Let’s begin by viewing human lives in yet another fundamental way (in my first Bulletin I emphasised the fact, novel to politics that human life consists most purely of human time) which has been overlooked by political theorists. In social and political terms most modern human lives also consist of four ages. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) famously described in his play ‘As You Like It’ The Seven Ages Of Man. However in terms of governance and politics that can conveniently and properly be reduced to four reasonably distinct phases in life. Those human ages are infancy, adolescence, prime adulthood and old age (or perhaps more appropriately, as Americans might say, an age when one is a ‘senior’). Clearly I recognise not everybody lives long enough to pass through all these phases and also the age or time at which one completes one phase and begins the next phase is neither the same for everybody nor clearly settled. However in terms of what I am looking at, charting one’s life individually or governance of a society as a whole that does not matter very much. The general point I am making is that each age is closely linked to one significant phase or activity in most modern people’s lives. Infancy is an age of total dependence; adolescence is an age of education; prime adulthood is an age of work and incidentally generally also an age of parenting and old age (or rather seniority) is generally an age of retirement from work.
I will try to incorporate those ages into an overarching political theory and rationale. Those ages should be considered not just as separate but also as different parts of a whole, parts of a normal whole life. In fact individuals are far more likely to consider those ages in roughly those terms (such as in saving money and making plans for retirement) than politicians or governments, let alone political theorists are.
Most fundamentally I am a libertarian. Accordingly I believe so far as is practicable people should be free to live as much of their lives as can reasonably be managed in their own way (as long as they are not impinging more on others’ freedoms than exercising their own freedom). I see the whole of human life within this overarching political concept and that includes so far as is practical all four ‘ages of man’. So in that light or perspective I will consider all four of the ‘ages of man’ both individually and as part of a unified whole with the same basic principle of human freedom and maximising human free time running through them. I will do so relatively briefly here.
The very first age of man is the age of infancy. I am not an expert on this age. Yet I would point out most people have minimal memory of it and their faculties are mostly far from developed during it. It is fashionable for modernists and woke theorists to have extravagant theories about this age and its importance in people’s lives. I personally am sceptical about such theories. I am very sceptical about the supposed importance of ‘socialisation’ and ‘education’ in this age of infancy, not to mention the proliferation of what dismissively used to be called ‘psychobabble’ and what I still regard as ‘psychobabble’. People used just to get on with life before all their newfound psychological conditions and traumas, supposedly especially prevalent in infancy were ‘discovered’ and I say people should just still get on with life in the old way. Perhaps infancy is best viewed as an extension of the time in the womb when people are still developing physically and mentally, let alone in terms of acquiring consciousness and memory. All that has not really changed through the ages and it may well be nothing can be done to change that, certainly within the scope of present technology. So I don’t have anything further to say nor changes to propose concerning the first age of man, infancy.
The second age of man, adolescence, is more significant and is presently dominated by ‘education’, especially ‘formal education’. This link between adolescence and education may now seem thoroughly entrenched but for most humans, historically speaking, that is a quite recent innovation. Unimaginable though it might seem to most people today up until about one hundred years ago most people in most societies could not read and were illiterate. Yet people survived and societies managed reasonably well, albeit in a less technologically advanced time though even then there was some fairly sophisticated technology around, far more so than animals have ever had! So education and literacy and schooling for people is certainly not essential, even if in many ways it is useful (although it has some drawbacks such as facilitating taxation!) for human societies. Indeed one thousand years ago in almost all human societies either a tiny minority of people or no people at all could read and were literate! We would do well to bear this in mind when considering the supposed importance of education and even more so the modern fashion for ever more education and devoting, usually compulsorily (or almost compulsorily) ever more of ever more people’s limited lifetime to formal ‘education’.
Let us also be clear that education does not come without a price, a very considerable price, not only in money but also in sheer human time, attached to it both to the educators and also certainly in the latter stages of education to those being educated. So in principle I say education, and that includes every part of education has to be worth the considerable cost attached to it both to society as a whole and to the individuals being educated. May I point out in this context that the years people nowadays devote to education may be divided into two parts, the years of young adolescence (up to the age of perhaps 13 or 14) and the age of older adolescence. In the age of young adolescence, children due to their physical (as well as to a lesser extent their mental) limitations cannot contribute fully to the workforce and so cannot be fully engaged there. However in the years of later education they (as happened in the past before the compulsory minimum school leaving age was raised beyond that threshold age) could usefully be at work (or indeed conceivably be at free leisure) instead of being in education. Therefore while at the younger age the cost of education can be considered to be only or at least primarily the cost of the educators, in the latter part of people’s education the cost in time (and indeed money loss) is borne not only by the educators but also by the educated. That means the cost and usefulness of education to people needs to be considered even more carefully and more rigorously in respect of people over the age of 13 or 14.
