Hey readers,
How's it going? We have a question for you: What are the biggest, most neglected issues you wished news outlets covered more? In case you missed it, I wrote about why it's important to remember and work on issues that get pushed to the wayside when a new obsession emerges.
Tell us your thoughts, feedback, and whatever else is on your mind at futureperfect@vox.com.
See you Wednesday!
—Kelsey Piper, senior writer
|
|
|
The future of work is democratic politics |
Silas Stein/Picture Alliance via Getty Images |
The winter issue of the multidisciplinary journal Daedalus asks a wide range of scholars how we might create a "new moral political economy." In his contribution, Suresh Naidu, an economist at Columbia University, imagines a future of work that forges a regenerative union between the fraying structures of both capitalism and democracy: a vision of what he terms "eudaimonic jobs."
Eudaimonia comes from Aristotle's vision of human flourishing, which draws a connection between a good life and political participation. The problem, as Naidu writes, is that "a basic constraint on democracy ... is that many of us are just too tired and busy to participate."
He puts forward a potential solution: What if every citizen received a part-time wage from the government to participate in the political process? Instead of a work week filled with whatever employment labor markets have to offer — however meaningless or grueling it might be — citizens could reallocate some of their labor time toward the work of politics.
"We talk about the end of work, but there's an endless amount of the work of democracy on the table to be done," Naidu said. Against dystopian visions of a fully automated society where human efforts, or humans in general, are ultimately rendered useless, democratic deliberation about how to govern ourselves should remain the one activity no chatbot ever takes over.
I spoke to Naidu about his vision for eudaimonic jobs, and what it might take — from universal basic income to higher wages or public job guarantees — to make them a reality for all. —Oshan Jarow, Future Perfect fellow
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The world of work seems to be facing a series of crises today, ranging from the economic to the almost spiritual. What's going on?
The automation thing is something that capitalism throws up every couple of generations. [It carries] the promise that we could eliminate work and that we might all wind up unemployed and poor as a result, or that we might wind up with enormous prosperity.
I do think that since Covid in particular, there has been this rethinking, particularly among people slightly younger than me: What is the point of work anyway? Part of this is the rise of gig and part-time work, reducing the attachment people have to individual jobs.
But a lot of the psychological and social functions work has had are being rethought, or feel like they're under threat, and this renewed thinking about what constitutes a good job is now back on the table. |
"So we talk about the end of work, but there's an endless amount of the work of democracy that is on the table to be done." |
Why did you choose the term "eudaimonic" jobs rather than something more familiar, and what does it mean in this context?
I deliberately picked a Greek term because the classical prerequisite for political democracy was that you couldn't have a full-time job. So by [using] the classical term of eudaimonia, that's trying to get you to think about how maybe we can automate a whole bunch of tedious labor in the world, but the one thing we wouldn't want to automate, in the eudaimonic classical idea, is that we can have the time to hang out, learn about the issues of the day, debate them, and come to collective decision-making. Which takes a lot of time and energy, and is a pain in the butt. It's one of the first things that falls off the calendar when you have kids or your job gets demanding.
So we talk about the end of work, but there's an endless amount of the work of democracy that is on the table to be done. And you can imagine juries and lots of mechanisms where citizens could spend more of their time using processes of collective deliberation to make decisions. This is why I think if we do have this giant threat of automation, one of the ways to expand the space of these eudaimonic jobs is to come back to this classical vision, where you don't have to spend your time working on something tedious. You can actually spend your time doing the work of self-government.
You outline three paths to eudaimonic jobs. This idea of the work of democracy is the third, and we'll come back to that, but can you describe the other two paths?
The first one is saying that there's plenty of stuff we do in taking care of each other, and we could imagine providing the material resources to support that work of caring. So we could imagine a universal basic income (UBI) or other things that make the delivery of caring labor in existing networks of support and solidarity feasible and sustainable.
The second option is a supercharged labor market where we recognize that there's a lot of work that we want to do and maybe we need a combination of the government and the market to deliver it. That entails making sure that there's a lot of labor demand. And that means paying very high wages. So we could realize that the profit signals that are going to private enterprise are not necessarily the ones that are going to deliver good jobs, but we can still use the labor market as the mechanism by which the government kind of supercharges labor demand for good jobs. The government's role there is to provide something much more like a job guarantee.
