work of economist Juliet Schorr, who puts forth a “progressive”
vision of future patterns. She notes that as leisure becomes more
widespread in the future, it is important that leisure and consump-
tion should be sustainable and that one’s leisure should not over-
consume resources.21
In many of these novels, however, what happens next is not a
breakdown of the technology, as happened in the utopian novels,
but rather some form of a break in which the main character realizes
the inauthenticity of his life and reaches out for something more,
something real. In 1984 and “I’m Starved for You,” the main charac-
ter reaches out for real relationships, while in Brave New World, the
character of the Savage typifies the need for a real relationship with
nature and with humanity. All these stories thus present the reality
that man’s natural state is one in which he is productive, using his
gifts to create, learn, and contribute to society.
And in this breakdown, we begin to see how leisure is sometimes
not a gift but a curse. Man, here, has managed to marginalize him-
self, rendering himself irrelevant to production through work and
also irrelevant to the key relationships that matter in life.
This same theme is explored in present-day American popular cul-
ture in the television series Humans, which presents a future where
synthetic humans or robots have been entrusted with much of society’s
work—caring for children and the elderly, teaching, and performing
32 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

household tasks. In this series, the actual mothers and humans often
feel marginalized or irrelevant. They gave away their work, believing
it was meaningless and beneath them, but in doing so, it appears that
they have also given away a large part of their identities. And as Thor-
sten Veblen has suggested about the human servants who served the
upper class in the 20th century, in the 21st century, the humans come
to resent the robot servants who are always in their space, watching
them and overhearing the details of their lives.22

Where Do We Go from Here?

What these dystopian novels show is that the questions with which
our social analysts now contend—“What shall we do with all these
idle people?” and “If I give a machine my job, what else am I giving
up with it?”—are not new. They are questions that surfaced along
with the Industrial Revolution, and they are questions that each gen-
eration has to traverse independently. But the answers are not easy
and not obvious, and the forces that we seem to fear may not actually
be inexorable.
Indeed, in the seminal work Theory of the Leisure Class, written in
1899, Thorsten Veblen suggested that even when one could cheaply
buy a manufactured version of something, people might still prefer
the higher-quality, handcrafted version.23 The decision to purchase a
good was, he argued, ultimately not about only economics but also
identity. America’s wealthy might therefore choose to flaunt their dis-
posable income, illustrating the fact that they do not need to procure
the cheapest goods, but rather that they appreciate the quality of a
handmade item. Thus, he argued, high-quality, individually made
goods would always have a market, even among an avalanche of
manufactured items.
Similarly, one might argue that there will always be individuals
who appreciate the authenticity of carrying out an action themselves.
We can point to the fascination individuals today seem to have with
products such as farm-to-table food, artisanal cheese, slow food, and
locally brewed beer. Although there may be a cheaper alternative—
in terms of both available goods and services available—individuals
 MARY MANJIKIAN 33

might still decide to purchase the more authentic version, the one
that is human- or handmade. It is not inevitable that people will
choose a training app on a smartphone over a human personal
trainer, a math video on YouTube over a teacher who encourages,
or pizza delivered by a drone to a home-cooked meal prepared by a
human being.
Thus, it is important that we consider the choices we have as we
go forward into our own Brave New World without work, such as
whether to produce and support new types of leisure that prioritize
contemplation over amusement; that we explore whether we have a
normative stance on leisure and whether the dangers that we associ-
ate with idleness are real or imagined; that we contemplate whether
we are too reliant on machines and whether in the process we are
giving up the opportunity to develop our own valuable skills; and
that we think about questions of authenticity and relationships in
a world where much of the work might be done by someone or
something else.
Speculative fiction has sometimes been associated with counter-
factual thinking, because one can often read a speculative tale as a
cautionary tale, using it to identify possible dangers that might arise
in the future and think about how they might be prevented.24 This
essay hopefully provides some practices to which we can aspire and
those we might wish to avoid.

