Yea, I don’t know that I particularly care for their vision of the future (much too sanitized), but their optimism is enviable.
Hell, I still miss the optimism of the early internet years, before people figured out that it is mostly a place to buy shit, watch television, and pretend to be happy on social media.
They actually got a lot right, but two big misses:
- Decline of nationalism. “Let’s just head on down to Mexico for 18 of golf!” “Let’s head down to San Juan for a show!” Would it be that the world was like that today.
- A “life of leisure.” I actually think that’s not particularly desirable – people’s happiness doesn’t seem very correlated to leisure (within reason). Now, having said this:
In The Overworked American (1991), Juliet Schor showed evidence that Americans were spending more time at paid work in the late 1980s than they had been in the late 1960s. Using government statistics she estimated that total annual work time grew by 163 hours per year between 1969 and 1987. Both women and men worked longer hours, but women worked 300 hours more in 1987 than in 1969 while men worked almost 100 hours more.
(from: http://ucdatadev.berkeley.edu/rsfcensus/papers/Working_Hours_HoutHanley.pdf ). And things have gotten worse since 1987.
In my perfect world, a family would work about 70-90 hours a week. That seems to balance our need to feel productive with our need to not be productive.
