In the first eight chapters of his book, Oxford economist Daniel Susskind tells a story of the history of automation and technological unemployment. He tells it succinctly and well. It is an enjoyable read, even for those familiar with the literature. In the remaining four chapters, Susskind examines a controversial topic: how to respond not only to “a world with less work” but also to “a world with less paid work.” Years ago, workmen typically believed that machines would replace workers, leaving them unemployed. British economist David Schloss in 1892 identified this as a fallacy. The belief assumes there is a fixed amount of work to be done, which is not true. Humans have enough intelligence to learn new skills and change occupations. Schloss called this the “lump of labor fallacy,” a term that persists in economics to this day. Susskind effectively illustrates the impact of technological change in the twentieth century with the example of introduction of tractors on farms in the United States. Figure 7.3 (p. 120), taken by Susskind from Manuelli and Seshadri (2014, p. 1371), plots the number of farm tractors, which increased from nothing in 1910, slowly at first, then rapidly to 4.7 million by 1960. Tractors on farms replaced horses and mules, which peaked at more than 26 million in 1920 before declining to about 3 million in 1960. The number of farm workers is not plotted, but it fell dramatically too, from nearly 12 million in 1910 to about 6 million in 1960, as the output of agriculture soared. Horses and mules have few options for employment, so became economically useless after the introduction of tractors in agriculture and the use of motor-powered rail and road transportation in the rest of the economy. Excess farm labor moved first to manufacturing, and later to jobs in the service sector. The idea of a fixed lump of labor was applicable to horses, but not to humans. Susskind argues convincingly that, over time, the lump of labor fallacy has itself became a fallacy, which he calls (p. 126) the “’Lump of Labor Fallacy’ Fallacy,” or LOLFF. “The lump of labor fallacy involves mistakenly assuming that the lump of work is fixed. But the LOLFF involves mistakenly assuming that that growth in the lump of work has to involve tasks that human beings—not machines—are best placed to perform.” In the twenty-first century, intelligent humans—like horses of the twentieth century—will be replaced by machines. The prospect of producing an increasing amount of output with machines means that the economic problem—the struggle for subsistence—can be solved with a high per capita income and a much higher output per worker. On the other hand, many humans will lose their jobs and become, like horses, unemployable. Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes (1931) predicted, in an essay he wrote at the beginning of the Great Depression, that this would happen within a hundred years. He even used the term “technological unemployment” in his essay. In a capitalist system, a high per capita income with high unemployment implies misery for many, unless income is distributed more equally among the population. Keynes paid little attention to the problem of income distribution, other than to suggest work sharing, with standard “three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week,” and a “return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue,” especially the principle that “love of money is detestable.” He did not mention whether reduced hours of work might be accompanied by a cut in the weekly pay of workers. Susskind, like Keynes, is optimistic regarding a prosperous future with less work and more leisure but tackles seriously the problems of unemployment and income distribution. He devotes an entire chapter to education, concluding that “more education” cannot solve the problem of technological unemployment because there is not enough work for everyone. He then examines deficiencies in the existing system of taxation and welfare (redistribution of income to the working poor and unemployed) before turning (on pp. 180–183) to the idea of universal basic income (UBI). He describes the UBI correctly as “a regular payment that the government provides to everyone, whether or not they are employed,” glossing over the important facts that payment is provided regardless of income or wealth and that it is included in taxable income. It is one of those rare proposals that is popular across political ideologies: “Conservatives like the UBI because it is simple, promising to do away with the inefficient complexity of existing welfare systems, while liberals like it because it is generous, promising to get rid of poverty altogether.” Susskind, nonetheless, dislikes the UBI. “To deal with technological unemployment,” he writes (p. 183), “we will need what I call a conditional basic income—a CBI, for short.” I suspect that his dislike of UBI stems primarily from a literal interpretation of universality, thinking that “any visitor could drop by a country with a UBI, pick up their payment, and head back home with a fatter wallet.” This is inconceivable. Canadian provinces provide universal healthcare, but visitors from abroad do not receive free healthcare. Eligibility requires citizenship or lawful permanent residence in addition to physical presence in the country for at least six months in a calendar year. The result, not coincidentally, is a requirement to pay provincial and federal income tax. Similar conditions could apply to a UBI, but it would still be universal income for those who qualify. The UBI, Susskind (p. 187) admits, solves the distribution problem, but he worries that it ignores the contribution problem. To address this, he would like to add membership requirements to convert the UBI into a CBI: “If some people … cannot make an economic contribution, they will be asked to make a noneconomic one in its place. We can speculate what these tasks might turn out to be; perhaps certain types of intellectual and cultural toil, caring for and supporting fellow human beings, teaching children how to flourish in the world.” In his final chapter, the most difficult of the book, Susskind makes the case for creation of a “Meaning-Creating State” to implement the CBI. For many people, work is meaningless and miserable, so they would welcome freedom from work. For others, though, work has an important social dimension, which “may partly explain why the unemployed often feel depressed and shamed, and why their suicide rate is about two and a half times the rate of those in work” (p. 219). As Keynes (p. 368) put it, “there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.” In Susskind's Meaning-Creating State (pp. 226–228), educators may no longer need to teach skills but will have to teach students to flourish through leisure instead. Susskind seems to welcome the freedom that comes with the high productivity of advanced technology. He stresses, for example, on p. 232 that with a basic income some people might choose to “pursue more leisure” while others “might want to retreat to some activity that looks more like work, though not in direct pursuit of a wage.” But on the next page he goes on to explain his CBI “is a UBI, but one that requires its recipients to do something in return. If it is adopted, … the daily lives of those without work are likely to be divided in two: not between leisure and paid work, but between activities that they choose and others that their community requires them to do.” This book is a joy to read, but the last part disappoints. Why, in a society with an abundance of goods and services and a scarcity of paid jobs, should anyone be forced to perform community service in order to qualify for a basic income? Something like that was tried before in England, with poor laws and workhouses. The results of that social experiment were unfortunate, as famously expounded by Charles Dickens. We can do better in the twenty-first century, especially if people learn to enjoy leisure activities.