It’s hard for me to avoid throwing my hands up in the air and thinking (loudly) to myself, “let it burn”.

For fifty years we’ve been expanding the size of the workforce, increasing productivity, increasing efficiency, increasing deliveries, increasing resource exploitation–not just here, but globally.

Abstractly, we do this because we want to have wealth. The only way to gain wealth is to produce more than you consume–so the world produces because it does not want to be poor.

In America, we’re too bound up in ‘having’ our wealth. We consume and invent new ways of ‘producing’ things that aren’t real, like the dot-com stocks or house values, to justify our consumption of useless things like the prius and solar panels, instead of doing real work and using wealth for useful things like nuclear power plants and robotics.

It’d be better to let every increase in efficiency and productivity result in ‘the workers’ worker fewer hours. At least then, once idle, there’d be no illusion that we were ‘producing’ and therefore entitled to consume.