Bergman talks about three main things in the book - the 15 hour workweek, open borders, and universal basic income. He posits that all of these things are easy to do, would have huge benefits for society across the economic spectrum, and would improve quality of life around the world.
I am inclined to agree with him, in large part. UBI is a thing I have been yelling about for years now, and I am sure that it would make the world better. Bergman talks about it as a big part of the solution to increased automation, and while I think that might hold true, automation itself doesn't worry me. Economic inequality does though, and although there is some correlation there, I do think that resistance to automation is not just futile but also destructive. We want mindless jobs to be automated... we just need a structure in place to make sure the resulting wealth is more evenly distributed.
Open borders is something I have thought less about but I ended up agreeing with the book after considering it. People often talk about 'buy local' as a thing to do, and while buying locally can have benefits in reducing transportation costs and emissions, it is usually pitched as a way to help the local economy. In rich nations I don't see how that is a benefit - shouldn't we be happy to help people in other places just as much? Why is it a moral imperative to help people near me be richer? If we all do this around the world that protectionism ends up making things worse for everyone. Opening borders is a more extreme version of this, letting people cross borders as easily as goods do. It involves sharing, and trust, and it ends up with the entire world improving tremendously.
The workweek section of the book is something I agree with less. Bergman is right when he says that a huge percentage of jobs are bullshit. There is pure evil like telemarketing scams and protection rackets, but there are so many jobs that are just pure waste. If all the marketing people in the world quit their jobs and instead taught in school or worked in hospitals or built things we would be so much better off! Marketing just competes with other marketing but we actually don't need any marketing at all for our society to work just fine. Those customers will buy from *somebody* if you ad campaign doesn't go through!
If we got rid of all the evil or bullshit jobs from hedge fund managers to social media consultants and put all that brainpower and time to use doing something useful for society we could easily maintain our standard of living and have a 15 hour workweek. There is no practical thing to stop us, aside from our desperation to compete. And that competition is a HUGE problem. People who work more and earn more will have more stuff, even in a world with UBI. Other people will want that stuff. Keep in mind, stuff isn't just huge TVs or fancy cars, it is things like a home located closer to city centres, or enough land to have a garden. Even if we made working more unnecessary, people would put in that work just to get ahead of other people.
As an example, take CEOs who make a bajillion dollars a year. They don't need the money. They could just retire. But they continue working hideous hours, hardly getting to use their many houses and toys. This is how people mostly are, defining themselves by their peers, not by any outside standard. Unless we decouple work from money entirely I don't see our workweeks shrinking down to 15 hours.
The general idea of reducing bullshit jobs and flattening the distribution of wealth I really like, but I am pessimistic about how effective it will be at reducing workweeks. Governments can step in to help with this in a heavy handed way - forcing companies to pay overtime for all time worked over 30 hours, for example, would help. Improving social safety nets so that companies are more incentivized to hire multiple part time employees instead of working single employees to death in order to save on benefits payments would also be a thing we could try.
In any case if you want to read a quick book that outlines a lot of good research and information about economics and work in these areas I recommend Utopia for Realists. It isn't perfect, but it is the sort of book that would improve society greatly if everyone read and implemented its suggestions.
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