Rather than deskilling work, we need to upskill employees. Rather than outsourcing low-value jobs, we need to increase the creative content of every role. Instead of assuming that middle-class jobs must ultimately fall to globalization and automation, we need to redesign work environments so they elicit the everyday genius of every human being.

How is it that in their personal lives, employees can be trusted to buy houses and cars, but at work can’t requisition a $300 office chair without a manager’s approval? If we thought about it for a minute, we’d realize this is stupid. Autonomy correlates with initiative and innovation. Shrink an individual’s freedom and you shrink their enthusiasm and creativity.

When economists define work as the time and effort we spend meeting our needs and wants, they dodge two obvious problems. The first is that often the only thing that differentiates work from leisure is context and whether we are being paid to do something or are paying to do it. To an ancient forager, hunting an elk is work, but to many First World hunters it is an exhilarating and often very expensive leisure activity; to a commercial artist, drawing is work, but to millions of amateur artists it is a relaxing pleasure; and to a lobbyist, cultivating relationships with movers and shakers is work, but for most of the rest of us making friends is a joy. The second problem is that beyond the energy we expend to secure our most basic needs—food, water, air, warmth, companionship, and safety— there is very little that is universal about what constitutes a necessity. More than this, necessity often merges so imperceptibly with desire that it can be impossible to separate them. Thus some will insist that a breakfast of a croissant served alongside good coffee is a necessity while for others it is a luxury.

The fact that the Roman economy was sustained by what were, from the point of view of most citizens, intelligent working machines posed some similar economic challenges to those posed by large-scale automation. One of these was wealth inequality.

But the tragedy doesn’t end there: capitalism not only destroys creativity in the context of labour, but creativity per se. All of the creative activities besides work - creating art, writing poetry, playing an instrument, learning a language - require the one thing that capitalism denies its workers, and that is time. Left to the discretion of capitalists, the workday lengthens and intensifies; leisure time is used not for the pursuit of other creative activities but for recuperating from the rigours of work itself. The rise of the flexi-time schedule worsens the situation as workers are now either at work, recovering from work or waiting to go to work, with the distinction between work time and free time duly eliminated.