Aren't we getting work badly wrong?

The economists have pushed productivity to the point where it has made work less satisfying.

"Frans," an old friend of mine said to me, "take my advice and don't retire early." He'd taken early retirement and lived to regret it.

He could not wait to get out and become a vigneron. But it was not what he expected ("I've got a cellar full of bad red wine") and he went through an unhappy patch until he found a new equilibrium doing a degree in literature.

The truth is I could be retired as we speak. I seem to be in the company of many baby boomers in the country who are not worried about the money side of it. But I could not see how being retired would be more fun than what I am doing now.

The experts are always telling us the secret to a happy and healthy old age is to keep active, both physically and mentally. So the idea of phasing down from full-time to part-time work rather than going straight from full-time to dead stop (sorry) strikes me as good for the individual, regardless of what the government and the captains of industry think is in the best interests of The Economy.

And when you remember how much longer we are likely to live, it does seem contrary for us to be retiring earlier rather than later.

Even so, if we are all going to be devoting an even longer period of our lives to work - some are calling the World Bank's recurring reports to member states "Work Till You Drop" - it may be an idea for the community to put more emphasis on making work more satisfying.

I think that, in the present era of turbocharged capitalism, work is one of the things we are getting badly wrong.

The conventional economists' model assumes work is a "disutility" - an unpleasant means to a pleasant end; money and all you can buy with it. But the work of the psychologists and economists studying happiness confirms what most of us already know, that work plays a very important part in our happiness and that a lot of our happiness actually comes from the work we do.

It provides a lot of our self-identity (how often have you explained aspects of your character or behaviour by reference to your occupation?), our friendships and our feelings about the purpose and value of our lives.

So work turns out to be both a means to an end (as the economists assume) and an end in itself (as the economists assume away). Work has intrinsic benefits, it is good for its own sake. If you are a good Catholic, you might also quote various papal encyclicals, including Pope John-Paul's teachings.

Let us look at some of the research. In a prestigious lecture series, Richard Layard, of the London School of Economics, summarised what other economists have learnt from extensive surveys in many countries.

On average, the loss of happiness suffered by people who are unemployed is three times greater than the loss in happiness suffered by people whose family income drops by a third relative to average income. So not having a job when you should have one is much worse than suffering a sudden drop in income.

And, on average, those people who feel insecure about retaining their jobs suffer a loss of happiness relative to those who do feel secure - that is 50 per cent greater than the loss of happiness suffered by people whose income drops by a third.

Research by Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at the University of Warwick in England, confirms that having a lot of job security is important to feeling a high degree of satisfaction with your job.

What other factors affect job satisfaction? Well, the self-employed tend to be more satisfied, as do people who work in a small workplace. The amount of time you spend travelling to your work-place affects job satisfaction and working at home tends to lead to higher satisfaction.

It is well known that job satisfaction is significantly affected by how much say you have over what you do and the way you do it. One famous study even found that the degree of control you have in your job affects your health.

Prof. Oswald finds that tight deadlines and high-speed work are bad for satisfaction. But who controls the pace of work is critical.

When customers control it, that is good for job satisfaction. And when your colleagues do, that is OK. But when the pace is controlled by production targets, that is bad, and when it is controlled by the boss, that is very bad.

The point is that though nicer or smarter bosses worry about the job satisfaction of their workers, all the pressures on them in recent years have been running the other way, encouraging them to forget their workers' feelings and to treat them as pack horses to be worked harder and costs to be cut.

Though at one level every economist knows work can be satisfying, that does not stop them urging on governments and businesses "reforms" inspired by a model that assumes that work is nothing more than an unpleasant way of gaining money and that the unemployed are to be envied for all their leisure time.

Under the influence of conventional economists obsessed by the goal of making us richer faster, for the past 20 years we have been labouring mightily to make work more efficiently - and more productively - oblivious of what that was doing to make jobs less secure and less satisfying.

Sounds topsy-turvy to me.