About the Author

Mary Manjikian is an associate professor in the Robertson School of

Government at Regent University. She is the author of Threat Talk:
Comparative Politics of Internet Addiction (Ashgate, 2013), The Securi-
tization of Property Squatting in Europe (Routledge, 2013), and Apoc-
alypse and Post-Politics: The Romance of the End (Lexington Books,
2012). She is a former US foreign service officer with service in Rus-
sia, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria and was a Fulbright Scholar at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Durham University in England in
2013. She is also a recipient of her university’s Chancellor’s Award
for excellence in teaching and research.
34 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

Notes

1. Edward Granter, “A Dream of Ease: Situating the Future of Work and

Leisure,” Futures 40 (2008): 803.
2. Derek Thompson, “A World without Work,” Atlantic, August 2015,
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/
395294/.
3. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed (New York: Harper & Row Pub-
lishing, 1974).
4. Mihaly Czikczentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1990).
5. Plato, “Meditation XV,” in The Republic, Trans. C. D. C. Reeve (New
York: Hackett Classics, 1992), 68–91; and Gen. 2:3.
6. Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (New York: Random House,
1963), 35.
7. Ibid., 27.
8. Abraham Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological
Review 50, no. 4 (1943): 370–96; and Ronald Inglehart, “Changing Values
among Western Publics from 1970 to 2006,” West European Politics 31, no.
1–2 (2008): 130–46.
9. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (New York: Dover Publications,
1996).
10. Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 34.
11. Jim Crace, The Pesthouse (New York: Doubleday, 2007); and E. M.
Forster, The Machine Stops (New York: Forster Book, 2013).
12. James Howard Kunstler, A World Made by Hand (New York: Grove
Press, 2009).
13. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto and Windus,
1932).
14. “The Future of Work, Leisure and Consumption in an Age of Eco-
nomic and Ecological Crisis: An Interview with Juliet Schor,” Dollars and
Sense no. 314 (September/October 2014): 13.
15. G. Wesley Burnett and Lucy Rollin, “Anti-Leisure in Dystopian Fic-
tion: The Literature of Leisure in the Worst of All Possible Worlds,” Leisure
Studies 19 (2000): 77–90.
16. Prov. 16:27.
 MARY MANJIKIAN 35

17. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (New York: W. W. Norton &

Company, 1962).
18. Farzaneh Roudi-Fahimi, Shereen El Feki, and Tyjen Tsai, “Youth
Revolt in Egypt: A Country at a Turning Point,” Population Reference
Bureau, February 2011, www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2011/youth-
egypt-revolt.aspx.
19. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classics, 1960).
20. Margaret Atwood, “I’m Starved for You” (Byliner Inc., 2012).
21. “The Future of Work, Leisure and Consumption,” 13–23.
22. Thorsten Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
23. Ibid.
24. Mary Manjikian, Apocalypse and Post-Politics: The Romance of the End
(Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013).
 What Is Your Narrative?
Human Purpose and the Future of Work

by Kevin J. Brown, Asbury University

In 1798, Thomas Malthus—who held the titles of both reverend

and economist—published the widely read “An Essay on the Princi-
ple of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society.”1
Though the book would undergo multiple future revisions, its same
central theme remained: society is doomed.
In essence, Malthus argued that human reproduction would
continue at an exponential rate, while resources such as land
would be limited to linear growth. Given this, each incremen-
tal unit of input for productive activity would inevitably lead
to diminishing marginal output. In the words of Malthus, “The
power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to
produce subsistence for man.”2 Or, more bluntly, there simply is
not enough food to go around.
This economic appraisal contrasted sharply with the hopeful
march of economic progress advertised by Adam Smith and his con-
temporaries. For Malthus, society was not a complex system iterat-
ing toward an inevitable utopian arrangement. “On the contrary,”
writes economic historian Robert Heilbroner, “those natural forces
that once seemed teleologically designed to bring harmony and
peace into the world now seemed malevolent and menacing.”3
Centuries later, it is clear that Malthus’ predictions did not come
to pass. However, we do not find ourselves immune from poten-
tially “malevolent and menacing” forces. In this short paper, my aim
is to consider the ever-increasing rise of automated machinery and
the implications for labor in tomorrow’s economy. My hope is to
37
38 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

sufficiently argue that determining the future of work is intricately

tied to our narrative conception of human nature and purpose.