However I will start with the preliminary phase of education up to age about 14 when the primary and overwhelming cost is with the provision of education and not also to those being educated.
The first question is what should be the starting age of formal education (parents often – but not always – provide some informal education, such as teaching their children the alphabet)? When I was young and there was negligible ‘nursery education’ provision (and originally it was for those who got it more akin to nursery care or substitute parental minding rather than nursery ‘education’), the starting age of education varied between five in Britain, six in most of Western Europe and seven in Scandinavia. It was found then (and Scandinavia had some of the best educational attainment results) that those who started school at seven soon caught up with those who had started at five. So why then go to all the extra expense of educating children from five years old (when a lot of it is playschool anyhow!) if the result of starting at seven is likely to be just as good? So start at seven I say, even if that means some extra childminding is needed where parents both work and there are no grandparents or other adults at hand (and those are needed during school holidays anyhow!). Let’s be sensible! Let’s not waste either money nor worktime and start formal education at seven years old.
At the other end of education one needs to be mindful that by the age of thirteen or fourteen children can readily begin work or at least start training (in apprenticeships etc;) for their adult work, as historically happened for many centuries of human existence. So at that age there is a feasible alternative to formal education if further education does not substantially benefit them and society. Furthermore at least for people who are not that keen on education, thirteen and certainly fourteen is the age when many adolescents become difficult and resentful of education and not willing to learn. That therefore is the sensible age to stop education for many children and send them in a new direction and into the adult world of work!
So I am saying that for most people education should be a ‘crash course’ of seven years between the ages of 7 and 14. That in practical terms should be enough to make youngsters literate, numerate and suited to engage in the world. For many, indeed most, more education is going to be a waste of everybody’s time, that is the educators, the educated and society as a whole. Within that education more emphasis should be placed on what is practically useful for life such as for instance tax calculations more than Algebra, civic studies more than exotic languages and sheer comprehension more than past literature. At the end of this ‘crash course’ there should be a comprehensive testing of people’s abilities, both academic and otherwise, especially in relation to their future work abilities.
Only the academically able, perhaps the ablest 10% should continue at state expense (or even really at their own expense) in academic education. Obviously there are some occupations such as medical doctors, scholars and sundry others at the top of society for whom education is manifestly necessary. Only those who are most able should be in fulltime academic studies at an age when they could otherwise usefully be part of the workforce or trainee workforce. Some of the others could do technical, work related courses and yet others could and should then go directly into work. Those not continuing in academic education could choose to teach themselves or develop their academic knowledge in what interests them later in life via reading books, listening to internet documentaries (which is how I myself am now learning more about history, religions and even some Philosophy) or even via more formal part-time courses. Such learning would be voluntary and according to people’s interests rather than be syllabus and exam based. So it would be a better utilisation of people’s time if they choose to devote personal time to supplementary education but it is not necessary within the context of society as a whole.
The savings in educational costs not merely in time but also in money would enable the ablest (perhaps 3% of the age group, as it was in Britain in 1961) to get University education free and aided with a maintenance grant.
Unfortunately education is bedevilled by two enormous fallacies that have proved extremely costly both in money and in people’s time to society and to people generally. The first costly fallacy is that the extra education is vital to provide employers with a well educated workforce that is necessary for them, the employers. With few exceptions (such as for instance research scientists) that is untrue, most especially in a general sense. The vast majority of jobs, including many top jobs such as most of those running businesses, do not require more education nor more academic ability than what can and should be acquired in an efficient and concentrated course of about seven years in education. Indeed in many workplaces too much education tends to be counterproductive in terms of efficiency. For instance policing requires practical intelligence far more than academic learning. In nursing University education has led to the ‘too posh to wash patients’ nonsense. Furthermore if nurses are, as at present, educated at much the same universities with degrees not that different to doctors, the necessary hierarchy in patient care can break down with unhelpful rather anarchic results. Furthermore in general education, including University education, tends to be so academic as to be unhelpful for the practical requirements of employers. So though I advocate a general assessment of everybody’s abilities or potential, including work potential/abilities, at the end of compulsory education at age 14, I do not agree that ever more education is beneficial. Nor is it even an efficient use of human money or time resources in terms of later employment.
