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James Livingston

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea Hardcover – October 28, 2016

by James Livingston (Author)

3.8 54 ratings

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For centuries we've believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance--in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn't work, you didn't eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself.

In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In this book, James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem--why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that "full employment" is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for any problem, moral or economic. The result is a witty, stirring denunciation of the ways we think about why we labor, exhorting us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world--and showing us that we can afford to leave that world behind.

Print length

128 pages
Language

English
Publisher

The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date

October 28, 2016
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.75 x 7.25 inches
ISBN-10

1469630656
ISBN-13

978-1469630656
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Pack[s] a verbal blow against all those--on the Right and the Left--who continue to kneel in adoration in the Chapel of Work.--Dissident Voices

Unrivaled . . . in its audacity and brashness, all in a delightfully amusing little essay that is guaranteed to delight undergrads and provoke them to question their individual collective future. Highly recommended.--Choice

Livingston is at his most persuasive as a historian.--Public Books

Review

No More Workis, wonderfully, at once a rude book and a kind one. Livingston is bracingly impolite about the cult of capitalistic productivity, all in the service of the happiness and pleasure that could be ours if we demanded less toil from ourselves and more justice from our society.--Benjamin Kunkel, author of Utopia or Bust

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ The University of North Carolina Press (October 28, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1469630656
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1469630656
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.75 x 7.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,902,593 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,963 in Economic History (Books)
- #7,066 in Human Resources (Books)
- #25,985 in Sociology (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.8 54 ratings

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James Livingston

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James Livingston has taught history at Rutgers since 1988. Before then, he taught at a community college, a maximum-security prison, a small liberal-arts college, and three state universities. He's the author of five books, beginning with Origins of the Federal Reserve System (1986), on topics in economic, intellectual, social, and cultural history. His published essays include studies of Shakespeare, banking reform, cartoon politics, pragmatism, diplomatic history, Marxism, slavery and modernity, feminism, corporations and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, capitalism and socialism. He lives in New York City.

Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5

54 global ratings

5 star		38%
4 star		28%
3 star		20%
2 star		4%
1 star		11%

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A Reader

Riveting

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 16, 2016

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James Livingston’s refrain throughout these searching, provocative, and erudite 111 pages is “***k Work.” Most of us probably feel a measure of relief, not to say liberation, in merely uttering the phrase: ***k Work. ***k it. ***k it all to hell. Well OK, so aside from finding a catchy slogan to capture what so many of us feel in our workaday lives, what’s Livingston’s purpose in telling us that we’re essentially wasting our time on the job? We already know – don’t we? – that the postcapitalist system under the sign of which we labor all the livelong day is paying us too little to boost productivity – that ten-dollar word that captures what the powers that be treat as *socially necessary* – even while offering us garbanzo beans for doing work that’s *socially beneficial*, like child-rearing, or uploading our latest piece of fan fiction, or, oh, railing against Trump on Facebook. So why shouldn’t we just buck up and get on with it and, work ethic in heart and mind, keep telling ourselves that work, however meaningful, will somehow build character, keep hoping against hope that what doesn’t kill us will make us stronger…workers? Well – and this is something Livingston has to establish in brief historically, you understand, and economically, and even philosophically – the problem with this line of thinking is that the robots really are upon us, all of us. And that means you too, Shanghai sweatshop worker sweating over Apple components. In fact, it’ll likely be to many leftists’ dismay to learn that there have been select moments in US political history when liberals like [cough] Nixon, and Rumsfeld, and Cheney advocated for policies that would have effectively guaranteed a minimum income – to everyone – an especially sensible move after it was proven, over and over, that this had no effect to speak of on worker productivity. At any rate the signs are everywhere that capitalism has failed or, as Livingston has it, succeeded – read the ***king book – and his argument is that there simply aren’t enough good paying jobs to keep us gainfully employed making the stuff that dreams are made of, and moreover, that things are only going to get worse for homo economicus, DIY craft-based spiritually-fulfilling artisan startups notwithstanding. We’d be better off paying everyone a guaranteed income, and if that results in a small cohort of lazy asses who just want to ***k off and read books like No More Work, that would be a far, far better thing than millions living on the dole, and the rest working their asses off for peanuts in industrial systems that, oh yeah, are ravaging the Earth. After all, there’ll still be yahoos like yours truly writing pro bono reviews, right? But wait…there’s more! And it has to do with our distinctively human lot, as some would have it, whereby work and love – that’s right, love – comprise the ties that bind. ***k with one, you ***k with the other. But what do brick and rivet and lime have to do with love? Read the ***king book, even if you would prefer not to. As Clark Gable puts it in The Misfits, beats wages.

