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Speaking in a city on the precipice of disaster, the British economist hazarded a counterintuitive prediction. By 2030, Keynes said, mankind would be confronted with the greatest challenge it had ever faced: what to do with a sea of spare time. Unless politicians make “disastrous mistakes” (austerity during an economic crisis, for instance), he anticipated that within a century the Western standard of living would have multiplied to at least four times that of 1930. The conclusion? In 2030, we’ll be working just fifteen hours a week.
And Karl Marx similarly looked forward to a day when everyone would have the time “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, raise cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner… without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
At around the same time, the father of classical liberalism, British philosopher John Stuart Mill, was arguing that the best use of more wealth was more leisure.
According to Mill, technology should be used to curb the workweek as far as possible. “There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress,” he wrote, “as much room for improving the Art of Living.”2
“What do the poor want with holidays?” an English duchess wondered toward the end of the nineteenth century. “They ought to work!”3 Too much free time was simply an invitation to wickedness.
Henry Ford had discovered that a shorter workweek actually increased productivity among his employees. Leisure time, he observed, was a “cold business fact.”5 A well-rested worker was a more effective worker. And besides, an employee toiling at a factory from dawn till dusk, with no free time for road trips or joy rides, would never buy one of his cars. As Ford told a journalist, “It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege.”6
In the 1980s, workweek reductions came to a grinding halt. Economic growth was translating not into more leisure, but into more stuff.
Even in countries that have seen a reduction in the individual workweek, families have nevertheless become more pressed for time. Why? It all has to do with the most important development of the last decades: the feminist revolution.
January 2010, for the first time since men were conscripted to fight in World War II, the bulk of the U.S. labor force would be made up of women. Where they contributed only 2–6% of the family income in 1970, now this figure has already topped 40%.18
you include unpaid labor, women in Europe and North America work more than men.19 “My grandma didn’t have the vote, my mom didn’t have the pill, and I don’t have any time,” as a Dutch comedienne pithily summed it up.20
But that didn’t really happen. Whereas couples worked a combined total of five to six days a week in the 1950s, nowadays it’s closer to seven or eight.
At the same time, parenting has become a much more time-intensive job. Research suggests that across national boundaries, parents are dedicating substantially more time to their children.21
And according to Korean research, the smartphone has the average employee working eleven more hours per week.26
We are long past due for the fulfillment of Keynes’ prophecy. Around the year 2000, countries like France, the Netherlands, and the United States were already five times as wealthy as in 1930.27 Yet nowadays our biggest challenges are not leisure and boredom, but stress and uncertainty.
Ironically, medieval people were probably closer to achieving the contented idleness of the Land of Plenty than we are today. Around 1300, the calendar was still packed with holidays and feasts. Harvard historian and economist Juliet Schor has estimated that holidays accounted for no less than one-third of the year.
In Spain, the share was an astounding five months, and in France, nearly six. Most peasants didn’t work any harder than necessary for their living. “The tempo of life was slow,” Schor writes. “Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.”29
It’s quite simple, really. Time is money. Economic growth can yield either more leisure or more consumption. From 1850 until 1980, we got both, but since then, ...
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And that’s precisely the main argument that has been brought to bear against the shorter workweek: We can’t afford it. More leisure is a wonderful ideal, but it’s simply too expensive. If we were all to work less, our standard of living would collapse and the welfare state would crumble. But would it?
What Ford, Kellogg, and Heath had all discovered is that productivity and long work hours do not go hand in hand.
Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.
Recently, a friend asked me: What does working less actually solve? I’d rather turn the question around: Is there anything that working less does not solve? Stress? Countless studies have shown that people who work less are more satisfied with their lives.
Climate change? A worldwide shift to a shorter workweek could cut the CO2 emitted this century by half.
Accidents? Overtime is deadly.41 Long workdays lead to more errors: Tired surgeons are more prone to slip-ups, and soldiers who get too little shuteye are more prone to miss targets.
Unemployment? Obviously, you can’t simply chop a job up into smaller pieces. The labor market isn’t a game of musical chairs in which anyone can fit into any seat and all we need to do is dole out places. Nevertheless, researchers at the International Labour Organization have concluded that work sharing–in which two part-time employees share a workload traditionally assigned to one full-time worker–went a long way toward resolving the last crisis.42
Emancipation of women? Countries with short workweeks consistently top gender-equality rankings. The central issue is achieving a more equitable distribution of work.
Aging population? An increasing share of the older population wants to continue working even after hitting retirement age. But where thirty somethings are drowning in work, family responsibilities, and mortgages, seniors struggle to get hired, even though working is excellent for their health. So, besides distributing jobs more equally between the sexes, we also have to share them across the generations.
working hours.”47 Inequality? The countries with the biggest disparities in wealth are precisely those with the longest workweeks. While the poor are working longer and longer hours just to get by, the rich are finding it ever more “expensive” to take time off as their hourly rates rise.
