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Culture

Why 3-hour workdays haven’t happened yet

by Dylan Matthews<br>Updated Feb 12, 2015, 8:26 PM UTC<br>Share<br>Gift

Why is this not you right now? Shutterstock

Dylan Matthews was a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes made two big predictions. The first was that “the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is today.” He got that one right. It’s only been 84 years, but so far, real GDP per capita in the United States has grown sixfold since Keynes’ writing, right at the midpoint of his estimates. His second prediction, following from the first, was that this economic boom would allow for a dramatic reduction in hours worked — “three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week,” perhaps.

That did not happen. It’s true that average hours worked per full or part-time employee fell from 1950 to 2011, but from 1,908.73 a year (36.6 per week) to 1703.55 a year (32.6 per week). We’re a long way from 15 hour weeks:

And that might overstate things, since it ignores the big increase in labor force participation that occurred over that time frame as women entered the work force in greater numbers. In a report for the OECD, Angus Maddison estimated that hours worked per American (not just per employed person) actually grew slightly between 1950 and 1998. Hours worked per working-age person grew significantly between 1977 and 1999 before falling back to where they were in 1977 again:

The typical worker may be working less, but because there are more of them, work isn’t really declining, at least relative to mid-century levels. But why Keynes’ predicted decline didn’t materialize isn’t totally clear. I don’t claim to know the actual answer, but here are five plausible explanations, many drawn from the excellent book Revisiting Keynes, in which a dozen-odd economists (including Nobel winners Robert Solow, Joe Stiglitz, Edmund Phelps, and Gary Becker) offer explanations for why Keynes’ prediction didn’t come true.

1) We haven’t spread the wealth around enough

Sorry, Joe the Plumber, more wealth-spreading. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Keynes was wrong in predicting that we would use the tremendous wealth of our age to, as he put it, “solve the economic problem”: to make it possible for all to live, at least at a subsistence level, without performing any labor.

But Stiglitz notes that we certainly could solve the problem if we so desired. “If the more than $42 trillion dollar global GDP were divided equally among the earth’s some 6 billion inhabitants, each would have some $7,000, more than enough to bring everyone out of poverty,” he writes, adding that for a family of four, such a division would exceed even the US poverty line.

This is even more possible within industrialized countries. Rich countries have the resources to create basic income guarantees, wherein every person gets a certain amount annually ($7,000 a head, perhaps, maybe more) to meet subsistence needs, no strings attached:

That’s a far way from passing anywhere, but Stiglitz notes that many European countries have chosen policies that encourage vacation and leisure, with exactly the effect you’d expect: people work less and enjoy more time off. A 2006 paper by Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote similarly concluded that tax and regulatory policy explains the difference between US and European leisure levels, and that while the European approach should, according to conventional economic theory, hurt growth, residents of countries with more mandatory vacation tend to be happier.

Robert and Edward Skidelsky, in their book on Keynes’ prediction, echo Stiglitz, and call for policies to encourage leisure.

2) People actually love working

(20th Century Fox / Whatnot and Whatnot / Giphy)

As the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert noted in her superb piece on Keynes’ prediction, Phelps and Harvard economist Richard Freeman have a very simple explanation for why people haven’t chosen to work less: they don’t want to.

“Many people go to work for reasons beyond money, and might prefer to work longer than Keynes’s fifteen hours a week under almost any situation,”...