The second and biggest fallacy in terms of education is it is based on the logical fallacy that ‘if some is good, ever more is even better’. That is manifestly not true with respect to eating and it is not true in education either. Indeed it is symptomatic of the poor, indeed useless calibre of most ‘educators’ that far, far more people expound or fall into this fallacy than comprehend, let alone point out this obvious fallacy. Clearly in relation to food , eating some food is absolutely necessary to sustain life and eating somewhat more food than that makes life better or at least more comfortable. However beyond a certain amount of weekly eating, consuming food becomes ever more unhealthy, counterproductive and dangerous (as well as wasteful) in food production for sustaining life (though of course different people require somewhat different optimal amounts of food). In terms of education much the same applies albeit in a somewhat different sense or context. It is clearly true, especially in the modern age when there is so much technology and knowledge available to generally improve and indeed extend human lives, that some education, most notably in literacy and numeracy is good for people at least in most respects. Education can be time well spent, especially when it is undertaken in junior adolescence when one is not yet adult enough mentally and certainly physically to be a useful part of the workforce and one is learning about life in general. However from an age when one can usefully and sensibly be doing something else, education and its relative costs and benefits should be viewed more critically, in particular as to whether it is really worth the financial cost and lifetime time entailed in this further education.
The cost of this mostly superfluous education is not small both in time and in money but massive for everybody involved. Obviously the annual cost in money, which is essentially the cost of paying all the people at work in the process (teachers, teaching assistants, auxiliary school staff such as school cleaners, administrators and transportation costs to and from school) is absolutely enormous. That is not even counting the loss of potential work earnings for those being excessively educated. However the cost in lost human time is truly massive and astounding. There is a huge cost in time for those educators and the many others being paid for their time in facilitating all this superfluous education. Most Western people (and non-Western people are trying to follow suit) are devoting in practically all cases at least five years and in very many cases ten years (or more) of their lives to superfluous education. Ten years is a massive amount of time within a lifetime, about one sixth of one’s useful, potentially productive lifetime (in terms of capacity for work, or of course alternatively potentially extra leisure or free time). This is scandalous, a scandalous waste of time, a scandalous waste of potential human free time, and therefore a massive attack (be it deliberate or not) upon human freedom. Even if two or more of those wasted years are during human infancy (where the greatest waste is upon the time of those facilitating education) the remaining and majority of those years are at a time when youths could be doing other things. (Indeed I should add closing many occupational options to those with less education is wrongly both forcing more people into wasteful education and unfairly restricting job opportunities throughout life to those with less education but sufficient education to actually do such jobs – another real scandal I say!) The most obvious other thing is beginning work or training for work much earlier so that people may start and finish their working lives much sooner. Then they can enjoy the freedom of retirement much sooner in their lives and indeed when they are physically fitter to enjoy it all the more! Possibly then ‘the gap year’ concept between school and University could be expanded and could even include gap leisure years so as to increase people’s freedom even more. At any rate the damage done by the fashionable (and generally favoured by educators who have tended to talk most others into accepting it) fallacy in education that ‘if some is good, more is ever better’ has stolen many years of a limited lifetime from most people. So it has done enormous damage to human freedom. That is a disaster, no less, for human freedom and most contemporary human lives that I am proposing sane political theorists or political philosophers should quite simply and logically be putting an end to (radical though such an outlook and change would now be).
So with respect to education, I am proposing a massive compression of the entire Western (and increasingly worldwide) education system so as to whittle it down in a broad sense to just what is ‘useful’ to individual people and society as a whole. Let’s, I say and say with sadly some originality among theorists, not devote human money, that is human resources and human time, vast amounts of human time, to an activity that is not useful or at any rate not the most useful thing that can be done in terms of our limited human time in our lives. Accordingly if such a logical reform is enacted, most people will have massive amounts of time in their lives granted to them as free time instead of unjustly taken from them by the unreasonable pressures, both legal and coercive from modern society (and the modern, flawed, irrational governance of society) as a whole. I am primarily proposing that the great majority of people (except much of society’s elite) move on from the second adolescent phase of their life into the third, mainly work related, phase as quickly as practicable and not have to delay themselves any longer than is actually necessary with education.
I would ideally like to do the same with the third phase of people’s lives, that related to employment and move people onto the fourth and in my system very elongated final phase in life, retirement as quickly as possible. To some considerable extent this should be achieved within my system. However there are (unlike with education) compelling reasons why this can or at least should only be partially achieved. Those reasons are applicable to this third phase of life, the work phase.
The problems with reducing the retirement age for everybody to as low as possible which could potentially be even as low as thirty years old or younger (if most inessential work was rooted out) in my opinion are primarily two in number. They relate first to the problem of human or at least ‘elitist’ expertise and second to the problem of ‘dependency’. Let me explain.
