Why is this ridiculous?
The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the
rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the
ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very
commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that
perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from
drink and children from mischief.
Genuinely curious - I'm no economist, and don't understand whether Russell's argument is full of holes, outdated, both, or if rather his proposed reallocation and reduction (through technology) of work is something we should be aspire to.
Let me explain you what the problem is. The concept of work is relatively modern compared to the entire human history. Organized work is something that was needed to scale organized living, and growth of human population. Without agriculture, architecture, transport, communication and health care human kind wouldn't have made it till now. Hunter gatherers had it a little easy, each man for his own or at the max his offspring. But this was not scalable, then extremely unpredictable. To scale we had to get down to staying at one place for long periods of time[read: civilization], and then produce food in bulk quantities[Read: Agriculture/farming]. But no man would work for others, so then came in the concept of doing other kind of work. Like building homes, pottery, carts etc and then people would trade one for the other.
This was still OK, until the kingdoms and kings came along. And then automatically came the concept of slavery, then soldiers who are supposed to die for king. Misery was the norm in this era. A lot of people were stuck building large monuments and cities for kings. Its during this period the notion 'born into richness' and 'born into poverty' evolved and to a very large extent continues till today.
If you are born to some one poor, the world assumes you now have absolutely no 'right' to be rich. And if you do get rich by your work, the rick kids/people think of it as unfair to them. And now matter how lazy, unproductive some rich guy is he considers it unfair to him that he must become poor out of his own actions.
Tribes have specialized warriors, and also would raid other tribes for loot and spoils of war which included slaves. This didn't need the creation of Kingdoms to achieve this. Man will come up with this at the proto-civ stage because other humans beings are the best tools.
You also are drawing some sort of line of intent, that hunter gatherers knew to move towards agriculture, AFAIK the data on how the transition occurred is spotty and is still being debated.
EVEN then, from tribal structures and from studying nomadis/hunter gatherers its clear that "men did work for others", at the very least for the good of the tribe, and often because the village headsman would be able to mobilize people to work on mutually beneficial tasks like say, a granary, or even a juju enhancing spirit walk.
Bulk food also is something of a recent phenomenon, if you look at the chart of human population growth its balooned since around 1950, and before that the total human population of the world was nearly a billion people.
And thats with the invention of the plough, harness, irrigation and so on.
While agriculture was massively advantageous compared to whatever we had before, it wasn't without its own pitfalls - such as famines, droughts, pests, bad crops and so on.
Finally your last para is at odds with the entire ethos of the USA for a large portion of its existence, that you could get somewhere with merit. Matter of fact its only in the recent past that this has stopped being true.
This 'cult of work' needs to go. We're not here to use our hands to modify the structure of matter and energy, we're here to figure out why we're here, enjoy and love each other and have a good time.
Turns out we're here to work.
Seriously, I don't know about you, but I have a list a million pages long of problems I'd like to see solved by the human race, and I'm pretty sure everyone can chip in on at least one of them. Navel-gazing doesn't get anyone very far.
We look at how much food the human race produces and see that there is absolutely no reason why anyone should starve, yet many people do. We have plenty of water yet people die of dehydration. Why is this? Our technology is clearly advanced enough that these problems should not exist. Should we keep working to improve our technology?
My argument is that we should drop what we're doing, take a step back and think about how we got into this mess - that we stop working and consider where we're going and how we are getting there. Why, in a huge corporation, are there some employees earning minimum wage and barely making enough to survive while someone working the exact same hours has two houses and three cars? Why are there people living on the streets in what are apparently first world countries? Why is the inequality gap growing instead of decreasing? Shouldn't all this work be improving the situation?
My contention is that we cannot work ourselves out of this problem. We need to sit down, think and talk. We need to empathise with each other and share. I believe that the solution to the problems that plague people will find their remedy on the social level. That is, information, and access to that information, is the key to resolving them, not working hard to keep the streets clean or developing the newest iPhone or building new houses. Don't get me wrong, those things are important too, but we have the capability to automate a lot of them yet we have not done so. Why are robots not roaming the streets and keeping them spotless? Why are people working for pennies in factories to make our smartphones?
I believe that answering these questions and doing something about them will go a lot further than turning up to a 9-5 every day. It's all very good having an engine that can produce a thousand horsepower but if the steering wheel is not used to aim the car in the right direction, it will crash. The engine is already good enough - the direction seems to be terribly wrong.
> Why are people working for pennies in factories to make our smartphones?
Because it's a better alternative to subsistence farming, usually. I mean, whatever caused them to voluntarily choose to work for pennies in a factory must have been even worse. Now you want to put them out of a job?
Even if you want to redistribute the wealth, it still needs to be generated in the first place or the whole thing collapses. And you're not going to stumble upon a better social and economic system by not producing as much wealth anymore.
I would like to think that I can look forward to retirement - travel, family, personal projects, etc. - without having to also continually worry over my status at work. But I'm not terribly optimistic.