No More Work

Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea

By: James Livingston

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 3 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2016 James Livingston (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Could've used another draft

The arguments proposed in this book are compelling, but it reads like a draft, not a finished work. His definition of "work" seems to morph throughout the book, and some of his arguments aren't fleshed out enough. Still worth a read.

Not What I Expected At All - Way Better Though

Excellent practical & philosophical recommendation for an all out, socioeconomic reformation. This book is definitely in line with my own research on STEM Theory and The AI STEM Drive.
Brilliantly thought out and well written!

A much-needed counterbalance to current thinking

A fun, provocative, and--ultimately--convincing case. Jobs are becoming less remunerative and fulfilling. Livingston explains why we should stop obsessing over them and focus on what we enjoy. Can we get workaholic politicians to listen?

rumsfeld and Cheney running an UBI program in the 1960s!

none to change in this book, the ideas are interesting. good history lessons good things to plan for the future

what a joke

there so many flaws with this book. bunch of half bake ideas with no substance.

Sadly Clueless

A product of Continued Universal Human Cluelessness (so the author's cluelessness is by no means unique). Has no clue as to what to do when we are not working, and has no clue as to what we all SHOULD be cooperatively working toward (because the author has not read the Philosophy of Broader Survival) (the hint is in the title). Also speaks highly of Marx (who was wrong, the problem with humanity was not economic, but philosophical), and seems Pie in the Sky, as if money were freely ubiquitous. Peppers the book with preposterous argument for the Left (one example: they are for the traditional family). Good God. Debate team assignment? He fails, needness to say, and worse, he seems to have searched hard for bad science (and for any science, and not all is good - 85% of published papers cannot be duplicated) to validate his twisted sophism. A social manipulator when nothing needs manipulating, playing FDR and the New Deal when there is no massive immediate crisis (and when FDR's philosophy was 'to do something', anything, and the New Deal was the first thing that came to his mind, meaning he really wasn't a Socialist, just a 'man of action'). People like this author have not read that part of history. They are Socialism for Socialism's sake.