The End of Work?

“We will soon be looking at hordes of citizens of zero economic

value.”4 So say William Davidow and Michael Malone in a recent
Harvard Business Review article. The logic is simple: where capital
used to be considered as complementary to labor, it now risks being
understood as its substitute. The difference, note the authors, is the
rate of progress. Advancements in machinery were slow enough in
decades past that technology could be harnessed by the laborer. In
contrast, today’s progress and intelligent machinery is no longer a
passive mechanism to be channeled but an active force destined
to succeed human capital. “The Machines Are Coming,” reads one
headline from a popular news source.5
What are we to make of this? For some, labor-replacing inno-
vation is “freedom from drudge work.”6 Complex and intelligent
machinery can now undertake otherwise undesirable chores. Not
only can we relegate “toil” to, say, robots but also we benefit from
their efficiencies. Consider, for example, what it is like to get an air-
line boarding pass today relative to even a decade ago.
Labor-replacing machinery can effectively cut costs, democratize
access to goods and services, and release humans from unpleas-
ant but necessary work to pursue other, more attractive, options.
Respondents to a 2014 Pew study suggested, “Technology will free
us from day-to-day drudgery, and allow us to define our relationship
with ‘work’ in a more positive and socially beneficial way.”7 Put dif-
ferently, artificial intelligence and automated machinery is presumed
to make our lives easier.
Yet not all work is “drudgery.” Indeed, since the Industrial Revo-
lution, human progress has been intricately linked with our industri-
ousness. Who we are closely corresponds to what we do. Take away
the latter, and you short-circuit the former. Aside from issues in iden-
tity, labor, and the value creation therein is the indisputable means
for earning one’s living in a meritocratic, market-based society.
 KEVIN J. BROWN 39

The threat of job loss because of technological innovation comes

not only with what social scientists call psychosocial costs but also a
potential reconceptualization of distribution altogether. Understood
in these terms, human persons devoid of economic value look to be
more dour in the long term than helpful.
The predictions of a technology-dominated labor force are not
merely conspiratorial forecasts of modern-day Luddites. A recent
study from Oxford University estimated that 47 percent of the US
labor market is eligible to be “mechanized out of business.”8 Erik
Brynjolfsson, an MIT professor, believes that we are now begin-
ning to see the rate of job destruction outpace job creation. In other
words, we are witnessing economic growth without the emergence
of new jobs, a trend Brynjolfsson directly attributes to automation.9
Brynjolfsson is not alone. Author Derek Thompson offers three
compelling reasons for why “the beast is at the door” when it comes
to automated labor. First, human labor has been diminishing since
the turn of the century. Many correlate this trend with businesses that
have opted for computers and software in place of human capital.
Second, a key statistic, according to economist Tyler Cowen,
relates to labor trends in “prime-age” Americans (ages 25 to 54).
A close inspection reveals that the number of people within this
category who are working or looking for a job has been trending
downward for the last 15 years. In addition to unemployment,
underemployment (those working in jobs they are overqualified for)
is trending upward.
Finally, tomorrow’s technology is now visible today. With the
advent of drones and self-driving cars, it is not difficult to imagine
their eventual usage in otherwise previously untouched fields (for
example, a drone delivering a pizza). Thompson concludes, “Tech-
nology could exert a slow but continual downward pressure on the
value and availability of work.”10
To summarize, the future of work is at stake. Human labor pro-
vides healthy self-identification and the means to subsist, save, and
accumulate. Yet current trends suggest that our labor is at risk of
being replaced by superior machinery. To borrow a phrase from
Malthus himself, our job-market outlook has a “melancholy hue”
40 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

to it.11 Indeed, today’s changing labor landscape seems to vindicate

the reverend’s ominous predictions and, two centuries later, trigger a
new collection of Malthusian sensibilities for the modern Westerner.

