Is Work Necessary?

(This is a repeat of a previous blog - but it just staggered me again how odd the world is)

Yesterday my girlfriend tells me that she is has competition from another girl who is better qualified and seeking a similar job.

That is a good thing right? because it means that the job can be done even better than she can do it.

After all what needs to be done needs to be done, and it should be done as well as possible by people who are most able to do it. We ask pilots to fly planes and accountants to do accounts, and within those professions we want to be flown by the best pilots and have the accounting done by honest accountants.

So if someone is better able to do your job obviously it is best that they take over.

YET, that is not how we think for some reason.

We think that we MUST do the job, even if we are not the best person for the job.

Worse we believe that we need to do a job, even when there are no jobs to do!

For some reason the rules of the economy are set so that we have to do a job (even when there is nothing to do) in order to get any products of the economy.

Often in a jobs there is nothing to do, holidays and the way things worked out ment that I had virtually nothing to do yesterday, but I still had a job and I still got paid - so its not the work so much as the job which pays. There are jobs, even when there is no work.

The reason is that without work there is no produce to consume, and so it follows (they argue) if we don't work we don't get any produce.

BUT, that argument doesn't work. "Economy of Scale" and machines both operate to vastly increase the economic productivity which far exceeds the abilities of its individuals. It makes no sense to attribute productivity to individuals then.

Capitalism solves the problem by paying investors to encourage investment and economic growth which we need to pay investors (silly circularity that), and then profit which belongs to the company directors.

Marxism was supposed to share the profit between the whole nation.

A problem with both these is that economic expansion is :

good economically,
bad ecologically

What we gain within the system is taken from outside the system. Economics is slowly absorbing the cost of ecological damage. But is all stems from economic growth which is needed to create jobs and increased in return on investments because in reality we are running out of things to do.

The obvious answer is to pay people in time, not money and reduce the amount of work that people need to do. Either maintaining the job=pay equality and paying more, or increasing the social security payments to encourage people out of work.