Work

Today, successful people in very competitive jobs, professions, and industries often work a great many hours per week. This makes it plausible that selection for em productivity will produce a world of ems who are also very hard-working, even “workaholic,” perhaps working two-thirds or more of their waking hours, or 12 hours or more per day. Today, people who are seen as “workaholics” tend to make more money, to be male, and to focus their socializing on scheduled times such as holidays. They also tend rise early to work alone and they often use stimulants ( Kemeny 2002 ; Currey 2013 ). These patterns weakly suggest that ems will also tend to be early rising males who use simulating mental tweaks and socialize more at standard scheduled events. (How an em world might deal with unequal numbers of males versus females is discussed in Chapter 23 , Gender Imbalance section.) In the U.S. today, people aged 15 and older do work and “work-related activities” an average of 25 hours per week. They also spend 3 hours on school, 12 hours on housework, and 20 hours watching TV ( Bureau of Labor Statistics 2013 ). However, from around 1820 to 1850 in the U.S., France, and Germany, men worked at jobs an average of 68 to 75 hours per week ( Voth 2003 ). For ems, work levels might return these 1820 to 1850 levels, or even exceed them. Of course “work” time includes gossip, news-following, and unstructured exploration to the extent that these activities are productive enough for work purposes. In addition to working more hours, em workers are likely to accept less pleasant working conditions, if such conditions are substantially more productive. during the industrial era, we have spent much of our increasing wealth on more pleasant working conditions, as well as on more consumption variety and on working fewer hours. poorer and more competitive ems are likely to reverse these trends, and accept more workplace drudgery. It is not clear, however, how much productive drudgery exists in the em world.