First, the obstacle of ‘elitist expertise’. I have already stated a small minority of people, those of the most ability do need to be educated to degree level and often beyond to enable them to occupy some (though not all, as some like top businessmen do not attain their specialist ability via formal education)of the most important positions in society. In fact many of them such as specialist doctors, research scholars and Judges may be over, well over the age of thirty (otherwise a feasible retirement age) before they have achieved the educational qualifications and more important, the practical experience to do such work satisfactorily. Indeed top managers will usually have been over the age of thirty or even forty before they have obtained the practical experience and hopefully skill to work their way up the managerial hierarchy of large organisations. Nor would I want to retire people with the greatest skill so young that such valuable skill is lost to society. Although such considerations apply only to a very small minority of people those are the people society is most dependent upon, indeed very heavily dependent upon. This dependence is most extreme in the case of the most innovative people who may develop big new businesses or even more important develop or materially help develop new technologies that might even benefit mankind as a whole. Of course one could pay such people massive amounts of money to entice them to continue in their work rather than just retire as other people do. Yet though that is part of the solution, that is not entirely satisfactory especially as there is some tendency among all people to retire mainly because it is fashionable to do so at their age. It may also properly be observed that as soldiering is necessarily in physical terms a young person’s occupation, armies throughout the world have this problem. They solve it partly by accelerated promotions which works quite well for them (and it is too easily assumed by people in most other occupations that people lack requisite ability or potential to do a top job if they are young). Yet they also get their top personnel to go beyond the normal age of military retirement though they are rather enabled to do so because it is expected that retiring soldiers will not retire entirely but proceed, albeit latish in life, to another career. So insufficient time for the ablest to develop their advanced skills and loss of needed skills (for which many of those people have long trained) is a decisive factor against reducing the normal retirement age to too low an age.
The second factor is what are likely to be the structural problems in a system reliant on ‘dependency’. The truth is however one cuts it and even however one organises society’s financial structure those who don’t work are reliant for their livelihood on those who do work, or rather those who work at useful or critical jobs. Even though one may claim one has saved diligently for retirement, every retiree unavoidably lives mainly or at least substantially off the resources acquired by present time workers. Nobody can arrange to dine say on oranges, bread and meat that were farmed or acquired ten, twenty or thirty years ago before they retired. Nor can retired policemen catch and imprison a fraudster of the present day. In essence having saved for a pension is making a moral claim (based on past good behaviour) upon the resources of the present. It is necessarily a claim upon society’s present resources that pensioners make and are completely dependent upon. Human nature being what it is, it is not a good idea, certainly not in a democratic system, to allow the vast majority of adults (people tend to be more sympathetic to children who are also dependants) to be idle or at leisure and free though ‘dependant’- at least while they could reasonably also work. Meanwhile just a small minority of people, of another age group, would have to do the work necessary for everybody’s sustenance. Then the minority who work and sometimes work hard might not be content with just the thought that their turn for a long life of leisure would if the system persists come round eventually. This could be especially so if they lost most of the income from their labour in a combination of quite punitive taxes so as to keep their leisured elders at leisure. They might strike, rebel or change the political system so as to distribute the workload more widely (or as they might see it more fairly). Anyhow a society in which the great majority of people are dependent for their economic survival on a smallish minority of workers is possibly not stable. It would also probably lead in due course to a poor standard of living (very restrictive, particularly of freedom in retirement) for the leisured elderly compared to the working young.
These two big considerations, expertise and dependence, should not and do not preclude the reduction of the standard age for retirement somewhat to say fifty five or even fifty years old when most people are still physically quite healthy. However they do mean that the age of retirement cannot sensibly be reduced to anywhere near as low as what would otherwise be possible.
Instead of a massive reduction in the age of retirement what I am in this phase of life proposing to do with the massive amount of work time that could be saved is a combination of a big reduction in the standard working week and an increase in people’s normal holiday entitlement. However before I go on to expand on these proposals further it would be useful to examine the general history of human work and my insights into how the amount of human work to be done could sensibly be massively reduced.
Originally people (homo sapiens) were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Indeed people mostly remained hunter-gatherers for over 95% of the time that people have lived on Earth. Similarly wild animals (if not herbivores) are also hunter-gatherers but that is neither technologically nor economically efficient.
Thereafter most people became settled farmers with a smallish minority becoming artisans or tradesmen. (There were eventually even a small minority involved in a usually hierarchical scheme of political leadership that itself developed as settled societies became larger into professional kingship). More important, settling (instead of being nomadic) and later the development of writing (albeit for a small minority who were literate) created the potential for sustained technological development. However though technological developments got started and benefited societies, that was very slow to gather pace. Indeed for many centuries most people lived in terms of their technology in much the same way throughout their lives as their grandfathers had lived. Mostly variations in their lives were caused by the vagaries of the local weather rather than by any new technologies. When the weather was benign life was good (as in the English early Middle Ages when most people lived fairly well and only generally worked a twenty hour week at farms that were then fertile). When the weather was bad (or plague hit) it caused famines and life for most people was plain awful!
