A World Without Work By Derek Thompson

As generations go by, our predecessors assume we are skipping out on important aspects of life just to get a few extra minutes on our devices. In Catherine Rampell’s “A Generation of Slackers? Not So Much”, it is said the older generations believe Generation Y is “coddled, disrespectful, narcissistic, and impatient” (Rampell 388). In all reality our generation is just doing what it has to in order to thrive in the world we live in, where technology is one of the largest parts of our everyday lives. If the older generations that criticize Generation Y had grown up in Generation Y they would realize the world we live in requires the use of technology. The advancement of society with technology has shaped Generation Y to be the people that they are, relying on technology; however, older generations believe Generation Y is lazy.

Our president during this time, Hoover urges everyone to remain optimistic and wanted strong faith from volunteers. But these volunteers were also in the same state as the people. He asked businessmen to maintain wages and employment, and asked

Jared Diamond is a world renowned scientist, author, Pulitzer Prize winner, and currently a geography professor at UCLA. Of his six books published, we will be looking at the last chapter of his fourth book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In this book Diamond utilizes the comparative method to find resemblance in past societal collapses with our current society. In the chapter entitled, "The World as Polder: What Does it Mean to Us Today," Diamond points out that there are indeed many parallels between past and present societies and that our modern day society is currently on a path of self destruction , through examples such as globalization and the interdependency of each country.

During the years between 1920 and 1960, America saw change in many aspects of life. The United States was a part of two major wars and a crash of the banking system that crippled the economy greater than ever seen in this country’s history. Also the country had new insecurities to tackle such as immigration and poor treatment of workers. These events led to the change of America lives socially, economically, and politically. The people of America changed their ideas of what the country’s place in the world should be. The issues challenging America led the country to change from isolation to war, depression to prosperity, and social change. The threats to American way of life, foreign and domestic, were the changing forces to the

Barbara Ehrenreich 's showed that she didn't have the mind set or worries of a working class person by reminding us as readers the fine line between the kind of performance she is doing and the kind her fellow coworkers do every day on the job. Time and again she lets us sink into her new world of a low-wage worker, only to pull us back with a reminder of the act. 1 She does this experiment to determine whether or not she could both live off the money earned and have enough money at the end of the month to pay the next month's rent. Working class people depend on the money they make on these jobs to survive and provide for their families. She could drop all these jobs she experimented with and go back to her real life without a worry in the

Democratic localism was also enforced to keep the government at bay, allowing people to make their own economic decisions. Capitalism was renewed due to growth. Americans were enjoying various freedoms in politics, religion and travel. Nixon stated in one of his speeches that the United States had “come closest to the idea of prosperity for all in a classless society (166).”

In the 1920s, Americans were trying to figure out what was everyone’s role in society. During this time women started to take on bigger jobs then housekeeping and African Americans are finally standing up for their race. Once 1929 hit, Herbert Hoover, America’s newest president, was viewed as an ‘American Superhero’ at that time because of everything he promised society; however, America gets hit by the Great Depression leaving society in a hole. While banking systems were unstable and overproduction were leaving people bankrupt, Herbert Hoover was blaming Europe and was failing to keep society financially stable. As his presidency went on, filmmakers made film cycles and gangster pictures like Little Caesar that portrayed America’s corrupt society during the Great Depression. By the end of his campaign, Hoover was known as the worst American ever which led to the rising of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. Roosevelt saw the struggling society as an opportunity to help his campaign in which he created the New Deal. America was given an opportunity that allowed them to look forward to the future. During Herbert Hoover’s presidency, America did not support the federal government, but after Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for president and promised a New Deal, they began to look more favorably on the government.

President Richard M. Nixon’s administration had to face many international and domestic challenges in the United States between 1968 and 1974, some positive and some negative. His achievements in expanding peaceful relationships with both China and the Soviet Union are contrastingly different with his continuation of the Vietnam War. In the end, Nixon’s scandals and abuse of presidential power caught up to him, and his administration did much to corrode America’s faith in the government.

Together, they made around $83,000 and had around $90,000 in assets which placed them solidly in the middle class. Twelve years later, Allison and David experienced setbacks but increased their income to about $125,000. Their financial assets quadrupled to a whopping $368,000 and saved up thousands of dollars for retirement. However, with the economy downsizing on the heels of the Great Recession and uneven job recovery heavily tilted toward low-wage jobs, David joined millions of other Americans in unemployment. Having spent half a year unemployed, David returned to work working at a significantly lower wage. Over the course of 12 years, David witnessed how work became less stable and more contingent for many Americans. The working experience illustrates a larger transformation in America’s employment landscape, away from middle-class jobs and jobs with significant benefits toward low-paying jobs with few benefits, accelerated by the Great Recession.

Roszak makes a point in his essay about jobs being our salvation, where he describe there is no end to a working life. Roszak describes the waste of time in people’s jobs and that most employees don’t even put all of their effort into them. He figures

In A Capitalist Manifesto, Gary Wolfram provides an explanation of how free market systems work in society and highlights their benefits compared to socialist economies. The first chapters of the book are an introduction to microeconomics: how marginal analysis, supply, demand, market equilibrium, opportunity cost, and profits work. According to him there are three fundamental advantages to a market economy: it allocates resources efficiently, consumers determine wages and therefore income distribution is fair, and finally it’s the only method of organizing society that is consistent with individual liberty. He explains that socialism is an economic system that is is unable to provide a decent standard of living for people and that it cannot survive, giving as an example the fall of the Iron Curtain. The reason is that

The American work ethic, he claims, has made a large free labor force, which in turn has made capitalism a very powerful force in our society. The post World War II surge in patriotism and

Adam Smith's "Book Wealth Of nations" discusses his philosophy and motivation for salaried labor. Smith argued that the institution was just one more artificial restraint on individual self-interest. "THIS division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature, which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another."

William Cullen Bryant writes two poems that are about life: the present and future. One of his poems is called “Life” and the other, “Future of Life.” Both poems are similar in form and rhythm; however, they are also different in many ways such as the imagery and mood.

The chapter “The Age of Total War” in Eric Hobsbawm’s novel “The Age of Extremes” is broken into four sections in order to explore the time period of 1914-1945. This essay will explore the subjects and processes that are present in this chapter of Hobsbawm’s (1994) novel in a limited scope. The processes that will be discussed are how the zero sum game led to the total war of World War one; the desire for revanchism led to the existence of World War Two, the cost of World War Two led to the economic crisis and how the disaster these events caused resulted in the desensitization of human beings. Throughout this chapter, Hobsbawm (1994) frequently expresses a fear for human kind in both a literal and metaphoric sense arguing that people of