Wage labor is one of the core principles for organizing our lives in western societies. How did that happen? We attempt to answer that question in 20 minutes, moving backward from Keynes to seventeenth-century England to Virgil’s Georgics. It’s quite a ride. We also talk about farming.
What We Talked About
John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”
James Livingston, No More Work
Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England
Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England
Joan Thirsk, Agrarian History of England
John Denver, “Thank God I’m a Country Boy”
James Suzman, Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots
![A lantern slideshows four overlapping illustrations of the Earth depicting its tilt at different time periods in the past, present and future. Dates represented are 13000 BC, 5544 BC, 1921 AD, 2296AD. Handwritten in blue ink at bottom left corner of plate is the text 'G53 CLW [illegible] Aug '22'.](https://i0.wp.com/publicseminar.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Wragge_Earth.jpg?fit=768%2C749&ssl=1)
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