No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea

For centuries we've believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance—in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat, or else you must be stealing from someone. According to such pieties, if you truly worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself. In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. Here, James Livingston explains why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem, resulting in a witty, stirring denunciation of the way we have always thought about why we labor. No More Work exhorts us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world.

James Livingston is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. He is the author of five other books on topics ranging from the Federal Reserve System to South Park.