It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy. The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money; but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.
I once attempted to sum this up on another forum by saying, “Careerism is a subgoal stomp.” Russell, of course, better expresses the broader point that the subgoal stomp of maximizing productivity has almost entirely replaced all discussion of what kind of terminal goals individuals and societies should have.
The problem with spending money—and consumption in general—is the opportunity cost. If by doing something you are not maximizing some value, then it would be better if you did.
The same criticism could be also made about production: if you work hard and make profit by creating value, but by doing something else you could create even more value, then it would be better if you did the other thing.
Perhaps the difference is that on the production side people at least try to maximize (of course with all the human irrationality involved), but on the consumption side we often forget to think about it. So we need to be reminded there more.
If by doing something you are not maximizing some value, then it would be better if you did.
Not some value—a lot of people are maximizing the wrong values.
One of the reasons why this whole thing is so complicated is that in reality people very rarely optimize for a single value. They optimize for a set of values which usually isn’t too coherent and the weights for these values tend to fluctuate...
-- Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness
I once attempted to sum this up on another forum by saying, “Careerism is a subgoal stomp.” Russell, of course, better expresses the broader point that the subgoal stomp of maximizing productivity has almost entirely replaced all discussion of what kind of terminal goals individuals and societies should have.
The problem with spending money—and consumption in general—is the opportunity cost. If by doing something you are not maximizing some value, then it would be better if you did.
The same criticism could be also made about production: if you work hard and make profit by creating value, but by doing something else you could create even more value, then it would be better if you did the other thing.
Perhaps the difference is that on the production side people at least try to maximize (of course with all the human irrationality involved), but on the consumption side we often forget to think about it. So we need to be reminded there more.
Not some value—a lot of people are maximizing the wrong values.
One of the reasons why this whole thing is so complicated is that in reality people very rarely optimize for a single value. They optimize for a set of values which usually isn’t too coherent and the weights for these values tend to fluctuate...