we can have continuing growth without damaging the very environment on which our ability to enjoy the fruits of that growth depends. But for now, the insufficiently appreciated imperatives of the growth economy impel us to grow in any fashion, regardless of the environmental consequences, so long as jobs result from that growth.
As I shall shortly discuss, there are other ways to address the need for jobs and income besides sheer growth in output, ways that actually enable us to live far richer and more satisfying lives even as they avert the damage we inflict on the Earth. But to make room for these alternative strategies, we need to better understand how the dynamics of our present approach to providing people with jobs keep us on a treadmill in which growth at any cost, rather than green growth or smart growth, continues to be the order of the day.
At the time I am writing these words, for example, we are witnessing a growing conflict between federal initiatives to require cuts in carbon emissions at power plants that burn fossil fuels and the impact of those initiatives on the jobs of people who mine coal or work in those plants. This is, under our present assumptions and arrangements, a tragically zero-sum game. The proposed environmental initiatives are urgently needed and by no means extreme or radical. But the impact on these workers is nonetheless severe. In our opposition to the hypocrisy of the mine owners, who after decades of giving short shrift to both the safety and the economic well-being of the miners, now present themselves as the vocal champions of their welfare, those of us committed to the cause of the environment and battling climate change must not forget that the workers do face very real suffering. Their opposition to changes that are absolutely essential but that will impact them so powerfully and painfully is perfectly understandable.
As we make further efforts to rein in carbon emissions, but struggle to do so within the very system that enabled them to become such a problem in the first place, we are likely to come upon more and more of these agonizing zero-sum dilemmas. Our present habits of thought do not leave us well equipped to deal with them. In order to fashion alternatives that enable us to meet our needs in a more environmentally responsible way, we will need to rethink the assumptions that have created a damaging tunnel vision.
One particularly significant obstacle to our envisioning alternatives to our present course is our continuing fixation on the forty-hour work week that emerged as a standard fairly early in the last century and has remained largely unmodified since then. For about 150 years, the number of hours people worked a week progressively declined, from eighty hours or more a week at the dawn of the industrial era, to sixty (a much sought after ten-hour day with a day of rest each week), to today’s widespread standard of thirty-five or forty. But that progressive decline in hours spent on the job stalled almost a century ago. The forty-hour week had already been established in several major industries when Henry Ford adopted it, with great impact, for the workers at Ford in 1914, and it was incorporated into New Deal legislation in the 1930s;12 but since then, there has been little further progress in reducing working hours, or even much significant advocacy in this regard. We have simply come to accept forty hours as a “normal” full-time job (and, indeed, for many today, a considerably longer workweek prevails).
This failure to move beyond a standard of full time work that derives from the previous century impedes our ability to develop environmentally sound policies in providing work for all who seek it. Under our prevailing assumptions, in order to provide work to a growing population in an era marked by worldwide competition for jobs as well as technological advances that make fewer workers necessary to produce the same quantity of goods, we are pushed to keep creating new jobs in order to keep people working. As a result, the effort to generate jobs becomes driven rather than reflective, and prospects for environmentally sound growth give way to “growth at any cost” growth.
In contrast, if we began a transition to a standard workweek of, say, twenty or twenty-five hours a week, the same given amount of work would provide jobs for many more people, thereby reducing the need to grow in order to provide people with jobs. Such a course would also, as a consequence, reduce the pressure to keep producing more and more that leads to compulsive and reckless growth, growth that has no time or patience for green growth.*
It is, after all, not growth per se that is the problem but compulsive growth, growth-at-any-cost growth, unreflective growth. The transition needed to meet our needs while safeguarding our environment does not in any way imply a stagnant economy. Rather, it points toward an economy less in thrall to what are by now dangerous and outmoded versions of growth, versions of growth driven by an urgent need for jobs rather than by the genuine value of and desire for the new goods and services that are generated. Perhaps we need to modify our dialogue to articulate our goal as an economy of improvement rather than one of growth. Sometimes that improvement fits the growth framework of ‘more” (more people on the planet with access to electricity or running water) but often it is a matter of better rather than simply more (electricity generated by solar or wind rather than coal, cars and devices that work more reliably rather than more of them per se, etc.)
Further pointing to the importance of a shorter workweek in averting an environmentally disastrous compulsion to grow at any cost and in any fashion is a phenomenon that has been particularly marked since the time this book was first written—the extraordinary and continuing advances in computers, robotics, and artificial intelligence. As a consequence of these advances, whole new categories of human work are likely, over time, to be replaced by algorithms and computer-guided machines. The process has already begun, and there is reason to think that it will significantly escalate in the coming years. Driverless cars, for example, are already on the roads of California in Google test cars that have driven millions of miles, At the same time, there are currently over three-and-a-half million truck drivers in the United States, and in thirty-two states truck driving is the single most widely held job.13 It is also one of the declining number of jobs in which people with a high school education can still earn middle class incomes. As self-driving vehicles begin to appear on our roads—and while there is debate about the time scale, almost no knowledgeable observer doubts that this will happen—the need for all those hours of truck driving will diminish very sharply.
The process of replacing human work with machines has, of course, occurred throughout history, but the revolution in computer technology and artificial intelligence in our current era is viewed by an increasing number of experts as a game changer. Extrapolating from trends already strongly evident, a flood of influential books and articles have pointed to a day, not so far away, in which smart machines will replace millions upon millions of workers, not just in the blue collar sector but in such previously unlikely realms as law, medicine, journalism, and education.14
These predictions, to be sure, have not gone unchallenged.15 In contrast to those experts who argue that accelerating developments in robotics and artificial intelligence are creating a totally unprecedented state of affairs, there are others who take the position that after an initial panic by those with vested interests and settled ways, new technologies always end up creating more jobs than they replace. When cars replaced horses and buggies, blacksmiths were thrown out of work, but many more found work as auto mechanics, in tire factories, and, now, programming the computers that govern much of the modern car’s functioning. In this sanguine picture, every generation has its doomsayers, and every time history has proved them wrong.
But in an era where computers themselves are now employed in the process of further enhancing computer power, with the newly supercharged computers that result in turn put to the task of still further increasing that power in a continuous process of exponential acceleration, the prediction that technology will not fundamentally change the old patterns is on less certain ground. Moreover, it is important to notice that advocates on both sides of this debate in fact agree that we are experiencing extraordinary advances in our capacity to have machines do what people once did. The growth advocates simply predict that other jobs will replace those that are lost. But, as I have been discussing, even if the search for those “other” jobs, newly “created” jobs is successful, the results can
