« Rough | Main | 18:09/174 »
January 13, 2006
In Praise Of Idleness
I ran across this paper in a blog Andy suggested. Bertrand Russell appears to have written In Praise Of Idleness in 1932, at which time he seemed aware of potential problems in the USSR, yet also a little too hopeful about a society that had already by then been divided into the bureaucratic commissar class and the rest, instead of the rich and the rest. Furthermore, Russell defines work either as physically moving stuff, or as directing stuff to be moved. I sort of do the latter in that I instruct machines what to do and write recipes for sys admins and developers. His categories seem to ignore what Drucker called knowledge work, but then he wrote this before Drucker wrote all that.
Anyway, Russell's argument still holds some water. What if he's partly right? Where specifically is he wrong?
Posted by Mark at January 13, 2006 08:45 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://mcraig.org/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1244