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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.
(Score: 2) by slinches on Wednesday October 30 2019, @04:42PM (2 children)
The current capitalist global economy has evolved to its current state. It's not about needing rich people to make decisions or yachts to motivate them, it's that rich people have made enough profitable decisions to become rich and they are free to choose how they spend or invest most of that profit. A consequence of giving people the freedom to use the profits of their labor how they see fit, which is a core principle of capitalism, is that they can end up buying luxuries rather than feeding the poor or funding infrastructure and education. That's where government and taxes come in. That's supposed to be the portion that is siphoned off to fund all of those collective programs that benefit everyone instead of just the individual. Currently, the US takes in ~$6 trillion in tax revenues (federal, state and local combined), so we should have enough to go around. If you don't like how that's being distributed, then lobby the government and vote for representatives to change that. If that's not enough for you, then you are arguing for a command economy. Although, those haven't historically worked out well for the poor either.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 30 2019, @09:07PM (1 child)
1. For over half of the rich people around right now, the profitable decision they made was being born to rich parents. It wasn't the profits of their own labor at all, it was the profits of great-great-granddad's labor.
2. You seem to be engaging in the Is-ought Fallacy [txstate.edu], where you assume that because things are this way, they ought to be this way.
Sure, I can (and did) vote for someone other than who's currently in office as my representative. And I can and sometimes do lobby the government. But I can't write $2800 checks to said representative, and thus my opinion doesn't matter. My own congressman is actually on the record saying that he doesn't care in the slightest what his constituents think (he gets enough votes to be reelected because of gerrymandering, incumbency, and party loyalty).
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Funny) by slinches on Wednesday October 30 2019, @10:40PM
1. The ones who don't continue to make profitable decisions don't stay rich long.
2. Defending the existing system is not inherently an is-ought fallacy. I understand there are weaknesses in our current system and we should work to minimize those. I just don't think there's a fundamentally better system out there (short of the world being made up of fundamentally better people). Though, I would change my mind if one is eventually developed.
This is why I don't have much faith that the government would make any better decisions about how to use the profits of our collective labor. As far as I can tell, it would just change who gets to buy the yachts.