24 people found this helpful

Helpful

Ted

Good but missing a definition of "un-work" and data on motivation

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 17, 2017

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This is a good but unfinished book. Or maybe it just needs a fast sequel. The author makes an erudite case that both the Left and Right believe in full-time employment for all; that this is an unreachable goal and is unnecessary with the addition of minor tweaks in tax rates. Everybody can have, should have, a basic income without having to work. So here's the rub for me: What does Livingston mean by "work?" Is it anything I get paid for (everything else is un-work)? I'm working on this review. Working! Does that count? I'm assuming not, but Livingston never spells out what this state of doing things for which people aren't paid is-- and crucially, whether is it s good idea in fact (look, I like the idea but want more data about it). As I moved through the book, I was looking for empirical data about motivation and happiness: With millions of people not working for money, would they need training for un-work? Or just figure it out for themselves? For what drives motivation, check out Daniel Pink's Drive Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us . Or Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) . Gallup polls show year after year that few people in corporations experience either motivation or flow. Can we do a far better job with people out in the wild? Or would they figure it out on their own?

17 people found this helpful

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How can I give a less than one-star rating?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 29, 2017

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This is a worthless book. Which is too bad, because the topic is a vital one. How will our society (or our children’s) deal with a work environment where most of jobs that provide employment today (but not all of them) can be handled with robots and AI? Who will get (or be compelled to take) the jobs that need doing? How will we pay those worker bees, and how will that compare to what we hand to those who either can’t or won’t do the work?
Rather than offering useful thoughts about these complex issues, Livingston, who is said to be a teacher at Rutgers, seeks to show that he’s one of the guys by scattering some dirty words throughout the text. Back in my pre-teen years I was taught that dropping these words into an otherwise intelligent discussion simply demonstrated the inadequacy of one’s vocabulary. They are to be used only in extremely stressful situations, where a relief valve is helpful. So I try to save them for appropriate use. Apparently Livingston wasn’t paying attention when those lessons were being taught.

But he is also anxious to show that he’s really smart. So he livens up the book with what I assume is the only Greek word he knows—“poesis”—whether it’s appropriate or not. Perhaps it is. But it sure brings to a halt a reader such as I who doesn’t have the benefit of training in classical languages.

Finally, I have to comment on a motif which seemed to run through the book—the old Marxist shibboleth about “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” More often than I cared for there appeared fragments of this bit of unwisdom. But never was there any meaningful discussion of the idea. Which, as I reflect back on the book, is about what Livingston has to offer—a good description of a tough problem, and no ideas about how it might be attacked.

5 people found this helpful

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Sean T. Gill

I hope people are ready

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 27, 2017

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As described by the author, he wrote this at the urging of others. Sometimes I'm not sure he explains what he means as fully as needed (like the references to being our brother's keeper), but the book makes it's point. Robots and AI will change work in ways we have never seen. Maybe at every revolution in work (the steam engine, large scale manufacturing machines, etc) jobs have been lost and new jobs created. But this long march of efficiency will soon take a turn where there really are no jobs. Not jobs to China or Mexico, just no need for any humans to do them at all. It may be against human nature to prepare for changes before they bocome a crisis, but I would like to think we can start to adjust away from defining our worth and our lives by the job we do.

5 people found this helpful

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Simon Rotelli

Da leggere e consigliare

Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on May 2, 2019

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Ho trovato la lettura decisamente interessante, molto al di sopra delle mie aspettative, e anche della mia preparazione sull'argomento, particolarmente quando si toccano gli aspetti filosofici.
Una lettura rapida ma talmente ricca di spunti che userò la bibliografia per scegliere altri libri sull'argomento.
Davvero ottimo acquisto.

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Amazon Kunde

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 22, 2017

Verified Purchase

interesting

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