Let’s begin by viewing human lives in yet another fundamental way that has been overlooked by political theorists. In social and political terms most modern lives consist of four ages (reduced from the seven outlined by playwright William Shakespeare). Those human ages are each linked to one significant phase or activity in most modern people’s lives. First is infancy, an age of total dependence. Second is adolescence, a time of education. Third is prime adulthood, an age of work and incidentally generally also an age of parenting. Fourth and finally (for the majority who live long enough) is old age which is usually an age of retirement from work.
Most fundamentally I am a libertarian and accordingly so far as is practicable I believe people should be free to live as much as their lives as can reasonably be managed in their own way. I see the whole of human life including the various ‘ages of man’ within this overarching political concept.
The first age, the age of infancy is unavoidably characterised by total dependence on others. I say no more.
The second age, adolescence, is more significant and is presently dominated by ‘education’. This link between adolescence and education now seems thoroughly entrenched but for most humans historically speaking, that is a quite recent innovation. Up until about one hundred years ago most people could not read and were illiterate. Yet people survived and managed reasonably well, albeit in less technologically advanced societies (though still with much technology). So schooling and literacy is certainly not essential for people even if in many ways it is useful for human societies.
Moreover education has a price, a very considerable price, not just in money but also in sheer human time attached to it both for educators and also, certainly in the latter stages of education (when those being educated could do other things) for those being educated. In principle I say education, 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. That is far from the situation at present.
Two big fallacies bedevil education. The first fallacy is most jobs in modern society should require ever more education. Not true. Relatively few jobs rely on educational attainment; most rely on common sense and on the job learning. The second fallacy is if some education is good (as is mainly the case) ever more is ever better. That is not true of eating food and is not true of education, especially in terms of the human time it consumes relative to life as a whole. Eliminating those two fallacies would eliminate most modern education (except for a small percentage of key occupations such as doctors or researchers). In fact education is unnecessarily consuming at least five and often ten years of most people’s lives.
So what I propose for about 90% of the population (the exception being the academically most gifted) is a short, intense, basic and practical education lasting seven years, starting at age 7. At the age of 14 there would be a comprehensive assessment of abilities, both academic and technical. Then most people would either start a job or technical training for work. So most people would start work 4 or 5 or 7 or more years earlier than now, thereby massively cutting the cost of education both financially and in life years devoted to it, ultimately facilitating earlier retirement from work.
Ideally I would also similarly reduce the length of the third phase of people’s lives, relating to work in prime adulthood. There are however two obstacles to doing so.
The first obstacle is ‘elitist expertise’. If the normal retirement age were pushed as low as thirty, specialist doctors, research scholars and Judges might not even be fully trained, let alone satisfactorily experienced by the normal retirement age.
The second obstacle is likely structural problems in a system reliant on ‘dependency’. The truth is 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 substantially off the resources acquired by present time workers. Nobody can arrange to dine say on oranges, bread or meat produced ten, twenty or thirty years before they retired. It is socially not a good idea for the vast majority of adults to be at leisure and free, at least while they could work while just a small minority of people of another age group do all the work necessary for everybody’s sustenance.
So while the standard retirement age should be lowered to about fifty years of age, I would look in a phased way to encapsulate most savings in eliminating unnecessary or wasteful work primarily by eventually reducing the working week to three days and also by some increase in people’s holiday entitlement.
Yes, it can be done. For instance due to better technology the percentage of people working in agriculture declined from most of the workforce to only 1% or 2% in most Western countries. Thereafter and similarly the number of people working in manufacturing industry declined from most of the workforce in the twentieth century to only about 10% now in many Western countries.
So what is this workforce doing as substitute for work in agriculture or manufacturing industry? Certainly they are producing nothing edible or in most senses material and tangible! Statistics tell us about three quarters of the workforce now ‘work’ in ‘service industries’. Though some of that like tourism is private sector and subject to market economics, most is public sector driven or working to fulfil the regulatory or other demands of government or quasi-government. This is absurdity. The only sensible response is a massive cutback in government’s size and scope. It is public sector activity that is the main reason why people have scarcely benefited in terms of less worktime and consequently more freedom in their lives from the massive advances in technology that have meant a great deal more can be and is being produced with a tiny workforce compared to 1901. That failure to translate those technological advances into more human free time and more freedom (or even to spot that opportunity!) is the greatest political failure of my lifetime!
The fourth and last Age of Man, relative old age is dominated 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 there would for most people be a much longer time of personal freedom, certainly freedom from the constraints of work.
So yet again I advocate a different conception of politics and governance from other political theorists, past and present. I advocate a politics that fundamentally relates to human time as well as human nature and the realities of our world. Within that I look to maximise the scope for personal freedom so people can so far as practicable live as much of their lives as possible as they, rather than others (especially society as a whole) choose.
Geoffrey H.L.Berg M.A.(Cantab) – The Guru Of Rational Politics