TOIL & TROUBLE
“Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as the pitchfork And drive the brute off?”
Philip Larkin’s Toads, quoted in Work.
‘Work” is one of those words we use with such regularity that we rarely consider its meaning. For most of us, it’s just something to which we have to devote a large percentage of our time so we can live a satisfactory life. If there are about 112 waking hours in a week, on average we spend more than a third of them working. For commuters, it’s probably closer to a half. And with the omnipresence of email, the internet, Zoom and all our other digital paraphernalia, the shadow of work seems to grow ever longer.
But as the anthropologist James Suzman reminds us in his recent book, neatly entitled Work, that shadow was supposed to shorten. Ever since the Industrial Revolution brought mass mechanisation to the workplace, people have been predicting the arrival of the leisure age. The prediction gained intellectual ballast in 1930 when UK economist John Maynard Keynes argued that the combination of technological innovation and improved productivity would mean that by the early 21st century – in other words, now – nobody would be working more than 15 hours a week.
To understand why the 20th century’s greatest economist got it so wrong, Suzman steps back from the narrow confines of economics and explores how we came to think of work as we understand it today.
On an elemental level, scientists use the word “work” to describe the transference of energy in any and all settings. And that is what work effectively meant for most of human history. The work of hunter-gatherers was to attain food to transfer into the energy required to live. But, like all work, it was also a kind of stand against entropy, a means of establishing order by harnessing energy. So, even from the earliest days of humanity, you could
