With an expansive doff of the fedora to Moonbattery, it seems that the solution to our “key economic, social and environmental problems” turns out to be surprisingly simple, according to the British taxpayer-financed New Economics Foundation. All we have to do is stop engaging in so much productive activity.

To solve inequality of outcomes between the industrious and the lazy, and to rescue the polar bears from their imaginary plight, a 3-day work week is proposed:

According to nef, there are several forces pushing us towards a shorter working week: lasting damage to the economy caused by the banking crisis, an increasingly divided society with too much over-work alongside too much unemployment, and an urgent need for deep cuts in environmentally damaging over-consumption.

Quoth Ann Coote, nef’s Head of Social Policy:

So many of us live to work, work to earn, and earn to consume. And our consumption habits are squandering the earth’s natural resources. Spending less time in paid work could help us to break this pattern. … It is time to break the power of the old industrial clock, take back our lives and work [or rather, refrain from working] for a sustainable future.

If we work less, we’ll have less, so there will be less for socialists to envy. Plus a few die-hard nutters still believe that doing anything other than loafing – or as nef would put it, partaking of “civic engagement” – at Starbucks makes it be too hot out.

According to Cootie’s colleague Andrew Simms, producing less will also alleviate poverty and hunger, presumably because companies will have to hire twice as many people – with all the extravagant benefits and government-imposed liabilities that entails – to get the same amount of work done. How companies could stay in business under these conditions is left to the imagination. Presumably they will not – thus the promised reduction in harmless carbon emissions.

Here’s an idea for nef. Why don’t we drop the incrementalism and go directly back to hunting and gathering – except without the hunting, because it oppresses animals? Only if the government forces everyone to subsist by foraging for roots and berries can we eliminate income disparities and limit carbon emissions to breathing and flatulence.