It sounds like for a modern world of eudaimonic democracy to work, we couldn't just add political participation onto people's existing workloads. People already work a lot. They'd have to be able to work less to make time for the work of democracy, right?
Yep. There's a jobless future where we actually wind up spending a lot more time doing jury duties, for example. We reduce our time in the labor market and spend much more time doing politics. And politics is annoying, but it's not the kind of thing that you would necessarily want to delegate to an artificial intelligence or even experts. If you really take this democratic sensibility seriously — and maybe a lot of people don't — the opportunity of reducing the amount of market work and spending more time allocated across domains of the political process is an interesting sort of realistic utopia. |
|
|
4 unexplainable mysteries of pregnancy and parenting |
Technically, pregnancy is one of the most ordinary things in the world. And yet, even though it happens every day, pregnancy also remains extremely mysterious. On Expecting, a three-episode series from Unexplainable — Vox's podcast exploring big, unanswered questions — we'll investigate some of the scientific mysteries that parents face as they try to navigate pregnancy and caretaking. Plus, around the Vox newsroom, reporters have been asking (and getting answers to) their own questions about pregnancy. Check out the full package of articles and podcast episodes here.
"I report on reproductive health a lot, and I find it consistently mind boggling how little we know about pregnancy, something that every single human has direct experience with, and that we literally cannot live without," said producer Byrd Pinkerton. "So we decided to explore just three of the myriad mysteries around pregnancy and parenting, and for some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to bring my mom on the show to talk about them."
More on this topic from Vox:
|
|
|
Why inflation isn't going away anytime soon |
Inflation seems to be easing up heading into the summer, but we're not out of the woods yet. Climate change and an aging, shrinking population pose two hurdles for transitions that, if handled poorly, would be enough to generate years of unwelcome price increases as businesses and consumers struggle to adapt. The most important thing we can do to mitigate the damage is to start preparing for these transitions now, argues economist and author Matthew C. Klein. More on this topic from Vox: |
|
|
Liao Pan/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images |
If you live in New York City, make some plans to head to the American Museum of Natural History's stunning new building. The Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation feels as though you're stepping into a futuristic canyon, where you can walk through an insectarium, check out their library, and interact with an immersive data visualization experience. Sounds like a fun day out! —Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor In 2016, some US and Canadian embassy staff in Cuba began to hear a piercing sound that left them with symptoms ranging from irritating — headaches, ringing in the ears — to much, much worse. Was it sonic warfare? Really loud insects? Something else? Listen to The Sound, PRX's new podcast on the so-called "Havana Syndrome," to dig into the aural mystery. —Kenny Torrella, staff writer
Roland Griffiths, head of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research, used to study how psychedelics can ease anxiety in terminal cancer patients. Now, he's one of them. Having just received a Stage 4 metastatic colon cancer diagnosis at age 76, this wonderful interview with Griffiths explores how decades of psychedelic research informed his unusual, admirable approach to dying. In short, it's one big celebration. —Oshan Jarow, Future Perfect fellow
In 1997, Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology, published the results of her study on what would come to be known as the "Wood Wide Web." I hadn't heard of this fungal network that allows trees to communicate, which is why this new video from BBC Earth Lab, "How Trees Talk to Each Other," was so interesting to me, and why I recommend checking it out! —Rachel DuRose, Future Perfect fellow India presents a wonderful narrative to believers in progress — a sprawling, polyglot democracy, pulling itself and its citizens out of poverty. But worsening political repression and cronyism on the ground complicates that sunny narrative, as the great Indian writer Pankaj Mishra writes in a recent London Review of Books essay. Read it to understand what's happening behind the headlines in what is now the world's most populous country. —Bryan Walsh, editorial director Questions? Comments? Tell us what you think! We recently changed the format of this newsletter and would love to know your thoughts. Email us at futureperfect@vox.com. And if you want to recommend this newsletter to your friends or colleagues, tell them to sign up at vox.com/future-perfect-newsletter. |
|
|
Access the web version of this newsletter here. This email was sent to punjabsvera@gmail.com. Manage your email preferences or unsubscribe. If you value Vox's unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring contribution. View our Privacy Notice and our Terms of Service. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036.
Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved. |
|
|
|
