“I often get asked to come and talk at art schools,” says Brian Eno, “and I rarely get asked back, because the first thing I always say is, ‘I’m here to persuade you not to have a job.’”
That doesn’t mean, he emphasizes, that you should “try not to do anything. It means try to leave yourself in a position that you do the things you want to do with your time, and where you take maximum advantage of whatever your possibilities are.”
Easier said than done, of course, which is why Eno wants to “work to a future where everybody is in a position to do that,” enacting some form of universal basic income, the general idea of which holds that society will function better if it guarantees all its members a certain standard of living regardless of employment status.
J.M.Keynes suggested something similar almost a century ago in his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. I can’t imagine it happening until we free ourselves of the Luigini, to use Carlo Levi’s term, like Sunak and Starmer.
Comment by Tim on 5 September, 2023 at 12:55 am