When I was 16 years old, I landed my first real job. It was a horrible telemarketing job where we sat in this building right here in windowless rooms and peddled lotteries and magazine subscriptions to mainly old people. Looking back, I’m not very proud of the work that I did there.
But I did learn how to drink coffee while I worked there. So I'm in the middle of transitioning from being a lawyer to becoming a filmmaker. This career transition has made me think a lot about jobs and the role work plays in our lives.
And in thinking about that, I’ve kept coming back to the work I did in this building right here, and I will explain why I keep coming back to that horrible telemarketing job, but first, I want to show you something. If you get to live until you're 82 years old, then 984 is the number of months you will get in your life. And here to my left, you have a visual representation of that.
These 984 dots, they represent your life. The red dots in the middle, they represent the months of your life when you will be working. 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, or even more.
Certainly it's not news to anyone that we spend huge parts of our lives working. But what I find a little bit odd is that we almost never ask this question: Is it really necessary for us to let work take up such huge parts of our lives? In the 1950s, around 200,000 people worked in the Swedish forests, in forests like this.
Sawing and cutting trees and doing all that stuff. But just 20 years later, the tractor and the chainsaw, and other innovations had reduced that number from 200,000 to just around 50,000. Then, 50 years after that, the single grip harvester and other innovations had reduced that number further to just around 15,000.
So what happened in the forest industry, i. e. reducing the workforce from around 200,000 to around 15,000 is nothing short of remarkable.
But the same has happened across a multitude of industries during the 20th century. Thanks to new technologies, we're able to produce vast amounts of stuff with comparatively very little effort. In my country, Sweden, productivity has gone up around 20 times since the 19th century.
Put differently things that took 20 workers to produce in the beginning of the 19th century can today be produced by only one worker. And this mind blowing increase in productivity did make it possible for our parents generations, our grandparents and grand grandparents, to radically improve their lives in two main ways. First of all, their incomes and materials standard of living increased.
But second of all, these generations were also able to start working, much less. During the 20’s here in Sweden, we went from working 12 hours a day to 8 hours a day. During the 30’s, we gave everyone the right to take a couple of weeks vacation.
During the 60’s we stopped working on Saturdays. In the 70’s we expanded the right to take parental leave and we lowered the retirement age from 67 to 65 here in Sweden. But then, in the 70’s, something happened.
Productivity didn't stop increasing. It has actually doubled since then. But since then we've stopped using the increased productivity to improve our lives.
Since the 70’s, wages haven't increased nearly as much as the productivity gains and in general, we don't work less today than we did during the 70’s. In Sweden, by some accounts, if we start raising the retirement age, we will actually work more today. So here's a huge conundrum, right?
If we produce twice as much per person today compared to the 70’s, but we don't earn twice as much or work half as much, where has all the value of all that extra production gone. Recently, an apartment in that building sold for around €6 million. So to the question where the value from all that additional productivity has gone, here's part of your answer.
It has gone to the richest capital owners like the people who can afford apartments like that. Let's imagine that it's the 1980’s right now and that these 100 people represent the world's population. This man in the top, he represent the richest 1% of the world.
These 50 people in the bottom, they represent the poorest half of the world. Let's then fast forward from the 80’s to today. Since then, productivity has almost doubled, creating a lot of new wealth.
But out of all of that new wealth, the richest 1% of the world has captured close to twice as much as the bottom 50% of the world. If you look at the productivity increase of the last two years, the richest 1% has captured almost twice as much as the 99%. So while our parents and our grandparents were able to enjoy the fruits of increased productivity by earning more and working less, since the 80’s, our generation has more or less donated the value of our increased productivity to the very richest.
That is a bit sad, right? But there's another even sadder part to this story, namely that the work we spend our lives doing is becoming more and more pointless. When I worked in here as a teenage telemarketer some 20 years ago, I remember thinking that, wow, this is a really horrible job.
I was miserable as a telemarketer. My telemarketer colleagues were miserable. And the people we called, they hated us for doing our job.
A recent survey showed that 72% of Swedes actually wish that telemarketing would be illegal. So why do we keep doing these jobs that no one seems to want? Like telemarketing?
Why do these jobs even exist? In the 1850s, less than 200 years ago. 75% of the Swedish workforce worked within what economists call the primary sector, which means the food production sector.
Today, that number is 2%. And in the 1950s, 33% of the Swedish workforce worked within what economists call the secondary sector, which is the industry sector. Today, that number is 10%.
So in other words, only very few of us are still working within the actual production of stuff. So what do the rest of us do for work? Well, today, 75% in Sweden and 50% globally work within what economists call the tertiary sector or the service sector.
This service sector is a curious phenomenon. So some jobs in the service sector, they do serve obvious human needs, doctors and nurses, for example. But most of the jobs in the service sector, they do not.
In fact, most jobs in the service sector have one or two of these things in common: 1. they don't create any value, they just shift it around. 2.
if people doing these jobs would go on a permanent strike, society would be just fine or would even be better off. So if that's true, why do we still do these service jobs? Well, because these service jobs is the only mechanism we have to redistribute a little bit of money to all of us who no longer are needed within the production of stuff and who are not rich enough to live off capital.
To make people accept this weird and pretty inefficient redistributive system, we've had to indoctrinate ourselves in a work ethic that says that what you do at work, or at school, is far less important than the fact that you just do work or go to school. That is also why the work we do is getting increasingly pointless. The point of work isn't to have a point anymore.
Research also bears out how pointless work is becoming in a number of sad statistics. I will mention only a few of them here. So first of all, today only 1 in 5 employees globally claim to be engaged at work.
3 in 5 are emotionally detached or indifferent and 1 in 5 are miserable at work or even feel hostile to their employer. Second, the pointlessness of the service sector is also evident in how little work many office workers actually perform. So some studies show that office workers spend between 1.
5h and 3. 5h per workday pretending to do work, while they actually do non-work activities like posting things online or shopping things online. And third, research also shows that when people retire from work, their health improves as if they became ten years younger.
We've just experienced 200 years of massive, unprecedented productivity growth. Because of AI, autonomous driving and robots, this growth will just keep accelerating. Because of that, our traditional notions of work have become, or at least increasingly becoming, obsolete.
Our grandparents generations understood that when they demanded and implemented various measures to reduce how much they work. Why isn't our generation demanding the same? Instead of acknowledging the emancipatory potential of increased productivity, almost all of our politicians today are focusing on how to create more jobs.
And some politicians even want us to work more today. And yes, we do live longer today, but so did our grandparents when they reduced how much they worked. Because here's the key: The productivity gains have been so massive that they dwarf the relevance of increased life expectancy.
As we're now entering the fourth industrial revolution, we have an important choice to make. Either we keep creating pointless jobs, to maintain a system that enables a small group of people to amass more and more wealth. Or we start using the productivity gains to improve the lives for everyone.
So I've been binge reading the Swedish sociologist Roland Paulsen's books, and in the video you have just seen (thank you for watching it, by the way) I'm sort of exploring and trying out some of the ideas from from his books. If you like this video, I suggest you check out his books. If you're interested in critique of work, I can also recommend Rutger Bregman’s book Utopia for Realists.
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