Work

The second crucial point of convergence was far more recent, and arguably far more transformative. It began some 12,000 years ago when some of our ancestors began to routinely store foods and experiment with cultivation, transforming their relationships with their environments, with each other, with scarcity and with work. Exploring this point of convergence also reveals how much of the formal economic architecture around which we organise our working lives today had its origins in farming and how intimately our ideas about equality and status are bound into our attitudes to work.

Even if many of those at the very top somehow managed to engineer greater rewards for themselves, the crash did precipitate a sharp decline in public confidence in economists. If the so-called experts hadn’t seen the crisis coming, then there was good cause to question their expertise. The problem was that because economics had masqueraded as a science for so long, people quite reasonably began to treat expertise in general with more scepticism, even in far more solidly grounded sciences like physics and medicine. As a result, among the more unexpected casualties of the financial crisis was the once near-universal confidence in people like climate scientists warning of the dangers of anthropogenic climate change and epidemiologists trying to explain the benefits of immunisation.

Where history is a better guide to the future is on the nature of change. It reminds us that we are a stubborn species: one that is deeply resistant to making profound changes in our behaviour and habits, even when it is clear that we need to do so. But it also reveals that when change is forced upon us we are astonishingly versatile. We are able to quickly adapt to new, often very different ways of doing and thinking about things and in a short time become as habituated to them as we were to those that preceded them. This being so, while automation and AI have made it possible for us to embrace a profoundly different future, it is unlikely that it will be the catalyst that causes the dramatic changes in ‘social customs and economic practices’ that Keynes envisaged. Far more likely catalysts take the form of a rapidly changing climate, like that which spurred the invention of agriculture; anger ignited by systematic inequalities like those that stirred the Russian revolution; or perhaps even a viral pandemic that exposes the obsolescence of our economic institutions and working culture, causing us to ask what jobs are truly valuable and question why we are content to let our markets reward those in often pointless or parasitic roles so much more than those we recognise as essential.