History Often Rhymes

So, are we witnessing the end of work? Malthus, I submit, offers a

helpful starting point to engage this complex question. These con-
cerns may appear different and seemingly unrelated to the issues
raised by Malthus in centuries past. However, as William James
writes, our world’s history is nothing other than a “rivalry of pat-
terns.”12 Or, as Mark Twain is claimed to have said, “History does not
repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
Today’s economic topics and vocabulary may differ from those
presented by Malthus, but that does not mean they lack a Malthu-
sian element. Where Malthus expressed concern over population
growth, our modern concerns relate to the dizzying proliferation of
artificially intelligent machinery. Similarly, where Malthus feared an
abundance of humans and a scarcity of food, today’s reality is an
abundance of laborers and a scarcity of jobs.
More than 200 years later, it is clear that Malthus’ apocalyptic
vision did not come to pass. Why? What did Malthus miss in his
calculations? Many will rightly suggest that Malthus did not accu-
rately predict the growth of output per person because of innovative
production techniques. With the Industrial Revolution came a “mas-
sive re-organization of production” that saw extraordinary leaps in
output per person.13 Indeed, the early-20th-century Western world
marveled at pioneering forms of productivity such as the diesel
engine, radios, airplanes, and penicillin. This productive renaissance
minimized if not altogether dismissed Malthus’ original concerns.
Productive growth through innovation and increased output
per person helps us to understand Malthus’ miscue as it relates to
predicting Western society’s sobering economic future. However,
Malthus did not simply underestimate opportunities for harnessing
technological advancements in matters of productivity. His forecast
logically followed from his conception of human anthropology. That
 KEVIN J. BROWN 41

is, he held a particular view of what it meant to be human. Under-

standing this perspective may offer insight for our present context.
It would be misguided to simply suggest that Malthus failed to
predict new forms of productivity from capital; it is that he failed to
answer why such productivity might even emerge in the first place.
Malthus asserted that the human population would not grow indefi-
nitely, because natural forces such as starvation, war, famine, or other
forms of calamity would always bring the population back into equi-
librium with the level of resources necessary to survive. This Mal-
thusian trap would forever describe the human lot: a struggle for
existence in a world of finite resources.14
Much can be said here, but two considerations are worth attend-
ing to. First, this offers an attenuated conception of our human
makeup. To borrow a phrase from Arthur Brooks, the implication is
that humans are not “assets to be developed”—but rather “liabilities
to be managed.”15 That is, humans are constituted by consumption,
not production; depletion, not creation.
Second, Malthus’ picture of humanity as being trapped in an
ongoing struggle for survival underscores a distinctly evolutionary
understanding, where the organisms that endure in a competitive
environment are the ones whose random mutations are best adapted
to exist beyond their less equipped opponents. It is not surprising,
then, that Malthus’ theories have been described as influential to
Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection.
For our purposes, we may refer to this as the chaos narrative.
Because beings have specific needs to survive and the resources nec-
essary for survival are limited, they are inevitably in conflict with one
another. Further, beings that reproduce with superior qualities will
outpace and outlive their less adapted counterparts. Thus, humans
are characterized by their survival attributes, or what Darwin himself
called “favourable variations.” Here, human teleology gives way to
pragmatism: if it works, it endures.
While the language may differ, we find a similar chaos narrative
today relative to automated labor. Consider the influential doc-
umentary Humans Need Not Apply by C. G. P. Grey. In one part
of the film, he predicts a fully automated future labor force by
42 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

