As a mathematician-cum-philosopher-cum-social critic who published 66 books and more than 2,000 essays, Bertrand Russell was totally unqualified to promote leisure at the expense of work. But in a 1935 article for Harper’s Weekly titled “In Praise of Idleness,” that’s exactly what he did, and by many accounts he was quite successful.
The nuts and bolts of his thesis were bold: the workday should be capped at four hours. Increases in productivity should lead not just to increases in consumption, but also to more time off; instead of organizing our lives around our jobs, we should organize them around the activities that matter most to us — activities which rarely include laboring in a factory or an exurban office park.
From a modern perspective, “In Praise of Idleness” comes off as a bit utopian — submit an essay to Harper’s calling for a four-hour workday now, and you’ll have nothing to show for it but a rejection slip.
But the wonderful thing about utopian viewpoints is that by showing us an alternate world totally in balance, they also show all that’s out of balance with our reality. In Russell’s worldview, the West — especially the United States — was so obsessed with working, with employment, with thrift, that any activity not related to our jobs was considered unacceptably frivolous. Humanistic study was shunned, self-cultivation was deemed unimportant, and political dialogue centered on getting citizens to work, but never touched upon getting them some time off.
Russell detailed many causes and symptoms of this work-obsessed cultural worldview in his essay. Like almost all of Russell’s writings, the structure and syntax of the piece is crystal clear; but unlike many of his writings — which were stubborn children of early twentieth century Britain — the observations and arguments of “In Praise of Idleness” are as instructive in 2013 as they were when first published.
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Among the primary causes of the West’s work obsession, Russell believed, was the developed world’s anarchic system of employment — a system which ensured that the workday did not decrease significantly, even in an era of rapid technological progress and ballooning consumption.
To prove his point, Russell presented the situation of workers in a pin factory.1 With advances in technology, these workers would soon be able to produce their quota of pins in half the time, and, theoretically, their workday could be cut from eight hours to four without any productive loss.
Of course, this isn’t what happens. Instead, half the employees are squeezed out of work, while the other half labors the same amount and produces twice as much. In this way, society is split into two unhappy camps: the unemployed and the overworked.
Fortunately, men are always coming up with new “schemes,” new products, new innovations that require more employees. In a society where citizens constantly seek satisfaction in the newest material goods, exotic industries are forever popping up. Workers drift between enterprises as one shrinks or consolidates and another grows. This Russellian process is good in that it keeps employment relatively high, but bad in that it prevents the workday from growing shorter. Though we constantly find new products to consume, one commodity forever eludes our grasp: leisure.
According to Russell, the rich think it best that the poor spend most of their waking life working. They believe that the underclass would have no idea how to spend their free time, and, to avoid boredom, they’d drink, gamble, and commit petty crimes, but they certainly wouldn’t self-cultivate.
Though this sentiment was based on cynical assumptions, Russell saw bits of truth in it. “A man who works long hours his entire life will be bored if he becomes suddenly idle,” he wrote.
But for Russell, this inability of the common man to fill up his time with meaningful pursuits wasn’t an indictment of the underclass; rather, it was a consequence of society’s deification of labor. Men weren’t educated to contribute to civic life or enjoy art, or anything so decadent; they were taught the “ingredients in technical skill” and nothing more.
The placement of man into this system where work was more important than all else, made him further incapable of meaningful leisure by stripping him of his traditional culture.
There was a stage in history, Russell claims, when man wasn’t so obsessed with laboring, when not every aspect of his life — from his education to his assumed persona — was dictated by his vocation. In this climate, the idiosyncrasies of his community and his geographic surroundings were the source of his entertainment. Peasant dancing was the example Russell used, but storytelling, playing music, and the reading of literature, among other activities, fell into this category as well.
In Russell’s time, with man expending all of his mental, physical, and emotional energy in the workplace, acting as a cog in some nondescript corporate or industrial machine, he was more disposed to sit back and enjoy mass-disseminated forms of entertainment. The drudgework of the bureaucratic economy had worn out his mind — at least for the day — and his life revolved around fulfilling some variation of a task performed by thousands, if not millions of other laborers. It’s no wonder, in this context, that one-size-fits-all entertainment had become a fact of life. Russell called this “passive entertainment,” and Dwight MacDonald would more famously call it “mass culture” in the pages of Politics a couple decades onward.