It was The Industrial Revolution (initiated by a combination of numerous inventive individuals with canny businessmen) that began in England around the eighteenth century that changed all this. The developing mechanisation that The Industrial Revolution initiated made both manufacturing industry and agriculture far more efficient. It caused a vast movement of labour from agricultural work on farms to industrial manufacturing work in more urbanised areas. In essence manufacturing became more efficient and cheaper, creating more demand and affordability for it. So it was able to pay people more than they got from agricultural labour, attracting people to seek for their own personal betterment manufacturing work rather than agricultural labour. Also at that time in terms of employment because of increased efficiency (as well as increasing international trade) in developed countries agriculture needed less labour and manufacturing industry needed and could absorb more labour. Over time this change or movement in labour patterns was immense. The percentage of people working in agriculture which is in essence the provision of food to society at large (initially primarily their own families) declined from being the vast majority of working people to being an ever smaller minority. Now agriculture accounts for a tiny minority ( about one or two per cent) of the working population in most developed Western societies. In a similar but later pattern the number of people working ‘on the land’ in poorer developing countries is also decreasing over time.
The number of people working in manufacturing industry (manufacturing tangible products) initially increased massively in The Industrial Revolution. It eventually reached a majority, a substantial majority of the working population (in the mid-twentieth century) but it too was ultimately drastically affected by increasing efficiency and cheaper foreign competition. Due to labour saving mechanisation, indeed often automation and competitive price forces, including much cheaper foreign labour the number of people employed in manufacturing industry has declined enormously. It declined from a majority of the workforce in advanced Western countries to a small minority (about 10% in Britain for instance) of the workforce today.
For example in the 1901 British census the great majority of the workforce, that is 90% were employed in ‘manual labour’ that mainly consisted of agricultural labour or industrial labour (though there were then a minority, especially women, who worked as domestic servants). Only 10% of the workforce then were either upper class or worked in non-manual, mainly professional jobs such as teachers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, architects or even shopkeepers etc;. Furthermore there was then a smaller workforce as married women seldom worked unless their family was very poor and the percentage of the population who were children was larger. Nowadays in most Western countries most people (including a much enlarged female workforce) work in non-manual jobs, that is over 60% of the workforce. Under 40% of the actual workforce work in manual jobs such as in agriculture, manufacturing or construction (and not even all of them work efficiently, still less productively!).
The great majority of the workforce (about 75% in Britain today), the mainly non-manual workforce ‘work’ in service industries, a sector whose workforce was tiny (mainly part of the 10% of the non-manual workers) in 1901. I say the question should be asked what is the root of all this service sector that dominates modern employment and what actual good is most of it doing us now? Certainly we are getting no more food, no more living space in housing and no more manufactured goods such as cars, televisions or deep freezes out of all this ‘service industry’! We have however earlier seen just one example of what we are getting out of it which is much more ‘education’, mainly unnecessary education that is wasting much of our precious and limited human time in life.
While still contemplating this, I want to draw attention to two particular and significant features of education that distinguish it from the material products resultant from agriculture or manufacturing industry. The first significant feature is that in essence it is not genuinely market nor demand led. It is mainly the result of governmental directive in the case of compulsory education and at best fashion but in reality more government encouraged coercion on people in the case of nursery and further ‘education’. It is government that has been loaning most of the cost of supposedly voluntary education. It is also government, aided by many employed in education, that has been the main force in pushing the propaganda as to the supposed virtues of ever more education. Even more significantly government has been the force behind closing many careers, not only in its own civil service and public sector to those it deems insufficiently educated (notably non-graduates). Governments have also pressured and sometimes even effectively compelled (usually by regulations) the private sector to also close many jobs to those deemed insufficiently educated. This is not the same as the genuine demand there is for food or even better food or even for manufactured goods.
Secondly and very importantly there is a maximum level of demand for food as there is a limit on the amount of food a person wants to eat or even can eat. There is also a limit, albeit a more flexible limit, to the number of manufactured goods a person wants or can even accommodate in his dwelling, let alone what he can afford. So market led demand has limits, natural limits and in a competitive market is subject to competitive pricing and therefore production efficiency. That simply does not apply to government led ‘demand’. Even taxes upon which the structure partially depends seem to have little limit and negligible influence over either demand or efficiency in meeting demand. With ‘services’ like education there is no limit to the people who might be employed in the venture. People, especially educators, are forever arguing (mainly fallaciously though they convince governments and most people of it) that smaller class sizes lead to better quality education, as do (or so they claim) teaching assistants who lead to more manpower in classrooms. Yet one may forever be reducing class sizes say, from 50 children per class (as used to happen and still happens in some poorer countries) to 40 children per class to 30 to 20 and even to 10 children per class. No need to stop there – one teacher per 5 children would, they may argue, be educationally better and one teacher for 2 children even better still. One need not even stop at one child per class because surely two teachers per child could be even better, not to say in modern parlance less ‘stressful’ for the teachers! There is no natural limit to this and the appetite for extra manpower for public sector funded service industries is seemingly insatiable. So I suspect better technologies and competitive market forces will never of themselves reverse the ever growing absorption of working manpower (or employees and employment) they consume. Some other mechanism, and I suggest it should be ideologically rational governance inspired by human freedom, needs to be the force that achieves this!