comparing humans to horses. After discussing how the horse pop-

ulation dropped dramatically after 1915 because of new forms of
transportation, machinery, and so forth, we hear: “There isn’t a rule
of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs
for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud,
but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds
about right.”16
In another area, the film likens the human brain to a complicated
machine. Further, the complexity of other computers, robots, and so
forth will soon surpass the complexity of our brain machines—thus
making us obsolete. We have only managed to outpace computers
in the workforce up until now because our cerebral circuits are more
advanced than the technological alternatives.
So, whether using a horse, a computer, or any other creative met-
aphor to describe humans, the point is clear. Sooner or later, we will
become dated and unnecessary. We simply do not have the features
that will allow us to keep up, outsmart, or outrun our future’s new
robotic working class.
Note that the chaos narrative contains its own explanation of
order. Consider the Google-employed futurist Ray Kurzweil, who
suggests that there are six epochs to evolution and life. Presently, we
are nearing the end, because human intelligence has been success-
fully merged with technology. Eventually, the exponential growth of
technology, information, and intelligence will become incomprehen-
sible for humans.
In the end, claims Kurzweil, there will cease to be any resemblance
of a human, as we presently understand it, and only “transhumans,”
or human consciousness embodied in machinery. Humans, proper,
are merely cogs in the larger—ever advancing—evolution machine
whose march into blissful, technocratic progress is inevitable.

An Alternative Reality: Design Narrative

While the chaos narrative may be an implicit or explicit metanar-

rative underlying tomorrow’s labor forecasts, another metanarrative
is worthy of consideration when addressing the issues of human
 KEVIN J. BROWN 43

productivity in an age of robotic innovation. We may refer to this as

the “design narrative.” In contrast to chaos, this narrative—cut from
the cloth of the faith tradition—describes humanity as being delib-
erately designed and uniquely created. Thus, to understand human
purpose, we must first understand the designer.
The creation narrative of the Judeo-Christian tradition tells us that
God is creative, productive, and relational. Creation, and relating to
creation, is an overflow of God’s nature; it is in his essence to create
and relate. To go a step further, God relates to his creation (human-
kind) in a loving way. It is here that we find an important caveat. God
does not simply show love—God is love.17
Understanding the nature of God has direct implications for
understanding our own nature as humans. We are told in the Gen-
esis account that man was created in God’s image, the Imago Dei.18
If we accept this line of thinking, there are several important impli-
cations for how we should understand human nature and purpose.
First, every human being has an inherent dignity because he or
she was deliberately created and bears God’s image. Orthodox faith
tells us that each life is supremely valuable because that life was cre-
ated by God and bears his image.
Second, we have attributes of our creator inherent in our being.
This, of course, does not mean we are like God or we are God—but
it does mean that we bear his thumbprint. Imago Dei literally means
an image or likeness of God. That is, we have a Godlike resemblance.
Therefore, we might say that when we produce, create, and relate,
we are coproducing, cocreating, and corelating with God. We are
exercising these image-reflecting attributes.
Third, this means that humans have an elevated status in God’s
created order. Though all of creation originates from the creator, it
is only human beings, we are told, that bear his likeness. In contra-
distinction to other creatures (including complex manmade machin-
ery), humans can exercise both reason and will on the world. We
can consider our circumstances, reflect on the past, and intuit the
future. Further, we possess consciousness; that is, we have a sense
of self, or what we often call agency. Finally, Imago Dei means that
we are spiritual beings. We are not simply the sum of our biological
44 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

components. Nor does our value merely rise to the level of our eco-
nomic productivity. We have a spirit; a soul.

Implications for Future Labor

While not exhaustive, I want to offer three implications of the design

narrative (and its depiction of human nature and purpose) for navi-
gating the complexities of our dynamic labor landscape.
First, metaphors matter. If humans are designed and resemble
the productive, creative, and relational qualities of the designer, then
we should be entirely skeptical of attempts to compare humans to
horses, advanced computers, or any other organism that does not
bear God’s image. If humans are, indeed, advanced processors that
resemble machine-like capacities, then it is not unreasonable to
expect that we would become obsolete and thus replaceable once
similar organisms evince qualities better suited for survivability in a
competitive landscape.
Yet what if we are not? As Michael Harris writes in his thought-
provoking book The End of Absence, the largest database in the world,
the most complex computer system, the most advanced adaptation
of artificial intelligence “still lacks the honed narrative impulse of a
single human mind.”19
If we conceptualize ourselves under the design narrative, then
we have a new basis for appreciating human adaptability and mal-
leability. As economists like to say, when variables change, ratio-
nal humans adjust their behaviors accordingly. These adjustments
recruit the unique human qualities found in our embodied selves.
That is, we have capacities for assessment, critical thinking, and
problem solving (reason); we are characterized by free agency and
obligation (will); we are constituted by cooperative interactions and
find meaning and connection in others (relation); and we possess
and regularly exercise compassion, goodwill, and commitment
(emotion). Given this, trite comparisons of human personhood to
computers or animals appear, to borrow C. G. P. Grey’s expression,
“shockingly dumb.”
Second, human ontology makes us unique (and thus difficult to
 KEVIN J. BROWN 45

fully replicate) in the economic realm. In his book Redeeming Eco-

nomics, John Mueller writes:

