Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

Productivity keeps going up, now to the point where there is less and less work.

Instead of paying people more and reducing hours we let enough be taken by some at the top it unbalanced the whole system.

We should be working 3 day weeks on the same wages by now.

4 day week would be a start, it would give parents enough time to do chores and have a weekend.

Productivity is not a problem. We produce way more food than we need, way more cars than we need, way more plastic gadgets than we need etc.

In fact, we produce so much that it's making people sick: obesity, diabetes, atrophy, cancer, loneliness, depression etc.

At some point a long time ago productivity stopped being the thing that made us happy and started being the thing that made us sick.

But our politicians never stopped using this crude measurement as a target. If there's one thing people love it's a number. Number goes up: good, number goes down: bad. Easy. But there's no number for happiness, so our political systems are incapable of targeting it.

Now that productivity is long behind us we now need to start working out how to climb out of these local optima we've dug ourselves into. We need to solve problems like cancer. This doesn't get done by people going to a building and turning a handle all day. This gets done by thinking.

> Productivity is not a problem

GP didn't claim it was