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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday October 29 2019, @04:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the 15-hour-work-week dept.

In 1930, a year into the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes sat down to write about the economic possibilities of his grandchildren. Despite widespread gloom as the global economic order fell to its knees, the British economist remained upbeat, saying that the ‘prevailing world depression … blind[s] us to what is going on under the surface’. In his essay, he predicted that in 100 years’ time, ie 2030, society would have advanced so far that we would barely need to work. The main problem confronting countries such as Britain and the United States would be boredom, and people might need to ration out work in ‘three-hour shifts or a 15-hour week [to] put off the problem’. At first glance, Keynes seems to have done a woeful job of predicting the future. In 1930, the average worker in the US, the UK, Australia and Japan spent 45 to 48 hours at work. Today, that is still up around 38 hours.

Keynes has a legendary stature as one of the fathers of modern economics – responsible for much of how we think about monetary and fiscal policy. He is also famous for his quip at economists who deal only in long-term predictions: ‘In the long run, we are all dead.’ And his 15-hour working week prediction might have been more on the mark than it first appears.

If we wanted to produce as much as Keynes’s countrymen did in the 1930s, we wouldn’t need everyone to work even 15 hours per week. If you adjust for increases in labour productivity, it could be done in seven or eight hours, 10 in Japan (see graph below). These increases in productivity come from a century of automation and technological advances: allowing us to produce more stuff with less labour. In this sense, modern developed countries have way overshot Keynes prediction – we need to work only half the hours he predicted to match his lifestyle.

The progress over the past 90 years is not only apparent when considering workplace efficiency, but also when taking into account how much leisure time we enjoy. First consider retirement: a deal with yourself to work hard while you’re young and enjoy leisure time when you’re older. In 1930, most people never reached retirement age, simply labouring until they died. Today, people live well past retirement, living a third of their life work-free. If you take the work we do while we’re young and spread it across a total adult lifetime, it works out to less than 25 hours per week. There’s a second factor that boosts the amount of leisure time we enjoy: a reduction in housework. The ubiquity of washing machines, vacuum cleaners and microwave ovens means that the average US household does almost 30 hours less housework per week than in the 1930s. This 30 hours isn’t all converted into pure leisure. Indeed, some of it has been converted into regular work, as more women – who shoulder the major share of unpaid domestic labour – have moved into the paid labour force. The important thing is that, thanks to progress in productivity and efficiency, we all have more control over how we spend our time.

So if today’s advanced economies have reached (or even exceeded) the point of productivity that Keynes predicted, why are 30- to 40-hour weeks still standard in the workplace? And why doesn’t it feel like much has changed? This is a question about both human nature – our ever-increasing expectations of a good life – as well as how work is structured across societies.


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  • (Score: 2) by slinches on Tuesday October 29 2019, @10:46PM (2 children)

    by slinches (5049) on Tuesday October 29 2019, @10:46PM (#913477)

    The overwhelmingly vast majority of human activity does not require extra investment.

    [Citation Needed]

    To build anything new requires time and resources, which are an investment. That may take the form of wages or a capital loan to purchase raw materials, manufacturing space and machines. And that holds true across every scale from someone knitting their own sweater to commercial aircraft.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 30 2019, @02:22AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 30 2019, @02:22AM (#913548)

    "To build anything new..."

    As I said, the majority does not require new investment. New businesses are the minority, and very often are not the result of venture capitalists.

    Keep telling yourself those silly stories that keep your worldview from collapsing while selling your soul to those who would trade it to the valet to get their car first.

    • (Score: 2) by slinches on Wednesday October 30 2019, @04:58PM

      by slinches (5049) on Wednesday October 30 2019, @04:58PM (#913788)

      By anything new, I mean every unit of product created and every instance of a service provided. You create something new (i.e. did not exist in that form before) every time you take some bread, meat and cheese and make a sandwich. That takes investment in the form of the source materials and your time to assemble it. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that you should need a loan to stock your fridge, but when you scale it to the size of a restaurant, loans may allow you to expand to a new location where you otherwise couldn't.