Jesus once noted (as an astute empirical observation, not divine

revelation) that since the days of Noah and Lot, people have been
doing—and presumably will continue to do for as long as there are
humans on earth—four kinds of things. He gave these examples:
“planting and building,” “buying and selling,” “marrying and being
given in marriage,” and “eating and drinking.” In other words, we
human beings produce, exchange, give (or distribute), and use (or
consume) our human and nonhuman goods.20

We know in economics that value is created through the process

of exchange. A free and open marketplace creates the conditions for
mutually beneficial trade through interpersonal transactions or the
medium of businesses. Trade and exchange relationships are not
simply constituted by consumption, but by production. That is, eco-
nomic activity cannot be understood in terms of consumption alone.
As humans, we have productive capacities that are intricately tied to
consumption and thus value.
Moreover, it is important to note that value is based on human
conception, and such conceptions are conditioned by an ensemble
of economic, social, political, moral, and spiritual factors that are
often unique to individuals. Machinery, based on this conception
of value, can neither confer nor create value in itself. It is always a
function of human exchange, even if facilitated in some way, shape,
or form through machinery. Among other things, this would make
complete robotic substitution of human production and consump-
tion impossible in an orthodox economic sense.
Third, and related to the second point, as a teleological crea-
ture, humans are endowed with moral and spiritual sensibilities.
The design narrative not only posits man as a moral being but
also as a being that inhabits a moral reality. Therefore, in line with
the Aristotelian tradition, human goodness is bound up with ful-
filling human purpose: doing the thing we were designed to do.
Virtually no mechanism in the world of automated technology
46 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

accounts for this, even though it is a distinct dimension of the

human experience.
Consider Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s claim that the techno-
logical corporate powerhouse can “make you smarter” if provided
with enough of a user’s data.21 Note, though, that Google cannot
make humans better. That is, Google can equip us with data-driven
decision making, but it cannot imbue moral excellence or inculcate
a deeper, more contemplative moral imagination.
Not that we have not attempted it. The rise in automated machin-
ery naturally gives rise to ethical quandaries based on how they are
deployed. While this necessitates ethical programming in autono-
mous robotic entities, it fails to answer the question: whose ethics?
Indeed, in a 2012 Economist article titled “Morals and the
Machine,” one author casually recommends that “where ethical sys-
tems are embedded into robots, the judgments they make need to be
ones that seem right to most people.”22 While the comment is likely
to gain acceptance in its presently generic form, presenting a specific
ethical predicament is altogether unlikely to gain widespread accep-
tance among the masses.
For example, consider a dilemma posed by Stanford University’s
Chris Gerdes as it relates to autonomous automobiles: if a young
child runs in front of a self-driving vehicle, should the car hit the
child (likely killing the child) or swerve into an oncoming van (likely
killing the vehicle’s passengers)?23 The expectation of achieving
moral consensus for this or similar dilemmas is highly unlikely, thus
supporting Alasdair MacIntyre’s claim that competing views of jus-
tice and ethical action is often “incommensurable.”24

