 I'm delighted to be back at the Institute of International and European Affairs. I was here about two years ago, in fact 2012, and I remember that, the occasion of that visit with enormous pleasure. I'm particularly grateful to President Higgins for giving such a thoughtful and generous plug for our book. In his speech in Chicago earlier this year, President Higgins talked of the need to reinsert ethics into economics and particularly the need to reconnect economics to the political and philosophical ideas of the common good and of the good life. He called on economics to take account of issues of planetary sustainability. And today he returned to some of these themes in the context of the European single market. The President hit hard and entirely justifiably at mainstream economics. In my comment I want to put forward another challenge to conventional economic wisdom, no less urgent. This is the challenge of the impending abolition of work as we know it. Ever since the Luddites smashed their broad looms in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, people have worried about the impact of technology on work. The mainstream economic response has always been that there will always be enough jobs to go round for those seeking to work. By cheapening the cost of existing goods and creating whole new industries to satisfy new demands, the Industrial Revolution overcame the Luddite Challenge in two ways. It made possible the employment of an expanding population at increasing real wages and it brought about a gradual shortening of the hours of work. In short, mechanisation would create new jobs and expand the time for leisure. Economics taught that the trade-offs between work, leisure and income were a matter of individual choice. Since economics held that work was a cost, I think the exact phrase is a disutility, a cost which people incurred in order to be able to live, it seemed reasonable to assume that as technology increasingly made it possible for people to live well, they would work less and less. That, of course, was a dominant assumption and it was the economist John Maynard Keynes who in that essay to which President Higgins referred, economic possibilities for our grandchildren, thought that that time of increasing leisure was coming upon us. In that essay he thought that by 2030 people in rich countries would only need to work about 15 hours a day to, as he called it, satisfy the old Adam in us. The prospect he thought would fill many people with dread, but less work, after all, was something humanity had always dreamt of. To be rich enough to work less meant that the economic problem was on the verge of solution and people could now afford to spend their time to cultivate the arts of living. Keynes' vision is conveyed in the following splendid passage. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be a great change in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have had ridden us for 200 years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to assess the money motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession, as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life, will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity. One of those semi-criminals, semi-pathological propensities to which one hands over with a shudder to specialists in mental disease. Now the actual outcome of the work-leisure development is shown in the graph that I want to please have a look at that. This shows that in the United Kingdom between 1870 and 2000 the real wage increased by a factor of six, but average hours of work fell by only 40%, average hours of work being the red line. This is true of the OECD world as a whole. Since 1930 real GDP per head has increased four times while hours of work have fallen about 20%. At about 40 hours a week we are hardly hurtling towards Keynes's utopia, and in fact there's been a flattening in the last 20 or 30 years, I'll refer to that in a minute. The question my son Edward and I set out to answer in our recent book was why the increase in incomes has been converted mostly into goods and services and not into free time. We thought of four possible answers. First that people enjoyed work more than economic theory allowed. We call that section in our book the joys of work. Second that insatiability was stronger than Keynes thought it was. Third that most workers do not in fact choose how much to work. It's their employers who do something that conventional economics tends to leave out. And finally that the increase in average real wages since 1970 has disguised a stagnation or even a fall in the median real wage which left the typical earner not much better off than he had been 20 or 30 years before. This last would help explain why hours of work over most of the western world would have fallen hardly at all since the 1980s. Today we confront a situation where if we allow things to proceed much as they have in the past we may not be in a position to make the choice between work and leisure. Leisure will be forced on us by growing unemployment. Let me explain. For most of the industrial age wages have remained fairly constant as a share of national income. This suggests that the supply of labour and the demand for labour were roughly in balance over the industrial age, though we must not ignore the role of Irish starvation and mass emigration to the United States in keeping the supply of labour in Europe relatively scarce. It's a very important factor also left out. However, in the last 20 years or so labour's share in national income has been dropping. It's dropped from about 66-67% to 59-60%. This is a prima facie evidence of rising under-employment, of a congestive failure of our system to find enough jobs at good wages to replace the jobs being lost. In fact we have seen a mixture of rising structural unemployment, unemployment that doesn't go away when the economy recovers and a rising share in total employment of minimum wage jobs. What has caused the wage share to fall? Well one suspect is offshoring and that was the first sort of real investigation into the effects of offshoring on work. But recently attention has switched to automation, with offshoring being simply the first stage in a longer process of job degradation leading to job redundancy. The new fact which threatens the job achievements of the industrial revolution is the huge increase in computing power. In 1965 Gordon Moore predicted that the amount of integrated computing power would double every two years. This proved an underestimate. We are now faced with an incomprehensible increase in our total ability to manipulate information. How many jobs are at risk? Well this increase in our ability in computing power means not only that the marginal cost of producing additional goods is rapidly falling to zero but that the substitution of capital for labour can now go much further than in the past with machines taking over tasks for which the cognitive functions were hitherto deemed indispensable. In other words, which thinking was previously deemed indispensable. So what will become of jobs? Well, the best study I've come across by Frey and Osborne suggests that 47% of all jobs in the United States will become technologically obsolete within a decade or two, 47%. What will remain they suggest are lovely jobs and lousy jobs. The professional middle in both manufacturing and services will be hollowed out. Well, you can look at that, that's technological possibility and you can take an optimistic view or a pessimistic view. The optimistic view is that automation will produce new skills to complement the older skills while robotics will create new products which will create new jobs. And a recent book by Bryn Jolffson and McAfee suggests that our future lies in racing with machines rather than racing against them. Seemingly oblivious to the consideration that races are meant to stop at some time an endless race with machines into infinity. On the other side, Larry Summers suggests that we're in for secular stagnation. There's nothing in economic logic or in historical experience, he says, which suggests that technology will go on creating enough jobs to replace the jobs it's taking away. Well, I want to end very quickly with seven ways we can think of of meeting the challenge. First, raise the level of human capital that's favored by mainstream economists, businessmen and policy makers. Get the humans working together with the machines in producing more and more wealth. Second, greatly to expand what's sometimes called the third sector, the not-for-work sector, not-for-profit sector, you know, that's another sort of area. Third, one could reduce welfare benefits so as to keep a benefit entitlements below the falling market clearing rate of wages. That solution, of course, is much favored by right-wing businessmen and economists and policy makers. Fourth, one could aim to slow down automation by taxing machines rather than human labour, and that makes perfectly good sense in many contexts. Fifth, we might spread the bread thin on the butter by work sharing. Sixth, in our book, Edward and I advocated a progressive consumption tax. This would reduce the business incentive to innovate new products and thus strike at automation from the demand side. Finally, accepting that automation will lead to a net loss of human jobs, one could give every citizen a replacement income equivalent to a loss of money from work. Now, I've come to the point when I need to hand over to Edward to develop this argument further. Greater leisure is our preferred solution to the Janus-faced challenge of automation. That is, we reject the idea of racing with machines till Kingdom come to ours this would be a dystopian nightmare, and this conclusion is in the spirit of Keynes. The orientation of life and policy away from GDP growth to the sustainability of our common good is in the spirit of President Higgins. The two visions, I suggest, complement each other, but we need to tackle a crucial misunderstanding about the meaning of work and leisure. Thank you.