Why do you think that people should have to do 'economically useful' things?
Surely it is one of the goals of technology and progress that we free people from the need to work. As such, any step towards this 'leisure economy' should be celebrated, rather than thinking up pointless labour for people to do.
I suspect that, without some sort of direction, many people would go mad. It would be nice if people used their leisure time to create art or pursue research of some sort and so on, but people generally don't. You see it all the time, lottery winners who are miserable, some of them even going back to their ordinary jobs, because they miss them. For every JK Rowling who spent a period of unemployment writing a book, there are a million who won't even read a book. There's no easy way around this, it needs a fairly basic shift in human nature.
I'd be just fine. The natural state of man isn't a 40-hour workweek, and it wasn't even common until the industrial revolution. Hunter-gatherers worked less than we do.
If people still feel too idle and can't come up with something to do on their own, they can share a 40hr job with 4 or 5 other people. I am fully confident, though, that everyone will find something they like to do to occupy their time.
Quote:life expectancy at age 15 is 48 years for Aborigines, 52 and 51 for settled Ache and !Kung, yet 31 and 36 for peas-
ant and transitional Agta.
Survival to age 45 varies between 19 and 54 percent, and those aged 45 live an average of 12–24 additional years
The modal age of mortality in hunter-gatherers can range from 68 in the Hiwi to 78 in the Tsimane.
The "natural state of man" is to work from sunrise to sunset to find enough to eat, and still sometimes going to sleep hungry. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle wore people out so they died at 30! The natural state of humans is to be active. The question in the modern world is what activity.
Incidentally, my experience of job sharing is that it doesn't scale. You get 2 or 3 people, they arrange the job share among themselves, everyone is blissfully happy. Then one leaves and how do you fill the position, when it was tailored for one specific individual's lifestyle? The other sharers then find themselves having to adapt again, and maybe that's incompatible with the other commitments they've picked up thanks to the arrangement. 9-5 is actually the least-worst option all things considered.
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so
Well for a start that isn't true... And JK Rowling is a perfect example of it.
Surely it is one of the goals of technology and progress that we free people from the need to work. As such, any step towards this 'leisure economy' should be celebrated, rather than thinking up pointless labour for people to do.