I have attempted to portray similar ideas, in regards to a universal wage, to friends and family. Each time I'm met with "What stops some people from not working" and they refuse to move past that. They see people who work less, or don't work as a detriment to society.

What sort of changes can be made to change people's viewpoint on hard work as a virtue?

I like "How to Be Idle"/ Tom Hodgkinson

"From the founding editor of The Idler, the celebrated magazine about the freedom and fine art of doing nothing, comes not simply a book, but an antidote to our work-obsessed culture. In How to Be Idle, Tom Hodgkinson presents his learned yet whimsical argument for a new universal standard of living: being happy doing nothing. He covers a whole spectrum of issues affecting the modern idler—sleep, work, pleasure, relationships—while reflecting on the writing of such famous apologists for it as Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Nietzsche—all of whom have admitted to doing their very best work in bed"

There are all different types of work, with different 'rewards'

- Work for the mind - mental brain training. Reward: Getting a leg up on your competitors. In the caveman days; different language hacks meant tribes could figure out how best to kill prey, and hunt a lot better. These days, the task of hunting has been abstracted away by a Mc Meal™. The thrill of the hunt could be lost?

- Work for the body - getting fit. Reward: Physical strength, stamina, and endurance. Johhny emissions wastes $20.00 to get his Mc Meal™, gets a bad back from sitting in a car, and leads an otherwise sedentary life. If Johhny walked, he could get fit, boost his endorphins, and have the added bonus of burning off a Mc Meal™ a lot faster.

- Work for others - Helping others out. Reward: Feeling good. Endorphins, confidence, self-worth, creating joy for others. Johnny doesn't help others. He's an Internet troll leaving racist remarks on Youtube and Twitter all day. His sleep suffers because of that. He becomes cagey around others, and rarely looks others in the eye. Johnny helper takes joy knowing that another line of code in the Git repo helps about a million people live their life better. Johhny helper ignores the comment sections in websites, and knows a problem can't be solved on the same plane it was created.

If anyone is interested in reading more about 'Refusal of Work' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refusal_of_work - I would recommend

The Right To Be Lazy (1883) by Paul Lafarge

The Abolition of Work (1985) by Bob Black

BI is a massive political hurdle. A much smaller one is:

1. Dismantling the disincentives to hiring more people for fewer hours each

2. Dismantle the "40 hours is full time" as a legal fence that prevents people from wanting to drop under it (sharp benefit cut offs instead of gradual phase outs)

While I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment I think a lot of the economic thinking is a bit too simplistic, especially in our current age. For example, whether you invest in your government or not, your government will still be able to find funds for the war chest, by printing money if nothing else (or as it works nowadays, the central bank buying government securities). Another problem I can identify is that some hard work requires a lot education, we need nurses for example. What would happen if nurses only worked 20 hour weeks? Maybe there's a clever answer for this too, but I think we really need to think hard about this before we advocate anything politically. It makes a lot of sense to promote idleness as a virtue though, so go on and praise play (it is the hacker way, after all)!

undefined

> Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. There are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work.

It almost sounds like they are talking about the creators of mobile ecosystems, or about the gatekeepers of the internet.

The moral basis of the work is its repudiation of various parasite classes: priests, warriors, rentiers, even Party apparatchiks (albeit only in a footnote).

And yet it never stops to wonder why these parasites keep recurring, or how they might use these very arguments to recur again, or what might be done about that.

Bertrand Russell worked hard to write that. Work that we love to do falls into a different category.

undefined