Where did it go wrong?
Would you like a 15 hour work week?
in 1930, John Maynard Keynes prophesied that by the century’s end, technology would see us all working fifteen-hour weeks.?
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Where did it go wrong?
Would you like a 15 hour work week?
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Keynes was right about productivity gains, but those gains mostly fueled higher consumption and profits instead of shorter hours. A 15-hour week sounds great but only if wages and quality of life kept up.
Technology would enable us to do that.
AI could help us do that as well.
The controlling class doesn’t really want that though.
The very wealthy used the same technology to make more money instead.
Went wrong? In the sense that we have a higher standard of living in almost every way, while working much fewer hours?
The idea that these productivity gains are enjoyed by the people who formerly did the work is the issue. The widespread use of electric washing machines did not afford middle class women an extra day’s leisure in their week, it just meant that they could be pushed back into the workplace so that two-income households became the norm with the subsequent effect on house prices.
In 1798 Thomas Malthus suggested food production would never increase as fast as the human population, and that starvation was a likely result.
Economists don’t have a great track record with this stuff.
He presumably thought those owning the technology would share the benefits.
I work 15 hours a week. 40 at my desk, 25 spent browsing reddit.
It turned out that people would rather have more goods and services than a shorter working week.
Why employ 3 people on 15 hour weeks when you can employ one person to do 45 hours and use the threat that there are 2 unemployed people willing to do their job to keep the wages down?
I’ll take a 15 hour week if I get the same pay as a 35-39 hour week.
That’s totally unsustainable unless there’s a universal income nationally
A lot of jobs are 15 hours of work but you’re in the office 40 plus hours. It’s pretty pointless
The guy from tool?
He clearly didn’t understand the Jevons paradox
On one hand, we do work less.
On the other hand
I definitely think we need to fundamentally re-think our society. Not a single developed nation has a birth rate even close to replacement level. Expecting a family were both parents work 40 hours a week to also have kids is not realistic.
He didn’t account for corporate greed
Most people work 15 hour weeks. They’re just present for the rest of the workweek
And it should have done. Places I’ve worked there are so many people stringing out a 3 hour day into an 8 hour day.
Well yeah, with 1930s demands, people can probably survive on 15 hours a week today
He obviously didn’t have shareholders
I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent and buy food on a 15 hour work week.
Ah but that assumed working lives they had.. leave school at what?.. 14?.. state retirement? unlikely. So now you have youngsters starting work in their 20s, and many (though by no means all) retiring at or below state retirement age.
That doesn’t explain all the discrepancy, but certainly some of it.
You could work a 15 hour week and live a comparable life to somebody in 1930
The quality of life has improved tremendously.
As a result the amount of resources a regular average person consumes has increased massively.
If our consumption level was the same as 1930 , we could do it.
Case in point – we have a welfare state where people who don’t work are still able to have a satisfactory life.
I claim for 37.5 though.
He was sort of correct, in that for many jobs there is around 15 hours of actual productive work achieved per week. By productive I mean not “bullshit”, like producing reports for people who will never read them, or producing an internal comms newsletter, etc. However, since we are selling our time, employers want all of that time as theirs, regardless of whether there is productive work to do.
What do Tool know about hard work!
We potentially face the ability to automate a lot of white collar work with AI (we’re not quite there yet despite what all click bait outlets say, IMO).
But again, if there’s a chance to make more cash, the working classes won’t see this benefit.
My own job is vastly different to what it was 15 years ago. The difference, all the easy stuff is automated so I can focus on more complex stuff more of the time.
Capitalists will squeeze and squeeze til the last drop.
If we had a 15 hour work week the country would function. We would eat, having running water, clothes and houses but that is about it.
His productivity was correct in terms of productivity gains but failed to account for the human desire for more.
The fact is most people in the 1930’s lived in what would now be considered poverty level lifestyles.
Did he say which century?
I’d love to work a 15 hours week. Couldn’t even get close to paying the bills though, never mind having fun with the extra 25 free hours a week.
Yes but in 2001 Maynard James Keenan explained that the pieces fit, because he watched them fall away.
Unfortunately 15 hours of work won’t pay enough money to have a comfortable life 🙁
As now, many people have to work multiple jobs to earn enough to be comfortable 🙁
It was just a bad prediction? It’s not a conspiracy, predicting the future is hard.
There’s loads of bad and wrong predictions about the future.
Sign me up for 15 hours per week. Yes. Perfect. Where did it all go wrong? Venture capitalists. Oh, and our love for a good hierarchy, as a species.
Broadly we banked the gains as increases in lifestyle not reduction in working hours.
To take a more extreme example, how much work is required to meet the lifestyle of say a medieval peasant?
A few hours a week? Maybe less?
So why don’t we all just work 6 hour weeks and have 6 days off?
Well, because generally we dont want to live in single room, mud and whattle cottages, with no windows or doors, no running water, insulation, or plumbing, with a non trival chance of dying of starvation over the winter, or slowly and painfully from random illnesses.
If you’re going to measure Keynes’ statement you first need to benchmark a standard of living for 1930, and the try and estimate how much generating that standard of living would cost today.
