"copious leisure is right around the corner, if we can just muster the political will! But it doesn't work out like that. We still work a lot."This is worth thinking about. What do people actually do?
Well, this is what.[1]
- Farming is tiny. Under 1% of the labor force. In 1900, it was around 40%. (That's typical of most developed countries. Since the US is a net food exporter, that's not due to imports. Food preparation is 10x the size of farming. (Farmers complain that they capture only a small fraction of the value of food as eaten, but they're not doing more than a small fraction of the labor involved.)
- US manufacturing is around 5% of the labor force. Some of that is due to imports.
In Kropotkin's day, those two categories covered most of the workforce.
- Health care, broadly defined, consumes a sizable fraction of the labor force.
An interesting question to ask is how much other employment is not really necessary. How much is zero-sum activity?
- If advertising was no longer a tax-deductible business expense, there would be a lot less of it.
- If insurance was standardized (as it is for Medicare), the insurance industry could be far smaller.
- If finance faced a tax on financial transactions and was restricted to the product set of 1980, finance would be far smaller.
This would look a lot like China's policies today, or US policies of the 1950s.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-major-occupational-gro...
This is worth thinking about. What do people actually do?
Well, this is what.[1]
- Farming is tiny. Under 1% of the labor force. In 1900, it was around 40%. (That's typical of most developed countries. Since the US is a net food exporter, that's not due to imports. Food preparation is 10x the size of farming. (Farmers complain that they capture only a small fraction of the value of food as eaten, but they're not doing more than a small fraction of the labor involved.)
- US manufacturing is around 5% of the labor force. Some of that is due to imports.
In Kropotkin's day, those two categories covered most of the workforce.
- Health care, broadly defined, consumes a sizable fraction of the labor force.
An interesting question to ask is how much other employment is not really necessary. How much is zero-sum activity?
- If advertising was no longer a tax-deductible business expense, there would be a lot less of it.
- If insurance was standardized (as it is for Medicare), the insurance industry could be far smaller.
- If finance faced a tax on financial transactions and was restricted to the product set of 1980, finance would be far smaller.
This would look a lot like China's policies today, or US policies of the 1950s.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-major-occupational-gro...