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"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." - Buckminster Fuller, New York Magazine 1970

Fuller believed that work was largely obsolete - and by extension so were many full time jobs. His notion was rather that of projects. People would assemble for projects, bring their expertise, and disband when they were completed. Of course, this is how most architecture firms and how every construction site I've ever been to has operated. Interestingly though the trades embrace this and have a system for dealing with it whereas the (large) architecture firm must go through periods of cyclical hiring and firing. It's very similar to monogamy in our culture.

That is, humans tend to be slightly polygynous (men tend to have more than one wife/lover when they can afford it) but yet this is unacceptable to just come out and say. How do men get around this? By being serially monogamous - getting married and divorced repeatedly (women rarely do this especially when the marriage involves children). In much the same way many employers must go through the process of essentially pretending they want an employee for a long period of time. The reality is that this is untrue and both parties would be better off if both sides were honest and acted accordingly. I'd expect the work situation to change before male/female relations as monogamy tends to be in the best interest of men.

Fisher Studio Houses at 1209 N State Street in Chicago.