In passing I would note that ‘service industry’ is indeed a broad term. Though much of the ‘service sector’ is government directed or at least government led and presently largely outside the financial disciplines (leading to relative efficiency) of genuine competition and the world of profit and loss, there are parts of the service sector that are within the private and capitalist sphere. For instance the holiday and entertainment industries are usually part of the private sector. Their expansion has mostly been led by people having more money for things like holidays. That is in itself no bad thing though it is the cause of some of the extra work that has replaced the decline in agricultural and manufacturing employment. Private financial services is another mainly privately run sector that over time has expanded considerably. Yet even there government has been a malign force. Instead of encouraging efficient streamlining of human time-consuming labour, governments have caused, especially via extra regulations, extra consumption of human labour, human time and general waste which has resulted overall in much less human free time and much less human freedom.
So let us continue to consider governments’ huge contribution to the waste of human labour that has so marked and marred the twentieth and to date the twenty first centuries!
Of course governments (or local governments or governmental agencies) in general don’t only run or fund education but also (dependent on the country)run health services, much public transportation, many utilities and leisure facilities. They also run their policing, defence, prisons, taxation systems and regulation agencies and their own civil service and much else besides. These are mostly outside the realm and discipline of market competition. They are part of a ‘command’ (command by government ministers but more often by unelected, seldom accountable government officials) economy rather than a ‘demand’ economy. (A market ‘demand’ economy has to match what is offered to what other people want at an efficiency standard and price many people, their market, are willing to pay for.) So no wonder with little or no financial control and things run by civil servants (more amenable to the self-interested pleas of their own staff for ever less work and ever more people to do their job and ever less efficiency and ever less criticism) whose pay is generally not performance related, these activities are usually run grossly and often increasingly inefficiently. Such inefficiency results in huge overmanning for what services are offered which is in essence a huge waste of human labour and human time. Just about any activity run by the public sector can be carefully examined and found to be seriously deficient in those terms. Just as an example many municipalities in many countries still run public swimming baths (and even more did so in the past). Yet apart from charging customers they often fail to do essential maintenance (that leads to substantial periods of closures) and frequently rack up colossal losses. Yet very many hotels, especially tourist hotels, even of a relatively modest size manage to maintain and offer for customer use (without extra charges) one or more swimming pools at relatively low cost to the hotel. Of course they don’t have huge numbers of managers, back-up outside managers, rota staff, ticketing staff, cleaners and whatnot to pay. So in the true private sector the service of swimming provision does not, unlike in the public sector, tend to become outrageously and seemingly uncontrollably expensive. That is just one example to look at but one may go right through the public sector and find similar time wasting deficiencies.
Yet the malign and human time wasting impact in creating or necessitating wasteful extra human employment is not limited to the public sector but also now impinges heavily upon the private sector. This is done mainly by imposing multiple regulations, bureaucracy and paperwork, most of it excessive or entirely useless upon the private sector. That means very often contractors need to be employed to comply with regulations and employees need to be engaged just to deal with the bureaucratic requirements. Furthermore most employees have to spend part of their employed time to deal with usually excessive or unnecessary governmental regulations and bureaucracy. Just look at the obstacles facing a restaurant business. Its primary activity is after all just cooking and serving meals which is when one thinks about it what most families do every day at home without inspections, regulations, bureaucracy and paperwork from government or governmental agencies. Indeed most of our meals and therefore most of the potential dangers of the cooking-eating meals process result from home cooking for which there is generally no regulation, no inspection nor enforcement and no formal training! By contrast a restaurant has usually (depending on the country concerned) to get planning authorisation and a license or various licenses even to start up in business. It has then to have its kitchen layout, its gas and electrical supplies tested and certificated, its staff trained and certificated, usually before it even starts up in business. Then there is continual paperwork, and occasional testing by expert contractors and various inspections to cope with while in business. That is as well as multiple regulations relating to employees (even who it can legally employ) and also often to labelling of food and nowadays dangers from allergies as well! To top it all, it has to deal with a complicated tax system and all its transactions have to be monitored and recorded to comply with laws about taxation. No wonder despite a restaurant’s ability to buy food cheaper in bulk and cook more efficiently and more expertly than a home cook its prices are much higher than home cooking! Yet despite all this hugely costly monitoring and bureaucracy, the restaurant’s success or failure as a business mainly results from its reputation for good value among its customers! If one did away all of the various regulations and bureaucracy and paperwork (or computer work) that costs more in human time than it saves in human time (which is what I advocated in my first Bulletin) massive amounts of employed human labour time would be saved.
