No work, No pay revisited

Co-blogger here at Scatablog, ChiTom, e-mails me some suggestions in response to my previous post about what to do with the rest of the people when (and if) only a few highly productive people are needed to produce everything society needs. They are:

#1 Shorter work-weeks and longer vacations. Americans are notoriously bad about this. We work more and more hours all the time. Ought to employ more people. Just because society goes 24/7 doesn't mean all people have to.

#2 Create (and pay for) human service jobs: nursing homes, school aides, community youth activities, public support for the fine arts, and so forth. These places are understaffed because underfunded.

#3 As a compensation for taxation upon the ultra-productive, offer such people human rewards instead of infinite amounts of money: time off, desirable working and living conditions, and so forth.

These suggestions make a lot of sense to me. Much of Europe has already implemented policies like these, with long vacations, shorter work-weeks, job sharing opportunities, and extensive social welfare programs. Indeed, many Europeans seem quite satisfied with somewhat lower incomes and higher taxes than are typical in America in exchange for far more free time.

Unfortunately, I doubt the incentives ChiTom proposes in item #3 are likely to catch on in America. The tendency to measure a person's overall worth by his wealth is too strong here.

Further, even Europe is being forced to move in the opposite direction by competition from less developed countries.

Maybe no solution is possible until there is a more equitable distribution of wealth around the world. One would hope that could be done by raising the living standards in the less developed world without lowering our own, but right now that doesn't seem to be the way it's working out.