Keynes understood that the stock-market crash of 1929 hadn’t called curtains on the entire world economy. Producers could still supply just as much as they had the year before; only the demand for many products had dried up. “We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age,” Keynes wrote, “but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes.”
Yet Keynes wasn’t crazy. In his own day, workweeks were shrinking fast and he simply extrapolated into the future the trend that had begun around 1850. “Of course, it will all happen gradually,” he qualified,
his classic book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), the sociologist Thorstein Veblen still described leisure as the badge of the elite. But things that used to be categorized as leisure (art, sports, science, care, philanthropy) are now classed as work.
Not coincidentally, the countries with the shortest workweeks also have the largest number of volunteers and the most social capital.
We can’t all just go ahead and switch to a twenty-hour or thirty-hour workweek. Reduction of work first has to be reinstated as a political ideal. Then, we can curb the workweek step by step, trading in money for time, investing more money in education, and developing a more flexible retirement system and good provisions for paternity leave and childcare. It all starts with reversing incentives. Currently, it’s cheaper for employers to have one person work overtime than to hire two part-time.54 That’s because many labor costs, such as healthcare benefits, are paid per employee instead of per
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I was reminded of the dour priests and salesmen of the nineteenth century who believed that the plebs wouldn’t be able to handle getting the vote, or a decent wage, or, least of all, leisure, and who backed the seventy-hour workweek as an efficacious instrument in the fight against liquor. But the irony is that it was precisely in overworked, industrialized cities that more and more people sought refuge in the bottle.
Robots. They have become one of the strongest arguments in favor of a shorter workweek and a universal basic income. In fact, if current trends hold, there is really just one other alternative: structural unemployment and growing inequality.
It started with our paychecks. In the United States, the real salary of the median nine-to-fiver declined 14% between 1969 and 2009.4
The foremost reason for this is simple: Labor is becoming less and less scarce. Technological advances are putting the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty in direct competition with billions of working people across the world, and in competition with machines themselves.
There’s just one problem. Even people with a framed piece of paper on their wall have cause for concern.
The shot in the dark went down in history as a law–Moore’s Law, to be precise.
The advent of the chip and the box made the world shrink as goods, services, and capital circled the globe ever more rapidly.
Something happened that, according to the textbooks, could not happen. Back in 1957 the economist Nicholas Kaldor outlined his six famous “facts” of economic growth. The first was: “The shares of national income that go toward labor and capital are constant over long periods of time.” The constant being that two-thirds of a country’s income goes into the paychecks of laborers and one-third goes into the pockets of the owners of capital–that is, the people who own the stock shares and the machines.
Things were already beginning to change thirty years ago, and today only 58% of industrialized nations’ wealth goes to pay people’s salaries. It may sound like a fractional difference, but in fact it’s a shift of seismic proportions. Various factors are involved, including the decline of labor unions, the growth of the financial sector, lower taxes on capital, and the rise of the Asian giants. But the most important cause? Technological progress.10
The British economist Alfred Marshall already noted this dynamic back in the late nineteenth century: The smaller the world gets, the fewer the number of winners.
By now, inequality is ballooning in almost every developed country. In the U.S., the gap between rich and poor is already wider than it was in ancient Rome–an economy founded on slave labor.12 In
Granted, it all happened very fast. Whereas in 1964 each of the four largest American companies still had an average workforce of about 430,000 people, by 2011 they employed only a quarter that number, despite being worth twice as much.14
The reality is that it takes fewer and fewer people to create a successful business, meaning that when a business succeeds, fewer and fewer people benefit.
Back in 1964, Isaac Asimov was already predicting, “Mankind will… become largely a race of machine tenders.” But that turns out to have been a little optimistic. Now, robots are threatening even the jobs of the tenders.15
Today, new jobs are concentrated mostly at the bottom of the pyramid–at supermarkets, fast-food chains, and nursing homes.
A hundred years ago, computers were still folks like you and me. I’m not kidding: Back then, the word “computer” was just a job title. Computers were workers–mostly women–who did simple sums all day. It didn’t take long though before their task could be performed by calculators, the first in a long line of jobs swallowed up by computers of the automated variety.
At a time when nearly everyone everywhere was still poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly, the line of technological development began to curve. Or rather, to skyrocket, at an angle of around ninety degrees.
Like the steam engine, the computer needed time to, well, gather steam. Or compare it to electricity: All the major technological innovations happened in the 1870s, but it wasn’t until around 1920 that most factories actually switched to electric power.25
