Tragically, too many policy makers, politicians, and journalists conflate work and "progress" with human happiness.
Today, Tom Friedman bemoans our failing public school system. It's hard to disagree with his sentiment, but he does not understand what constitutes good education, and also the reason why we educate people.
For those who don't know, Friedman likes to play armchair coach. He likes to send other people to war, ask other people to save their money, and have other people do the bulk of the work, and have others do the heavy lifting. This tendency, in fact, applies to many people aside from Friedman.
The fact is, most discussion surrounding economic recovery centers on getting the "gears in motion." We focus on the jobless rate, for example, in particular in the blue-collar industrial area, such as Detroit. As Friedman points out, workers who essentially perform simple tasks (or are the average/low level employees at more complex jobs, such as at a law firm), are replaceable by either cheaper foreign labor or a computer. His solution is that we educate a fleet of go-getters and problem solvers.
Even as a solution to ensuring more work for Americans, Friedman's suggestion is moronic -- it is completely naive about human nature. Simply put, not everyone is an innovator. That should be obvious. But at its core, Friedman's solution represents one of the great failings of public policy of the 20th and 21st centuries -- that people must work to earn their happiness (and even that people must work to be happy).
What is meant by work is narrowly defined -- you are employed. Your hands are kept busy. In America, "work" tends to mean you work 40 hours a week. It should be obvious that creating such a precondition will forever preclude true progress -- that is, improving the human condition.
Worse, it stifles innovation. How many industries do we keep afloat solely so that people can have jobs? Forget human happiness -- in raw dollars, what does this cost us vs. simply providing people with welfare? Are we so afraid of the corrupting influence of being unemployed that we will resist handing people a free lunch at all costs?
While I could offer many arguments about why "Darwinian" pressures are not needed to encourage innovation (and why not everyone does better work when given financial incentives), I'm more interested in using this space to simply ask that people use human happiness as a starting point for economic policy discussions, rather than beginning with job recovery and economic growth.
If we worked less and our GDP shrank, we would still have enough. In fact, if everyone worked half as much as they do now, there would be twice as many jobs. As we become better at automating tasks, we should seek to free people from those mindless and dehumanizing jobs -- even if it means giving them a free lunch. It is not realistic, as Friedman claims, to educate everyone so that they are competitive in profitable industries. For many reasons, but one in particular -- not everyone is interested in the sorts of jobs that are most "profitable."
There's been a lot of discussion surrounding universal health care recently, and why health care shouldn't be tied to employment. We need to start taking that concept a bit further.