Will we run out of work, Economist?

#16 – Present photography meets future economics

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P: Good morning, Economist.

E: Good morning, Photographer.

P: I've read the papers.

E: Good to hear.

P: It says there have never been so many people in work in Germany as today.

E: You like superlatives, don't you?

P: What surprises me, Economist, is the following. When I was young, there was high unemployment in Germany. There was almost panic. Many believed this would never change again because of the ongoing technological progress.

E: I remember.

F: And isn't this fear somehow justified? We constantly invent new things to make our work easier, even to erase many jobs. Just think of the factories. Robots have made countless jobs redundant. We develop to work less, but instead, if the newspaper has put it right, we work more and more. That's weird.

E: It isn’t that weird. Technological progress ensures that what a single person can produce at a time tends to increase. It used to take 20 people to harvest a field, today, one tractor and one tractor driver are enough. It is similar in the factories and in many other working areas. At its core, this development increases our prosperity. Jobs are lost because machines do the work. So people have time to do other work.

P: And who says that we won't run out of work in the end?

E: There are more important things in life to worry about, Photographer. We will not run out of work as long as people have needs and these needs can be met by others.

P: Sounds reassuring, Economist.

< silence >

P: Would you say you work a lot, Economist?

E: Rather not. More specifically, I would say that whenever I feel like I'm working a lot, I actually don't like the work. If I like it, it doesn't occur to me as a lot of work. What about you?

P: Some people think that photographers don't work at all. Because photographers only take photos. These people believe that this couldn't be hard work. And guess what, they are right in a sense. My work is not work in the sense of suffering, in the sense of effort, in the sense of doing something that one would never do voluntarily. My hobby is my job. I wouldn't call that work.

E: Well then, I wish you a lazy day, Photographer.

P: You too, Economist.