A sensible ethic.

• Author: Schumacher, Paul
• Position: Letter to the editor

To get people to even think about working less, we will have to overcome the bad effect of our still dominant work ethic. This work ethic is 2,000 years old and derives from the founder of Christianity, St. Paul: "Let him who does not work, not eat." This may have been appropriate for a subsistence agricultural society, but it is absurd for conditions today.

Work is not inherently good. It is sometimes simply necessary.

To make this more sensible ethic prevail, workers must have much more control over work.

De Graaf mentioned Juliet Schor's latest book. In an earlier book, The Overworked American , Schor tells about how, in the United States, when industrialism took hold, things could be made much more efficiently. The owners faced a choice: Workers could get either more things or more...