Agriculture is about 4% of World GDP. Food, water, shelter and essential transport may be less than 15%. It would seem we “need” a highly inefficient system to maintain basics, and many don’t get them. Could it be that 85% of our economy just gives us Royal Weddings and Hollywood? Personally, I give about 84% of life a miss where I can. I’d move to this:
1. Do enough work for the 15%.
2. Look for efficiencies in not having to stand advertising, merchandising and fashion, being able to pre-order my goods direct from manufacturers who pay decent rates and produce stuff that lasts.
3. Do other stuff I want to with other people because we want to.
4. Put time in with others to prevent bandits running the show.
I know the devil is in the detail and this is rather idealistic because the world would have to agree – otherwise Taliban would just build up arms and ride out like Genghis. We should at least have the thought experiment in public dialogue to remind us our notions of what work is are well screwed-up. I sort of do 1 & 2.
Image via Wikipedia
I suspect most of us don’t really “work” much – most animals avoid it if they can, including bees. This may not seem right, say, to a cop doing his 22nd hour of the shift, covered in his nest mate’s blood and now confronted with an inspector’s bollocking for leaving his Panda’s engine running unattended (to avoid another push start because of a flat battery). I did prove the heads of such inspectors don’t fit up Volvo exhaust pipes and did claim the OT for trying, but was that really “work”?
If we were decent people, we’d think more on work and rewards. We don’t.
Allcoppedout's Blog 
“Work” a dirty word to most, I suspect there are not many who can arrive at home after what they consider to be toil and honestly pronouncy they have been productive! As a society we have dropped to a level where most work involves creating paper montains and converting someone else’s money into more cash for someone else!
Was it all about deforestation until money went ‘electronic?’