A crisis of worklessness?The phenomenon of worklessness, a neologism not yet found in dictionaries, has recently been commented on almost daily in the national press, especially in Great Britain.Nevertheless, it was defined as long ago as 2016 by Public Health England: 1Worklessness refers to a state where an individual or no one in a household aged 16 and over are in employment, either through unemployment or economic inactivity.Its origins lie, it is suggested, in high taxation and, especially, high marginal tax rates. 2 The "collapse of the work ethic" is also mentioned.Unsurprisingly, this is perceived at least partly to be an effect of the lockdowns imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic: many people were not allowed to work normally, and were paid by the Government not to work (the so-called furlough scheme).Nevertheless, not least considering that the above definition predates Covid-19, its origins may lie deeper than these rather superficial suggestions.A clue is given by a remark of Marconi in the 1920s, that within a decade everyone would be able to work for just two hours a day in order to satisfy all our material needs. 3It was a reasonable extrapolation of the exponential growth in technology, which had already been going on since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and was on the threshold of being supercharged due to the scientific revolution [6]. 4 Nevertheless, as we well know that did not happen.John Hodgson has written a penetrating analysis of this phenomenon [3].He called it the "leaky tank" theory.At the time he was writing (the 1920s) there were three main groups in society: 5 (a) the dispossessed, employed in factories and other enterprises, and as agricultural labourers, who could eke out a living from day to day by their toils; (b) a middle group, financially independent and