Just wait till you hear about bucky fuller
This is really interesting, because there’s such a huge variance.
So for instance:
1930s -> 2025
1 hour of mopping the floor = 1 hour of mopping the floor
1 hour of childcare at a nursery = 1 hour of childcare at a nursery
1 hour of manually moving boxes = 25 mins with a forklift
1 hour of manually calculating and completing a financial ledger = 6 minutes in excel.
1 hour of writing out a legal letter from a template = Ctrl C, Ctrl V
And then there are all the jobs that technology has completely replaced, but also the jobs that it has created. Tech jobs, coding, etc, are going to be much more ‘productive’ when it comes to content generated or actions completed per hour than a lot of the manual and farm work that has vanished since.
So this is actually extraordinarily hard to meaningfully measure in an economy-wide sense. Because an accountant may be literally 2000% more productive now than they could be a century ago, but the people mopping floors and picking up litter are likely working at a similar rate of productivity.
And how you measure productivity is also a challenge. How do you measure how productive a nurse is? Or a teacher? Excluding admin and paperwork etc.
Everyone who uses technology in their working practices is undoubtedly working a lot faster than you could have imagined a century ago, but how does that equate to the monetary value of the work produced? Not the salary paid to the worker, but the economic and monetary value of the thing produced?
For a start, advertising has changed the game massively since the birth of the internet. In 1993, writing a daily post about what you were doing and attaching a photo to it wasn’t something you could even share. Now as an influencer you can live off that.
If clients would actually be useful i could do all my work in a 15 hour week lmao. Stop sending me bullshit spreadsheets with hardtyped shite
World population coupled with increased consumption vs available resources is where it went wrong.
In the absence of unlimited energy, we have limited resources to share out, so every single man, woman and child on the planet is competing with the rest for what there is.
Asia, coming from behind, are putting in a LOT more effort than the West, with the result that they’re catching up and overhauling us, while the West declines.
There’s 3 outcomes from here
At the moment, 2 is by far the most likely outcome.
Even 10 hr week is possible. However with productivity increase, we’re not getting any monetary or other benefits. Look at value of companies, disproportion is getting greater each year
In 2025 we all ARE able to live off 15 hour work weeks.
But that would be living in 1930’s conditions – no 2025’s luxuries like healthcare and indoor plumbing…
People are not rational agents, nor are they economic maximizers. And this is why economic theory which doesn’t take into account human foibles is utter bollocks.
Keynes’ inability to understand this basic concept shows why economics is often pseudoscience.
he missed the “extra” an extra 15 hours to make end meet
He didn’t account for greed and selfishness by the rich.
Computers have allowed more complex work and regulation
Government workers per 1000
In 1930 there were 2
In 2025 there are 130
I probably do that much work a week.
The guy from Tool? Didn’t realise he was that old
/s
I work a 15 hr week about 4 times a week, almost every week. Woo hoo 😭
We do… Two of them… And a bit
If a person, assisted by technology, can get a week’s worth of work done in 15 hours, imagine how much money you could make as a business owner if you kept them on a 40-hour week anyway.
In 2002 I thought studying this shit at uni would lead to a wealthy and comfortable life. We were both wrong.
I think he meant 15 hour days. 🙈
John didn’t factor in that capitalism wouldn’t be satisfied with productivity gains since, without regulation, rent seekers would just keep ploughing forward in order to reap more and further push inflation to the point of demanding that people work 40 hours because that’s the typically affordability point for paying bills and having a little bit of a life as a treat.
This would only work is every person in the world joined in and “demanded” it –
Then of course the one country that remained working 40hr weeks would be the defacto superpower until the end of time.
I have a friend who works for the government. He literally rocks up whenever he wants, goes for massages at the local shopping centre, leaves whenever he wants, and gets paid for it. My Dad was a Senior Civil Engineer & he used to say the government contracts were the biggest piss-take. They’d literally jack the prices up 200% & because everyone was doing it, you’d win the contract for being on the cheap side!
You can have a 15 hour work week. Sadly you’ll only get paid for 15 hours.
Money printer go brrrr
I suspect that Keynes based this on the idea that the people at the top would share the profits with the workers so that they would have to work less to afford a decent standard of living.
He didn’t realise that people are not to be trusted.
If you don’t count useless meetings as “work”, then he was right for many office workers.
Has generally been trending downwards for a while so I can see why he’d think that. We should be at 32 hours tbh
Tbf, my company is that dysfunctional that some post-covid “work from home” staff members barely do ten. Let alone fifteen.
Keynes was right about the productivity/hour going up, but he was wrong when he assumed that demand on workers would stay the same.
We’re doing more, in less time, than we were, but the amount demanded of us by the employers has gone up, thus the time spent working if anything has increased.
I’ve never understood this whole “nobody will need to work” idea – I mean, even very fundamentally. Surely even a bright five-yr-old would be able to see the basic stumbling block – who is paying you to not work and why would they?
I’ve never heard a clear explanation – it’s as if someone came up with a theory of how we’re all going to able to fly by simply flapping our arms by the year 2050.
I sometimes do that per day, am I winning?