2 We’d be pretty darn miserable

In 1929, an entire community in Austria became unemployed overnight when the textiles factory that provided work to almost everyone in the village of Marienthal closed down. This became the inspiration for social psychologist Marie Jahoda’s life’s work, crystallised in her ‘deprivation theory’ of unemployment. Jahoda, who spent many weeks with the locals in Marienthal, proposed an explanation for the hardship people experience when they are unemployed. Work doesn’t just provide money, but also fulfils basic psychological needs including social contact, status and time structure. Yet no one rigorously tested Jahoda’s ideas until Dr Andrea Zechmann and her colleague Prof Dr Karsten Paul at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in

Germany and started speaking to hundreds of people looking for jobs. Their 2019 study confirmed that being out of work causes distress due to seven unmet psychological needs, the most important being collective purpose: work makes our lives meaningful. This suggests that robot-induced mass unemployment would make us miserable. How miserable? We can only rely on what little we know from longterm studies of unemployment. “People’s wellbeing is on a plateau for months or even some years afterwards,” says Zechmann. “This obviously means that many people who are unemployed for a long time find themselves in a depression.” Of course, this is in a world where people continue searching for work. What happens without any prospect of reemployment is difficult to predict.