Forwarded this e-mail? Subscribe now → Yes, please
Greetings from Rhode Island where I'm spending a week with my family.
#1 Digital Space: A fantastic must-read essay from Frank Chimero that somehow weaves libraries, Andrew Carnegie, Penn Station, grindr, the Amish, heaven and hell into compelling thoughts on how we should think about space, sanity, and spirituality n the digital realm:
"If commercial networks on the web measure success by reach and profit, cultural endeavors need to see their successes in terms of resonance and significance."
#2 Yale's Happiness Class: (I neglected to include the link last week) Yale has a 20 lecture class about how to be happy and we can just read this article to learn all of the secrets. Here is some insight about money:
"When people making $30,000 a year are asked what kind of annual salary it would take to make them truly happy, the average answer is $50,000. When you ask the same question of people making $100,000 a year, you’d expect them to say, “I’m double-happy! I make twice the happiness threshold!” Instead, what they actually say, on average, is that if they made $250,000 a year, then they’d be truly happy."
Bonus: I found that you can take this class for free on Coursera.
#3 Invisible Labor: A quite detailed exploration of how we undervalue "invisible" labor in the economy. While reading this, I reflected on a powerful comment offered from a friend from my hometown while looking at the "new" and much less impressive playground in our town park. She offered a reason: "all the moms go to work now." When I was little, I remember several stay at home mothers and fathers helping to fundraise and build a pretty incredible playground. The author makes a similar point:
"We get dignity from our work because what we do is important to our community, is seen as a valued contribution to it. But we’re prone to confusing our work with our job. The fact is that a lot of us contribute actively to our communities in ways we don’t get paid for: We raise families, we volunteer, we help people resolve their differences, we organize events, we listen to each other and provide emotional support, we pay attention to each other’s needs.
These contributions are crucially important to our survival as a society. They’re things we’ve been doing forever; it’s only in the past 150 years or so, as more and more people have started spending all of their time doing “traditional” wage-labor jobs, that the focus has shifted away from these other types of work."
This article also touches on some of the cultural issues we will face moving towards a world with less "good" jobs. Many have argued for a "jobs guarantee" to ensure people can have dignity through work, but the author points out the major issue with that (which is that it keeps our current issues intact):
"Job guarantees answer the first critique that people won’t want to work by deliberately leaving the underlying problem intact. Anyone who has to rely on a job guarantee has no better job available; therefore, all the “shit jobs” can be made into job guarantee jobs, which continue to be low-paying."
#4 Gig Future: This econ-fi 2030 story from the Economists projects what labor, jobs, and gigs will look like in 2030. Here is one line:
"In December 2028 an attempt by a group of American hospitals to use on-demand doctors led to a shortage of staff over Christmas, when many decided not to work even though “surge pricing” had bumped up their hourly rate."
Full-time employment, while having issues, aligns commitment of the individual with specific firms. If we have a weakening of that commitment (and as I've experienced with my own freelance life), will people just decide to work less and less over time? (HT C. Laws)
#5 Inequality: While America has its inequality issues, many economists have pointed out that looking at a fixed point is the wrong way to look at the problem. This research shows that 50% of Americans will spend at least one year in the top 10% of earnings. In addition, almost all who reach the top 1% at least some point in their life will eventually lose that status.
[contact-form-7 id="997" title="BoundlessReads Signup"]