Robots Will Steal Your Job

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK is an audiobook that explores the impact of technological advances on our lives, what it means to be happy, and provides suggestions on how to avoid a systemic collapse. Written by Federico Pistono and read by Ian R Buck.

Work and Happiness

Episode #16

If acquiring more and more money won't make people happier, and they cannot compete with automation in the workplace, can we simply provide people with basic amenities to make them happy? It is a little more complicated than that.

Chapter Index

00:00 | Intro
00:25 | Chapter begins
10:13 | 1.1 Flow
15:41 | Outro


Figure 1.1: Life evaluation against working hours in OECD countries (2009).
Figure 1.1: Life evaluation against working hours in OECD countries (2009). On the y-axis is percentage of people thriving, on the x-axis the average annual hours actually worked per worker. Happiness data comes from the Gallup World Poll 2005-2009 and working hours from the official OECD library. For an interactive version of the graph, click here.


  1. For a survey, see Darity and Goldsmith, 1996. Bjorklund and Eriksson (1998) and Korpi (1997) provide evidence for Scandinavian countries, Blanchflower and Oswald (2004b) for the United Kingdom and the United States, Winkelmann and Winkelmann (1998) for Germany, and Ravallion and Lokshin (2001) for Russia.
  2. Unhappiness and Unemployment, Andrew E. Clark and Andrew J. Oswald, 1994. The Economic Journal Vol. 104, No. 424 (May, 1994). pp. 648-659.
  3. See, e.g., Winkelmann and Winkelmann 1998 for German panel data, or Marks and Fleming (1999) for Australian panel data, the latter considering in detail various effects on mental health.
  4. For a survey, see Murphy and Athanasou (1999).
  5. “There are some very interesting exceptions. For instance, we do not get used to noise. A lot of research suggests that if your environment is noisy, for example they are doing construction around you, you can not get used to it. Your happiness drops and it does not come back up. Your system cannot habituate to continued noise. We adapt to good things, winning the lottery, winning a prize, getting an ‘A’ in a course. We adapt, we get used to it, also with some surprising exceptions. One of the other surprises from happiness research is the effects of cosmetic surgery like breast enhancement and breast reduction. One of the big surprises is it makes people happier and they stay happier. And one explanation for this is how we look is very important. It is very important for how other people see us and how we see ourselves, and you never just get used to looking a certain way. So, if you look better it just makes you happier all the time.” – Psychology 110 Lecture 20 - The Good Life: Happiness, prof. Paul Bloom. Yale University.
  6. Veum Goldsmith and Darity (1996).
  7. Ruhm (2000).
  8. Stutzer and Lalive (2004).
  9. Clark and Oswald (1994).
  10. Handbook of Positive Psychology, Jeanne Nakamura and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, 2001. pp.89-101.
  11. Handbook of competence and motivation, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Sami Abuhamdeh, and Jeanne Nakamura, 2005. Chapter 32 – Flow.
  12. Bruno S. Frey (2008), Hamilton (2000), Ryan and Deci (2000).
  13. Meier and Stutzer (2008).
  14. Table: The World’s Happiest Countries, 2010. Time Magazine.
  15. Average annual hours actually worked per worker. OECD library, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.



The Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK Audiobook is released under a Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. Feel free to use any or all of it as long as you link back to, you do not use it for commercial purposes, and you release any derivative works under the same license.