Time to kill.

• Author: Muller, Steven
• Position: Employment in Europe

Europe and the Politics of Leisure

Europe, now liberated from the Cold War, is seeking to reconstitute itself, and in doing so fulfill the lofty integrationist expectations of the early post-World War II era on a fully continental basis. Despite minority undertones of skepticism both here and in Europe, the prevailing expectation is that a new and better Europe is taking shape, one that will be united, prosperous, stable, and democratic. But such expectations mirror hopes, not reality. Europe as a whole is far more likely to face a period of acute economic stagnation, the undermining rather than the expansion of democracy, and serious social upheaval.

Conventional economic analysis and a few select sociological observations suffice to account for most of Europe's coming trouble - of these more below. But it may be, too, that what would otherwise be merely trouble will turn into a full-blown crisis for a reason that has so far received little attention: that Europe is destined to bear the initial brunt of a revolutionary change in the human condition. Such a bold assertion naturally invites skepticism if not outright rejection. Nonetheless, humanity may well be standing on the edge of a fundamental reversal of the human condition: the elevation of work into a privilege and the denigration of leisure into the burden of idleness.

Revolutionary is indeed the only way to describe the implications of such a reversal of the social functions and values of work and leisure. Throughout the ages, for all but a privileged minority that could command servants, the need to labor has been accepted as an inescapable burden. Only that same privileged minority had the luxury of true leisure, meaning not merely time free from work but discretionary time and energy uncontaminated by exhaustion or deprivation. Now we face a future in which the need for human labor will rapidly diminish to the point where there is no longer enough work to occupy the majority - let alone the entirety - of the human talent and energy available. Leisure will become ever more abundant, up to and indeed beyond the point of idleness and boredom. Increasingly, those with meaningful work to accomplish will constitute a privileged minority, while the majority will consist of those burdened with idle "time to kill."

The origins of this transformation go back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when, for the first time in history, machinery began to replace heavy human and animal labor and also to provide humanity with enormously increased mobility. The pace of that revolution itself continuously accelerated, but since the arrival of electronic technology it has been explosive. Smart machines, equipped with increasingly sophisticated virtual intelligence, now more and more perform the tasks of both production and service that human society requires. The human home as well is far along in featuring autonomously intelligent, comprehensively responsive technological enhancements of human purpose - such as programmable environmental, communications, cooking, cleaning, and security systems.

These developments are already so familiar as to require no further elaboration to those living in the technologically most advanced nations. Much of humanity, of course, finds itself in earlier stages of industrial and technological development, but the more gradual pace of the lateral extension of the industrial-technological revolution has not retarded its headlong rush in the most highly developed countries. Nor has the correlation between technological advance and the growth of material prosperity broken step as this rush has continued. Up to the present, too, the volume of work has remained sufficient to sustain more or less acceptable levels of employment - and hence the consumption levels required to keep a consumer society economically robust.

In the days ahead, however - and not so far ahead - there will be an inexorable rise in unemployment in the societies already most technologically advanced: the United States, Europe, and Japan. Much can be done, and is being done, to share jobs between two or even more people, to shorten worktime, increase holidays and vacations, and search for other means to spread out employment opportunities more widely. But despite such expedients, unemployment will increase as the need for work decreases.

Now there is a standard economic objection to this scenario, and it will be just as well that it be made explicit. It may be argued that the problem of absolute scarcity was already solved thirty or forty years ago in much of the West. Certainly, to someone living a century or two earlier it would have seemed so. But people tend progressively to transform their definition of "want" into "need", and there seems to be an infinite capacity to create new - critics would say "artificial" - demands in a consumer society. It is not self-evident that this process cannot continue indefinitely, or at least for a very long time; if people are willing to spend money on some thing or some service, there will be jobs to make whatever that thing is or that service delivers. There may be more smart machines, but there will also be more demands and hence more (if different) jobs created by that demand.

What is wrong with this argument? It vastly underestimates the revolutionary impact of information technology, which holds a future where machines can make other machines, and where the overall substitution of machine for human labor will progress exponentially. Already, smart machines have polarized the labor market in the most advanced countries. On the one hand we have the symbol manipulators and the machine-builders and caregivers, and on the other the McDonald's and hospital laundry workers. This itself is a truly explosive social issue, and one that technological dynamism is likely to make much more acute as, with the passing of time, jobs on the lower end of the sophistication scale disappear much faster than those on the upper end.

Europe's Handicaps

Whether one sees the growth of leisure as a truly revolutionary phenomenon or as a serious but still manageable social problem, its full effects are likely to be experienced first in Western Europe. For of the three economically advanced areas of the world - North America, Northeast Asia, and Western Europe - the last will be the least able to respond effectively to it. The fundamental reason for this lies in the structures of government economic policy that the exceedingly generous welfare states of the continent have adopted. Rising unemployment increases demand for compensatory public expenditures, and the states of Western Europe are badly placed to afford such additional expenditures. Their plight is due to a combination of external and internal circumstances, both of which restrict their ability to avoid a social crisis.

[TABULAR DATA OMITTED]

As for the internal constraints, here we come to mostly conventional economic considerations. While West European states are not all alike - Britain after Thatcher, for example, has reduced the role and cost of central government more than its Continental partners - they are similar enough for present purposes. The Federal Republic of Germany represents the quintessential and most acute example of the European dilemma. The recent sharp rise in German unemployment suggests more than merely cyclical adjustments and the costs of integrating the former German Democratic Republic to the tune of nearly $2 billion per year; it is almost certainly structural in nature. The current level exceeds 11 percent, one not experienced in the Federal Republic since the 1950s. The current French unemployment level is even higher (12.8 percent) and the Spanish much higher still (21.8 percent). Indeed, comparable problems exist throughout the European Union today, suggesting not random difficulties or mismanagement, but the result of something embedded in Europe's essential way of doing business.

The economic problems generated by generous welfare states are many, but for Europe the implications for unemployment are the most graphic and serious. The core of the problem is that the added costs of assisting ever increasing numbers of unemployed require ever greater public expenditures. Something has to give. Efforts to reduce the costs of the welfare state and to increase tax revenues are predictably producing heated controversy virtually everywhere in the EU...