So I am proposing to massively reduce the working week for people by massively reducing regulations and bureaucracy by cutting out the vast majority of regulations and bureaucracy that just consume overall more human time than they save. I also want the public sector to be streamlined and reduced to the minimum it takes to provide their essential (and doable) ‘services’ reasonably efficiently. It would also be possible to use better techniques and nowadays Artificial Intelligence
in much of the private sector as well as throughout the public sector. Just cutting out ‘duplication’ and even ‘triplication’ would be a big start. Look for instance at how often one’s time and extra airport staff are employed to have oneself and one’s personal luggage checked by scan, not merely once but often twice or three times (and often doing so even if one is just transferring from one plane to another)! There is indeed enormous scope for reducing bureaucracy and time wasting regulations (such as supposed health and safety checks that cost more in overall human time than they save). Such reductions in regulatory, tax and other governmental requirements (indeed there are even sometimes silly requirements for minimum staff numbers in the private sector) would enable huge reductions in employment hours. That would enable most of the proposed reduction in working hours to be achieved. Much of the time for an earlier retirement would also arise from most people starting their working lives about five or even ten years earlier!
Is it really feasible to reduce enormously people’s working week as I am now suggesting?
First of all I have already drawn attention to the British Census of 1901 which showed that 90% of the workforce (that then excluded most women) were employed in manual labour. Only 10% of the workforce were employed in non-manual labour of the kind that now well over 60% of the British workforce are employed in. So in effect about ten people are now covering the occupations that under 130 years ago one person was doing! That indicates waste on a monumental scale, especially as technological assistance is now far better! Even most of the rest of the workforce is now very handicapped by the demands (not made in 1901) on their time from regulations and bureaucratic procedures. It is all this that we should focus on and a reduction in work of two thirds is very modest indeed if we put our minds to it. Possibly we should demand a full 90% reduction in non-manual labour to take it back to 1901 levels when that worked so well as in the case of Britain it ran the biggest empire in the history of the world! That would liberate the human time we need to give people the freedom to live the rest of their lives relatively comfortably and freely as they choose rather than as slaves, well servants, to the dictats of employment, mainly useless, counter-productive employment at that! Technology has liberated most people from manual labour (most notably in agriculture and manufacturing industry). It is the greatest failure of our age and of our politicians and our political theorists that it has not liberated people from most of the work hours people used necessarily to do during their lives! I am advocating the liberation of people’s time from unnecessary employment labour. That is what politicians, especially politicians of the right (unencumbered by the divisive hogwash of the political left) can and should be advocating. Let’s do it. Better late than never!
A further indication that what I advocate is possible and practicable occurred as long ago as 1972 and 1974 in Britain. Then due to coalminers’ strikes there was a shortage of coal to fuel manufacturing industry and provide electrical light and heat supplies to Britain. So the government put almost all workplaces (apart from schools and hospitals), with very little time to prepare for it on a compulsory three day week. This was done without prior notice and when technology was a lot less advanced than it is today. Yet even then manufacturing industry under those very unfavourable circumstances was able to produce 78% in 3 days of what it had produced in a full 5 day week. Fifty years on with better preparation, a less disrupting environment and better technology more can be achieved. That is just in manufacturing industry, let alone the massive savings that can be made in non-manual labour!
