No more work Why full employment is a bad idea

Livingston (Rutgers) is ready to quit working, and thinks everyone should be. In a remarkably short book chock full of big ideas, he argues that technology and economic progress now pose a grand opportunity and dilemma: we could liberate ourselves from work, relying on machines for our sustenance, except that income is linked to the labor market. The emerging disjunctions pose multilevel challenges--to our ideologies, economies, policies, ethics, and ultimately to the meaning of our humanity. Many books have already sounded alarms about the "rise of robots," the "end of work," or a "jobless future," and Kathi Weeks (The Problem with Work, Duke, 2011) gives a deeper and fuller account of work issues. Livingston's discussion of surprisingly profound philosophical issues could benefit from more careful definitions and fewer dualistic alternatives; and, as is often the case, it suffers from a mismatch between the magnitude of the problem raised and the modesty of the solution proposed. The argument is unrivaled, however, in its audacity and brashness, all in a delightfully amusing little essay that is guaranteed to delight undergrads and provoke them to question their individual and collective future. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --A. B. Cochran, Agnes Scott College