One evening, when I was – who knows how old? – my dad said to me, “Some day, machines will do all the work for us.” I don’t know why it came up; maybe we were watching something science-fictiony on TV, or maybe I had asked him about his job.
“What will people do?” I asked him.
“We’ll go to the beach!” was his happy reply.
It really was happy. For someone who valued work as much as Dad did, he valued leisure, too. I’ve never known anyone who enjoyed retirement as fully.
Dad was trained as an economist, mostly as a labor economist, and I might have followed in his footsteps if I’d had any idea what an economist might do for work. All the folks I knew at Kenyon who were majoring in economics did so because they wanted to go work for a bank, which certainly wasn’t going to be my path in life….
And he was, if such a thing exists in the dismal science, an optimistic economist. I doubt if he really thought we were all going to live lives of permanent leisure, and I further doubt if he would have thought that would be a good thing, if you consider all its implications. But he did believe in people’s ability to make things better, both in the macro way of society and in the micro way of individuals and families. It pleased him to be able to offer his children and grandchildren opportunities he’d never had, to see us do interesting things or go off on our own adventures. Even if he was at times disappointed when none of us knew how to rebuild a tractor engine by ourselves.
And his work was about creating, as much as he could, a better world. Progress is imperfect, obviously. But I think he would have agreed with Noah Smith here – a second optimistic economist!
Happy birthday, Dad. I’m still looking forward to the day when we all get to go to the beach.