Deep Utopia

experience.

We then made the obligatory reference to the John Maynard Keynes article that predicted that a 15-hour work week would be nearly upon us by now, following a century of strong economic progress. However,

It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.

A strategy of this sort is used today by managers in bureaucratic organizations, who sometimes seek to hire as many subordinates as possible in order to exalt their own position within the corporate structure. These new recruits may then repeat the procedure and work assiduously to build up their own team of underlings. It’s a pyramid scheme that c

The hedonic treadmill continuously retreats under our feet, making us keep running while preventing us from ever getting to any fundamentally cheerier place.

We could, of course, easily eliminate congestion by introducing congestion pricing. But instead, the solution that our society has adopted is—to buy a bigger car. One that raises the driver higher above the road, so that we can at least look down on the other poor sods while we wait for the traffic to move…

As Posner says, “the traditional aspiration of the English upper class was not to work at all”, and not to appear to care too earnestly about money.86 And in this respect, the Lotto lout, although solidly lower working class, actually exhibited a more aristocratic demeanor than people on the middle rungs of the social ladder.87

Fred Hirsch in his 1977 book, Social Limits to Growth.65 The richer we become, the more of our desires for non-positional goods, such as basic food and shelter, are met; and the greater the fraction of our remaining as-yet unfulfilled desires pertain to positional goods, which are inherently scarce.

He could have given the Haredi Jews in Israel as another example of a leisured class. There is a sizable population who spend their entire lives studying the Torah, and get paid by the state for doing so.