Why should everyone work?Write five sentence?
Answers
Firstly, we have squandered most of the benefits or potential benefits of advanced technology. Take, for example, all the computer technology we have available to us. Sure, in some industries, computers are put to very good use. They often run the machinery in factories and enable us to manufacture vast quantities of products, with very little human input.
On the other hand, look at all the computers we use in offices all around the world. Computers, it is claimed, can help us do our office work much more efficiently. And, theoretically, they could. If we took all the paperwork we used to have to do - e.g. 40 years ago - and used computers to help us do that paperwork, our offices could be run much more efficiently and we could be living the life of leisure.
But what really happens when we have computers in our offices, is that we require office workers to produce ever more paperwork, seemingly just to keep them busy. Unsatisfied with the limited amount of paperwork we had to start with, we now have ever more risk assessments and performance reviews and reports and evaluations and presentations - and so on and so on and so on!
Are today’s offices actually run much more efficiently than they used to be? We can’t be at all confident that they are - even though we expend vast resources on building and maintaining the computer systems that are supposed to enable them to run more efficiently.
Secondly, as a species, we seem to be somewhat lacking in imagination. When we were poor, we naturally wanted more things. We wanted more food. We wanted a decent house to live in. We wanted a nice TV.
As we become richer, we could have turned our attentions to higher things. We could have tried to become better-educated and more cultured. We could have devoted more time to family life and friendship. We could have turned our attentions to building a better, kinder, more thoughtful society.
But it seems people often lack the imagination to do that. Instead, they just demand more ‘stuff’ and better ‘stuff.’ They want a bigger TV, a faster car, a larger house. They want a second TV, a second car and a second house. They’ve got a smartphone. They only bought it last year. It still works perfectly well. But for some strange reason, they feel they must have a new one anyway! They’ve got enough food, but for some reason they want to have ever more food, even if it causes them harm!
Consequently, we continue working long hours, making every more stuff, much of which we don’t really need and which may not be doing us any good - and may even be harming us.
Perhaps, if we introduced a Basic Income system, this might be the catalyst we need to fire people’s imaginations about what we could do with our lives, if only we weren’t compelled to work long hours and obsessed with the consumption of ever more goods and services.