Archives for March 2022

"...the reduction of leisure time as the marginal utility of money income rose, and the real location of labor from goods and services for direct consumption to marketed goods that is, a new strategy for the maximization of household utility. We see it among peasant households concentrating their labor in marketed food production, in cottar households directing underemployed labor to proto-industrial production, in the more extensive market-oriented labor of women and children, and finally, in the pace or intensity of work." Jan DeVries (The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” The Journal of Economic History 54,#2) "Leveling in the context of necessities and personal … [Read more...]

"Infinity renders impossible any solution to the problem of meaning." E.M. Cioran (The Heights of Despair) “I argue that the AI industry demonstrates the increasing autonomy of capital from labour and not the other way around.” James Steinhoff (Automation and Autonomy) "The correct recognition that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding on an infinite time, but by removing the longing for immortality." Epicurus (Letter to Menoeceus) “People want to conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies.” Erich Fromm (The Sane Society) "In the eyes of a dialectical critic, fractures in form … [Read more...]