Why are we still working this hard?
The gist
An essay says US output per person in 2024 was 7.8 times its 1930 level.
It revives Keynes's 15-hour-week prediction to ask where the freed time went.
How it unfolded
- 1930Economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay predicting that living standards in progressive countries would be four to eight times higher within a century and that three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week would suffice.
- 1938The forty-hour week was written into American law by an act of 1938 and, the essay notes, has not changed since.
- 1973An hour of work in American business made two and a half times less than it does now; for every forty hours then needed, twenty-four have since been freed.
Key terms
- Keynes
- English economist whose ideas founded Keynesian economics and shaped modern macroeconomics.
- act of 1938
- US labor law setting minimum wage, overtime pay and child labor rules.
Source: Wikipedia