Conclusion

Will jobs soon become a relic of the past? Are we slowly witness-
ing the end of work? Are our present-day Malthusian sentiments
justified? In this paper, I have attempted to suggest that our
answers to these questions begin with an antecedent question:
what is your narrative?
Under the chaos narrative, humans cannot keep pace with
 KEVIN J. BROWN 47

superior robotic beings in terms of productivity and processing,

leading to their logical and inevitable replacement. That is, human
capital as we know it is necessarily disposable because it is predicted
to equal zero economic value.
In contrast, under the design narrative, human beings have a
God-reflecting ontology and a deliberately designed teleology that
makes us unique in the created order. While nothing in the design
narrative would fail to recognize or even applaud the innovative
leaps and bounds inherent in technological progress, human beings
made in God’s image exist as the protagonist to this story.
Thus, in matters of human teleology, progress is not simply
advancing information and productivity; it is fulfilling human pur-
pose—the very command of Christ in Matthew 5:48 to “be therefore
perfect (‘telos’)”—or, as Eugene Peterson writes in The Message, “Live
out your God-created identity.”25 As image bearers, a significant
dimension of human purpose is to relate, create, and produce.
This essay does not attempt to say what the future of work will
be, exactly. As Malthus would struggle to predict, let alone compre-
hend, a diesel engine, it is equally difficult for us to forecast our
future arrangements. However, if we accept the design narrative as
our overarching metanarrative, I humbly submit that we can indeed
say what the future of work will not be: human obsolescence.

About the Author

Kevin J. Brown is an assistant professor of business at Asbury

University.

Notes

1. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population as It

Affects the Future Improvement of Society (London: J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s
Church-yard, 1798).
2. Ibid.
3 R. L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of
the Great Economic Thinkers (New York, New York: Touchstone, 1999), 104.
48 A WORLD WITHOUT WORK?

4. William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone, “What Happens to Society

when Robots Replace Workers?,” Harvard Business Review, December 10, 2014,
https://hbr.org/2014/12/what-happens-to-society-when-robots-replace-
workers.
5. Zeynep Tufekci, “The Machines Are Coming,” New York Times, April
18, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/the-machines-
are-coming.html.
6. Kevin Maney, “Silicon Valley Is Working to Replace Mothers,” News-
week, November 8, 2015, www.newsweek.com/2015/11/20/silicon-valley-
working-replace-mothers-391794.html.
7. Aaron Smith and Janna Anderson, AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs,
Pew Research Center, August 6, 2014, www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/
future-of-jobs/.
8. Michael Belfiore, “When Robots Take Our Jobs, Humans Will Be the
New 1%. Here’s How to Fight Back,” Guardian, March 22, 2014, www.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/22/robot-jobs-humans-used-
to-do-fight-back.
9. David Rotman, “How Technology Is Destroying Jobs,” MIT Technology
Review, June 12, 2013, www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/
how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/.
10. Derek Thompson, “A World without Work,” Atlantic, August 2015,
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/
395294/.
11. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers.
12. Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural
Life (New York, New York: Harper Collins), xiv.
13. Greg Ip, The Little Book of Economics: How the Economy Works in the
Real World (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons), 5.
14. Given this gloomy picture, it is little wonder that Scottish philosopher
and Malthus contemporary Thomas Carlyle referred to the economic disci-
pline as a “dismal science.”
15. Arthur Brooks, Banter #193: Arthur Brooks on The Conservative Heart,
American Enterprise Institute, July 21, 2015.
16. C. G. P. Grey, Humans Need Not Apply, 2014.
17. I John. 4:8.
18. Gen. 1:26–27.
 KEVIN J. BROWN 49

19. Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a
World of Constant Connection (New York, New York: Current Press), 146.
20. John D. Mueller, Redeeming Economics: Rediscovery the Missing Element
(Wilmington, Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute Books), 18.
21. Logan Whiteside, “Google: We’ll Make You Smarter . . . If You Share Your
Data,” CNN Money, October 16, 2014, http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/16/
technology/innovationnation/google-data/.
22. “Morals and the Machine,” Economist, June 2, 2012, 15, www.economist.
com/node/21556234.
23. Will Knight, “How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Deci-
sions,” MIT Technology Review, July 29, 2015, www.technologyreview.com/
news/539731/how-to-help-self-driving-cars-make-ethical-decisions/.
24. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame,
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press), 244–45.
25. Matthew. 5:48; and Eugene Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Con-
temporary Language (Colorado Springs, Colorado: NavPress, 2009).