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there is a more general lesson to be learnt about our puzzling relationship with work, and a lesson that will prove particularly useful if AI dislocates the labour market.
The puzzle is that we have a love-hate relationship with working for a living. Look closely and you find that people do not tend to enjoy their work. Step back and you find that they can’t do without it.
Twenty years ago, a team of social scientists, including Alan Krueger, an economist, and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate psychologist, investigated the wellbeing of nearly 1,000 employed women living in Texas. Kahneman and Krueger asked these women to reconstruct a recent day, episode by episode, and to rate the emotions experienced during meals, stretches of childcare, commuting and so on. Emotional labels included “happy”, “enjoying myself”, “annoyed”, “depressed” and “anxious”.
A Douglas Adams character once ruefully reflected about his job that the hours were good but “most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy”. The point of Kahneman and Krueger’s research was to examine that distinction, directing people away from grand evaluations of their lives and towards the moment-to-moment experiences of which life is made.