Around 80% of people think their job makes the world a better place, while very few think their job might be making the world a worse place. This isn't surprising, because people who do not feel that, for example, Wall Street makes the world a better place are unlikely to work there despite that the average salary of a worker in the securities industry in New York City is $361,000.
One consequence of the accelerated work week is that some jobs will go away. This includes some jobs that people like doing, but this doesn't mean that work will disappear. It will just be done by people as a hobby, either because it was too dependent on inequality such as management consulting or because there are many people willing to do it for free. An article by a Nobel-Prize winner written from the perspective of someone 100 years in the future described a world where the only way to make a living as a scholar was as a celebrity giving paid lectures. It is possible that paid services on the Internet may become more popular as people gain more control of their income, but we have already seen how difficult it is to compete against high-quality free content.
The reason I mention this is that the economic profession might see reductions in demand and fewer jobs, similar to what science PhDs have been going through. And of course, the government depends on economists for accurate advice. But on the bright side, according to Wikipedia people with psychopathic tendencies are more likely to make the utilitarian choice in ethical dilemmas—such as destroying one job to create five others—and experiments on game theory and rational decision-making show that only economists and psychopaths follow the predictions of game theory.
It's possible that people will disagree about whether some jobs are necessary, just like people do now. In some cases the answer is simply to let the private sector take care of it, as more people will have a reliable income or the option to earn more due to tighter demand for labour. In other cases, such as the recent elimination of the statistical abstract produced by the United States government, we must accept that the system is not perfect and the need to defend the usefulness of a service or program helps instill confidence in government spending.
This has always been about more than just creating jobs, of course. As mentioned in previous writings, lower inequality without a reduction of work just means higher resource consumption and more environmental problems. But if society is willing to plan for the future, income security resulting from job availability will allow us to create the proper incentives to switch to renewable energy sources before oil prices increase even further as well as prepare for any other problems we can anticipate.
And beyond that are the cultural and psychological issues which have resulted in the exploration of this topic being such a lengthy process. If most people think unemployment is an important problem, and yet it remains unfixed, it is natural to suspect something is wrong with the system and devote attention to whether it can be fixed. Conservatives are better able to rationalize away problems and so they tend to be happier, but if everyone was conservative we would probably have a much smaller government and higher unemployment and no interest in fixing it.
I was going to talk about how it isn't really ideal for it to be difficult to determine whether we should try to act ethical or just exploit the system, but is it really necessary? Negative effects of higher consumption is a better explanation for why people have been reluctant to support this concept, or just misunderstandings of why working less time at a high wage rate isn't really an option right now and how the accelerated work week would make it an option.
In summary the accelerated work week is about removing harmful effects from various assumptions and actions made with good intentions. The history of the United States is based around personal success, and there should be no significant harm to the economy or your social relations from exploring the available options for achieving nominal success. The accelerated work week accomplishes this by providing incentives which should lead to a reasonable number of employees who are willing to work less, earning a higher wage rate, if someone else wants to work overtime for a higher total income.
Furthermore, by balancing the goals that many people can reasonably expect to have, people are reminded that it is often difficult to determine the most effective course of action and so accurate systems encountered elsewhere in life, designed with good intentions of eliminating inefficiency, are less likely to lead to harmful assumptions about the infallibility of authority.
The fact that there can be harmful social results from being "too successful" can be seen through rhetoric against "the 1%". It is the middle class that is to blame for providing too much labour for high-paying occupations, which reduces job opportunities for recent college graduates with little work experience, but accusations are made only against the owners of capital without suggesting any realistic way for the 1% to fix the problem they are accused of creating.
So the existence of this question of whether a problem exists does not serve a very useful purpose. To some extent, knowing how to operate within a broken system does involve a form of "skill", but only in the same way that proficiency in the financial markets does. Society's reaction to the financial crisis and ensuing recession has proven, just like other crises before it like WWII, that people do want a well-functioning society and the only barriers are lack of confidence in the capabilities and intentions of other people, and so there should be no fears that fixing the immediate problem of unemployment will lead to decreased interest in addressing problems like global warming, the need for better energy sources, or resource depletion.
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