What made this system so difficult to escape — and the reason that there had been relatively little agitation against it in Russell’s eyes — is that the workers had bought into it. Though Russell claimed that the sanctimony of work started as a means for the over-class to institute a “Slave State” for its own benefit, now, even the poor deify work at the expense of leisure. Now, everything “must be done for the sake of something else” — an attitude Russell called “the cult of efficiency.”
In the U.S., this was especially true.
“[Americans] often work long hours even when they are already well off,” Russell quipped. “[S]uch men naturally are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as a grim punishment for unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons.”
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For decades, academics and politicians — especially in America — have disagreed with Russell’s views on employment and labor; in fact, many have proffered that increased productivity would led to increased time off.
Five years before “In Praise of Idleness” was even published, John Maynard Keynes predicted that we’d be working 15 hours a week in the not-too-distant future. That same year, evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley recommended that we prepare for a two-day workweek. As recently as 1965, a Senate subcommittee forecasted we’d be working only 20 hours weekly by 2000.
In hindsight, the predictions of Russell were much closer to the truth than those of the technocrats. The number of hours we now work per year depends on whom you ask, but to say that this number has flat-lined for a half-century would be optimistic. According to sociologist Juliet Schor, author of the bestseller, “The Overworked American,” the average American laborer worked 163 more hours in 1991 than he did in 1973. With women entering the work force en masse over that period, the average family put in 500 to 700 more hours annually.
According to another count, the average workweek decreased from 38.4 hours to 33.8 hours from 1964 to 2003. But this decrease resulted largely from the rise of the part-timer — a phenomenon tied to the decline of the stay-at-home mom. Overtime is rising, the number of laborers working at least 50 hours a week is up significantly from 25 years ago, and manufacturing jobs — where part-time administrative tasks are less available — require the same hours as they did in 1946.2
As for the pin factory effect that Russell described, in which industries slowly consolidate, squeezing some employees out of work, while overworking others, the Great Recession proved this theory to be more or less accurate.
The unemployment rate skyrocketed from 4.7 percent in November 2007 to ten percent in October 2009, while the average laborer’s workday increased slightly over that period. As a significant chunk of workers were reshuffled into part time jobs — in which workers found themselves underemployed in most situations — the length of the fulltime workday increased quite a bit more than the statistics reveal.
Economist Ed Dolan, author of the popular “EconoMonitor” blog, calculated that the unemployment crisis would be completely mitigated if a 14.4-minute shortening of the workday were spread out equally within the civilian adult population. Instead, the workday for the average fulltime worker has mushroomed, as has the unemployment rate.
“In this way,” Russell presciently wrote, “it is insured that…unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all around instead of being a universal source of happiness.”
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Among the unemployed masses of the Great Recession, many will never return to the business, or even the sector, in which they once worked. Under the savage productivity squeeze of the last six years, industries have grown leaner, meaner, and often more exploitative. According to most economists, more than half of those laid off will have to switch to a new industry altogether.
Some observers, including professor Larry Ball of Johns Hopkins, have warned that our heightened, post-recession level of unemployment could be permanent. But Russell probably had it right when he wrote that new “schemes” will forever be invented. New industries will pop up to sell products we never even knew we wanted. And workers will flock to this new growth industry before it begins to devour its own children in another recessionary, productivity-enhancing cycle.
With the Great Recession, we’ve experienced the trough of this cycle. Just getting a job, no matter how long the hours, is hard enough. Much of Generation Y is rightly shocked and scared — too scared to study the arts or the social sciences or any field that isn’t directly tied to a career.
In 1967, a small, but respectable 17.7 percent of college students majored in the humanities. By 2010, this number had dropped to 7.6 percent.
Two decades ago at Yale, the most popular majors were history and English; now they’re political science and economics. At Harvard, the percentage of the freshman class planning to major in the humanities has declined five percent over the last three years — 16 percent in the last sixty — and a task force has recently been formed at that institution to confront a lack of interest in the arts.
