Bhaskar Sunkara

And leisure doesn't only mean doing, you know, sitting around at home, drinking a bunch of beers, kind of wasting your life away that way.

Leisure might mean spending more time with your friends and family.

No, leisure should mean civic activity too, right?

I mean, there's that famous book, the Robert Putnam one, Bowling Alone or whatever, which described it for now.

I mean, I'm, it was born in 1989.

I like, you know, video and computer games, you know.

So I definitely do that type of leisure too.

But I found a lot more richness in my life when in the last, you know, decade, a lot of my leisure has returned to like going to the local bar for like the couple drinks I have a week instead of doing it at home.

alone watching TV or something, you know, because you get that random conversation, that sense of a place and belonging.

But...

I guess what's the undercurrent maybe of your question was, now, if you have a system with lots of carrots but not the whip of, hey, you might be destitute, you might be unemployed, you might not be able to support yourself unless you're working a certain amount, would we still be as productive?

Would we still be able to generate enough value for society?

Yeah.

And I think that that's a question that is quite interesting.

I think that we're living in a society now with enough abundance that we could afford

more people deciding to opt out of the system, out of production, and that the carrots of staying in, you know, more money for consumption, more ability to do cool things, more just social rewards that comes from being successful or from providing would be enough.

But that's another thing that would have to be balanced in a system.

So if we were seeing mass...

of unemployment by choice in a democratic socialist system, then you might need to reconfigure the incentives.

You might need to encourage people to go back into production.