Features > In Praise of Idleness

New preface by Anthony Gottlieb, The Economist

John Maynard Keynes wrote that his friend Bertrand Russell ‘held two ludicrously incompatible beliefs: on the one hand he believed that all the problems of the world stemmed from conducting human affairs in a most irrational way; on the other, that the solution was simple, since all we had to do was to behave rationally’. Russell was a better logician than Keynes, and could have objected that, strictly speaking, these beliefs are not incompatible at all. Keynes’s point, though, is clear enough, and right on the mark. Russell exhibits a faith in the power of reason to solve problems that is belied by the examples of stupidity which he shows to have created those problems in the first place. If it is the lack of reason that gets man into his messes, how can reason get him out of them? For all his well-known hostility to orthodox religion, especially Christianity, Russell often spoke in the tones of an other-worldly prophet. The ideal of rationality may, like holiness, be almost impossibly hard to attain in this life; but it is the unshirkable duty of the prophet to laud it.

Russell looks down on human affairs from empyrean though not dispassionate heights. With a command of history that incessantly draws parallels with what has gone before, and a command of the natural and social sciences of his day that tries – sometimes less successfully, since scientific ‘knowledge’ quickly dates – to cast new light on old problems, Russell’s prose delights by combining detachment and engaged, tart wit. The result can be shockingly blunt, or comically over-generalized. ‘[T]he peasant everywhere’, he tells us in ‘Modern Homogeneity’ (pp. 000–0), is ‘cruel, avaricious, conservative, and inefficient.’ All peasants? Well, he is talking in terms of broad tendencies: of what the nature of peasanthood generally entails, given a certain conception of peasanthood. The opposite end of the social scale is treated no more kindly: ‘The rulers of the world have always been stupid’. With such obiter dicta Russell is perhaps harking back to his Hegelian apprenticeship. Although his technical work in what has come to be known as analytical philosophy is rightly seen as a revolt against Hegel’s overarching theories and iron laws of cosmic development, the Hegelian style of abstract generalization still looms large, particularly in Russell’s more popular writings on social topics. But the poetic licence of the entertainer is much in play, too. There are, he argues in ‘The Case for Socialism’ (pp. 000–0), too many hat shops in London, and they are ‘usually kept by Russian countesses’.

When this collection was first published in 1935, a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement wrote that because of his ‘impatient’ wittiness and lack of subtlety, Russell was a ‘curiously unconvincing writer’. Yet the reviewer conceded that it is worth making an effort not to be immediately unconvinced, because ‘the simplification of a problem, even the undue simplification of it, often means a new approach to it’. There is no better proof of this than the title essay of In Praise of Idleness.

Russell’s theme and conclusion in this essay are startlingly provocative. Immense harm is caused, he argues, by the belief that work is virtuous, and only a ‘foolish asceticism’ makes us continue to insist on it in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists. The First World War showed that the scientific organization of production can keep people in fair comfort with a much smaller, or less active, workforce. For the well-to-do, Russell writes, it has long been acceptable for wives and daughters to be idle. Indeed, it has been positively encouraged. For the aristocracy it has been acceptable for all ages and both sexes to do nothing productive. Now we should recognize that, for everyone, ‘the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work’.

This cannot be called an unpopular view, because it is barely ever even considered today. Russell has not yet been hailed as a prophet for advocating it. But the time is ripe for that to change. Statisticians know that the amount of time spent on work has declined enormously and pretty much consistently throughout the twentieth century. Between 1870 and 1998, the number of annual hours worked per person employed has fallen by half in Britain. Since 1950 it has fallen by 24 per cent. Working people in rich countries have much more leisure than their grandparents had, but are barely aware of the trend, or of its implications when combined with other findings of social science. In 1998 in Western Europe workers produced , in real terms, nearly eighteen times what they had produced in 1870, while in the same period the number of hours worked per head of population fell steadily by almost half, from 1,295 hours per year to 657 hours. People have got vastly richer as they have spent less time on work, and differences between countries strongly suggest that longer hours do not automatically bring greater productivity – which implies that they could work fewer hours still and lose little. When France introduced a shorter working week of thirty-five hours in 2000, unemployment fell and economic growth remained strong, thus supporting the case for at least a little more idleness.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there is now overwhelming evidence that (above a certain minimum level of income) greater wealth does not bring greater happiness, either when two countries are compared with one another, or when one country is studied over time. This result holds good for all measures of happiness. While productivity per head in the developed world has swollen over the past fifty years, happiness seems actually to have declined. But none of this implies that you or me, or anyone else, might as well do much less work because we would be just as happy if we had more leisure and less money. On the contrary, surveys strongly suggest that, within a given society at a given time, the rich are happier. The solution to this apparent paradox lies in the fact that people, on the whole, want to be richer than their peers. It is relative wealth – keeping ahead of the Joneses – and not absolute wealth, that contributes to happiness. So if one person works less and earns less than others, this is likely to make him less content. But if everyone works less, and incomes fall in step, the result could be quite different. And more leisure for everyone is precisely what Russell advocated. On this, and many other topics, it would repay us to give him another hearing.

ANTHONY GOTTLIEB
30 MAY, 2003