On the political level, state and federal governments are inundating the public with new STEM programs — the STEM acronym standing for “science, technology, engineering and math.”
Conversely, how many bold new literature or history programs do you hear Congress rolling out?
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In terms of our entertainment, even Bertrand would be shocked at just how passive and sluggish we’ve become.
Around the turn of the century a slew, of dystopian novels eschewed the rise of a TV-based mass culture, among the most famous being Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, in which citizens of a fictional American city purchased “parlor walls” for entertainment until they were totally boxed in by external stimuli.
While it would be an exaggeration to say that our modern world resembles Bradbury’s, in which books were strictly illegal, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that television plays just as dominant a role in our society as the “walls” did in Farenheit’s dystopian projection of our time.
According to a recent survey by Nielsen, the average American over the age of two watches 34 hours of television per week. The Bureau of Labor Statistics — using the somewhat suspect method of simply asking respondents — came up with the much more modest figure of 2.8 hours a day. Still, that was sufficient to account for the bulk of the average American’s leisure time, dwarfing activities like reading (18 minutes per day) and “socializing or communicating” (37 minutes per day).
To sum it all up, despite America’s constantly ballooning GDP, we can’t wrench ourselves away from our desks and assembly lines. We’re still subjected to traumatizing recessionary bubbles in which we’re unemployed or working our asses off to remain employed. We’ve pretty much ditched the idea of self-cultivation for its own sake, and, collectively, we spend more time watching a few popular television shows than we do pawing through novels and magazines.
If Russell’s observations weren’t true in 1935, they certainly are now.
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Russell did offer to a solution to this predicament, but, as already mentioned, he was a utopian. He wrote in his 1935 essay, “The Case for Socialism,” that a democratic, non-Marxian, socialist regime, arising with the slow passage of time, would be able to institute his four-hour workday without a descent into penury. His idea is characteristically bold, and such a regime might work, but it won’t arise in our lifetimes, so for now we’ll have to look for solutions elsewhere.
One source would be Western Europe where a number of countries have managed to foster leisure, without dismantling capitalism — and the innovation that comes along with it — as Russell would have as do.
In Germany, the average worker labors 394 hours less than his American peer, and the average Dutch worker works a full eleven weeks less. In fact, when a civil servant signs up for a government position in the Netherlands, he has the option to work however many days a week he chooses. Paternal leaves are generous, workers can reduce their hours with robust legal protections, and both countries mandate at least four weeks of paid vacation time for all.
This German and Dutch leisure has come with a sacrifice: both nations sport an income per capita of about $24,000 versus $28,600 in the U.S. according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. But for $4,600, these western Europeans have a precious opportunity to buck the work-sleep-TV cycle; they have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their labor. The average American worker who tries to be a fraction as indulgent would promptly end up with an income of about $0.
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At the moment, Americans aren’t mulling the virtues of this European-style leisure. As we’re recovering from a period of economic malaise, citizens and politicians alike have emphasized the need for hard work and thrift. But we ignore that fact that our production grows more efficient by the year — that this growth in productivity was especially pronounced during the Great Recession. Whatever the roots of our economic anxieties, simply working more and more won’t sooth them.
Russell said that Americans were uniquely adverse to leisure; it appears he was telling the truth. For centuries we’ve deified the honest hard-worker — whether he be the yeoman farmer or the cunning industrialist. When this attitude shows its downsides, as it has in the last few years, we cling to it with more ferocity than ever before. Perhaps — in an era dominated by a never-declining workday, universal pre-professionalism, and extreme anxiety among both the unemployed and employed — it’s finally time to reconsider.
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1. An underhanded nod to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). Whereas Smith used the pin factory as an exemplar of the virtues of the capital system — specifically the division of labor — Russell uses it to expose the system’s abuses.
2. It’s worth noting that despite rapid increases in productivity and a relatively steady work schedule, real income has increased very little for most Americans over the past few decades. The median household income is essentially the same now as it was in 1989; for those near the bottom of the income spectrum, real salaries are the same as they were in the late 1970s. The only group that has reaped the benefits of our work obsession over the past several decades is the wealthy: the 90th percentile household income in the U.S. has increased by more than $50,000 since 1967. That increase alone is greater than the median household income in America today.