Do We Need to Work?

John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to fill all our new-found leisure time without going crazy. ‘For the first time since his creation,’ Keynes told his audience, ‘man w

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It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the hea... See more

Their economic life was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity. And this being so, there is good reason to believe that because our ancestors hunted and gathered for well over 95 percent of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old history, the assumptions about human nature in the problem of scarcity and our a... See more

Pour choisir le contenu de la production, Gorz suggère de retrouver la capacité à déterminer notre norme du « suffisant », capacité présente dans les sociétés précapitalistes, détruite à dessein par le capitalisme aux XIXe et XXe siècles. La décroissance n’est pas un projet de privation, mais d’adaptation à ce que chacun juge suffisant pour lui. Co

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