The Accelerating Hamster Wheel
Note: I am grateful to my brother, Reh for inspiring this article.
During the industrial revolution, workers laboured 10 to 16 hours a day for 6 days a week in the United Kingdom. Robert Owen a factory owner and social reformer, initially demanded a 10 hour workday in 1810, and by 1817 had his target set on an eight-hour day and coined the slogan: "Eight hours' labour, Eight hours' recreation, Eight hours' rest".
Despite this, it took almost a century before the International Labour Organization ratified the 8 hour workday. It was finally achieved in 1919: the 40-hour workweek, paid vacations and other labor concessions. Influential figures of the time believed that equal access to leisure would only increase in the 20th century. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes forecast that labor-saving technologies might lead to a 15-hour workweek in his essay, “Economic Possibility for our Grandchildren"."
After the Second World War and throughout the 1970s, many economists shared Keynes’ optimism. Buckminster Fuller, a prominent systems theorist explained how advances in technology could free everyone from the harsh conditions of the labor market and the pain of “useless jobs". From 1973 to 2013, the hourly compensation of a typical worker rose 9 percent while productivity increased by 74 percent.
This breakdown of pay versus workload growth has only increased in the last decade. While American National accounts data shows that working hours have been reduced from approximately 2000h per year to 1800h per year from the 1970's to the 2000's, dual income households have increased from 47% to 66% in the same time period. Where has the additional value created gone? In 1965, a CEO made 20 times the salary of an ordinary worker. By 2013, that figure has risen to over 300 times, and grew twice as fast as corporate profits. Asset prices have increased, while wages have largely stagnated.
Since the industrial revolution, all production has been tied to resource usage in a linear way. We extract raw materials from nature, add value to it, consume it and dispose of it. In 1925, The Pheobus Cartel was formed by lightbulb manufacturers Osram, General Electric, Associated Electrical Industries, and Philips to ensure that lightbulbs would be engineered to last no more than 1000 hours, down from the 2500 hours they could technically achieve. For the next 30 years, these companies made extraordinary profits as people had to buy more bulbs. Aside from creating an illegal oligopoly, the additional consumption created a larger environmental footprint than necessary.
These are examples of exploitation of different kinds of inputs in production, both in labour and material. While developed societies are materially better off than ever before, the cost to the natural world that sustains our existence has been astronomical, and that debt will be borne by future generations. There is an idea that future technology will arrive to help us deal with existential issues like climate change and income inequality, but there seems to be a relationship between trying to solve a problem, and getting further away from the answer.
In the 19th century, William Jevons observed that an increase in the efficiency of using coal to produce energy tended to increase consumption, rather than reduce it. Why? The cheaper price of coal-produced energy encouraged people to find new ways to consume it. Once things get more efficient due to technological developments, human consumption immediately shoots up. Therefore, the amount of production can never meet desire. Even if it that gap is closed, it comes at costs to society and the environment.
If you increase the productivity of anything, you reduce its price. As a result, the demand goes up. Nowadays, this effect is usually referred to as “rebound”. In cases where increased consumption cancels out energy savings, it is referred to as “backfire.” In a 1992 paper, Harry D. Saunders, an American researcher, provided a concise statement of this basic idea: “With fixed real energy price, energy efficiency gains will increase energy consumption above where it would be without these gains.”
Air-conditioning was a rarity around the world in the 1970's, but thanks to declining prices and efficiency improvements it's becoming one of the largest singular energy consumers worldwide. Between 1997 and 2007 the use of air-conditioners tripled in China. It is where a third of the world’s units are now manufactured, and where many air-conditioner purchases come with subsidies. In India, the use of air-conditioners increased almost tenfold between 2005 and 2020. According to a 2009 study, it accounted for forty per cent of the electricity consumed in metropolitan Mumbai.
Taking these ideas further, efficiency gains both in labour markets, and technology that will reduce our climate impact may possibly create an opposite effect. If new technology allows global energy productivity or energy efficiency to increase, then civilisation will grow faster into the resources that sustain it. This grows the economy, but it also means that energy consumption and environmental impacts accelerate.
Solutions to these existential threats are few and far between, however, helping people understand both the biological and social mechanisms of their consumption and accumulation may help reduce the tendency to move the goalposts as higher standards of living are reached. The challenge is getting collective agreement on a standard of living that is enough.
The future is not cast in stone, and we live in a time where these ideas are being discussed, from universal basic income to no growth economies. Stephen Hawking once commented “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced [robots] wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”
While this may be a pessimistic view, I believe that by meeting these trends with curiosity and creativity, even if we cannot change the objective suffering that might be already in motion, we have the ability to change the way we relate to it subjectively. Well-being and contentment can be practiced, and tying that to a larger aspiration to serve these challenges would be a life well lived.