As for the practicalities, it is far more sensible to reduce the number of days worked per week than the number of hours worked per day. That is because work entails a time consuming commute to and from work. (I don’t regard ‘working from home’ in most cases to be efficient as it is necessarily largely unsupervised and subject to home distractions such as spouses, children and pets etc;.) That preparation for work also involves preparations in dressing, washing, often makeup etc.; for work. I would aim to get fairly rapidly to a standard 3 day working week, four day weekend, with commensurate arrangements for shift work, beginning with the public sector before being temporarily (until it is standard practice) enforced if necessary in the private (employed) sector. I believe society should not go immediately from a 5 to a 3 day working week but achieve it via fast phasing. For instance the first move should be from say a 5 day, 8 hours a day (40 hours a week) to a 4 day, 9 hours a day (36 hours a week) working week; then a couple of years later to a 4 day 34 hours week; then a 4 day 32 hours week; then (the biggest jump) to a 3 day twenty eight and a half hours week; then 3 days 27 hours; then 3days twenty five and a half hours; then 3 days 24 hours and maybe finally to a three day twenty two and a half hours standard working week. Holiday entitlements could also gradually be increased. The costs, though phased should be shared between employers paying, employees paying (after all they would save some commuting costs) some of the costs and probably some tax incentives to employers to facilitate transition. Those on the political left who now advocate a shorter working week are unrealistic when they say employers in competitive (and often in internationally competitive) industries can be expected to suddenly bear all cost increases if they drastically reduce employees’ working week. That would be the way, as is the habit of the political left, of grandstanding on an issue but practically never actually achieving anything! Admittedly there would also need to be some redistribution of labour away from regulatory and bureaucratic jobs to other jobs, especially those that relate to 24 hour attendance (such as care-work or policing).
After all 100 years ago people used to work on Saturdays (a 6 day working week) which was reduced to a five and a half day working week (working on Saturday mornings, not on Saturday afternoons) before in Western countries abolishing most Saturday work entirely, making it into a five day working week. The great pity is this development was never continued to reduce the standard working week even further though it became technologically possible, albeit frustrated as the price of ever increasing, mainly useless bureaucracy and regulation!
Anyhow, my vision for this third age of man, this third age of human life, adulthood, dominated by work is that it should begin much earlier (early teens) for most people and end with an earlier standard retirement age (say 50 or 55). It should also include within the working age a great deal less work time and much more free leisure time, facilitated mainly by a standard three day working week and eventually supplemented by more weeks off work. This could and would be achieved primarily by more efficiency in work via a much smaller public sector and huge reductions in regulations and bureaucracy.
I turn briefly to the fourth and last age of Man, relative old age, dominated at least for most people by retirement from paid work. Under what I propose this would begin at an earlier age which most people would survive to experience and still for many years be relatively physically healthy. So though, as now, retirement and old age would often draw to a close amid disease and disability, there would for most people be a much longer time of personal freedom. Certainly there would be freedom from the constraints of work during which retirement can be experienced and hopefully enjoyed. So it will be an age not only characterised by retirement but also for the most part characterised by personal freedom (obviously subject to a reasonably adequate pension) concerning what to do with one’s life. Although I have sought to greatly decrease the workload in the third, adulthood, phase of life to increase personal freedom, the fourth age (seniority) of almost complete personal freedom should be the best age of one’s life. As people should be free (subject to not impinging on the freedom of others more than benefiting their own freedom) to do what they like with their time during retirement I say nothing further here about this fourth and final age of human life.
So I am yet again advocating a different conception of politics and governance from other political theorists, past and present. Not only am I advocating a politics that fundamentally takes account of time (as well as human nature and the realities of our world) but also views human life in its various phases as an integrated whole. I set out, unlike others, a political theory to deal with a whole lifetime and interrelate it to both its main phases and the need for certain things to be done to sustain life (such as rearing children and work, albeit work now aided by greatly improved technologies). Within that I look to maximise the scope for personal freedom so that people can so far as practicable live as much of their lives as they, rather than others (especially society as a whole) choose. That, I submit, is a much better, much more unifying and much more attractive mode of politics than what is advocated by other political theorists. Other political theorists have in the main sought to divide humanity into separate and supposedly conflicting ‘interest’ groups such as the rich and the poor; racially black and white; men and women; homosexual and heterosexual; woke and non-woke (or traditionalist). I say such divisions are generally harmful to people and certainly to individual freedoms. They fail to understand that in the main those supposed groups exist and best exist symbiotically and relatively harmoniously rather than in conflict.
However I make a particular point here concerning my demarcated Four Ages Of Man (which is a key aspect of my innovative Politics Of Human Time). That is there has been a terrible failure by the political (and governance) classes to benefit mankind fully from the huge advances in human technology since 1900 that have produced transformative labour saving mechanisms. Instead of drastically reducing the number of working hours within the average human life and diverting that huge (in the context of human life) amount of time for people to spend as they individually wish, legislators and society have introduced huge swathes of regulations and bureaucracy. Mostly they are time consuming and time wasting regulations that have in effect substituted extra work to replace that saved by technology for most people. That I say is unacceptable, horrific and tragic in terms of most people’s lives. That needs to be reversed by much more insightful political thought and political leadership. Let us take advantage of, instead of nullifying, the opportunities much better technology has given us to reduce the human workload and thereby increasing the overwhelming majority of people’s scope and freedom to do as they choose, not as others choose, with their lives.
Geoffrey H L Berg