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Is the 15-hour work week closer than we think?
Why the 15-hour work week predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes hasn't come to pass -- yet.
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You don't work as hard as you say you do, according to the U.S. Labor Department. They just released a study that found the typical worker claims to work 40 hours a week -- while actually working around 37.
But either way, your work week is still a lot longer than the 15-hour work week that economist John Maynard Keynes predicted we'd all be working by now.
So what happened?
Prof. John Quiggin's an economist at Queensland University in Brisbane Australia and author of "Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us." He looked into the 15-hour work week and found that part of the problem lies in an increase in consumption that Keynes hadn't predicted.
Keynes predicted that new technologies would allow workers to become more productive. This would mean they wouldn't have to work as many hours and could devote more time to leisure. Using an equation, he found that eventually, people would be able to work about 15 hours a week and still maintain their standard of living.
But Quiggin says Keynes didn't predict the rise in consumption. And then again, Keynes certainly didn't predict "time wasters" like weeding through spam emails or updating Facebook at work.
Then again, maybe we put too much emphasis on "hard work."
"It turns out that a lot of the things that are most valuable really didn't come from hard work aimed at making money," says Quiggins. "For example, if you look at the Internet, it really...arose because university professors like to chat to each other."
But if your job is something you love or would do anyway, you're probably okay not working a 15-hour work week. You tell us.
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I do feel like we are decades away from being able to create a leisure economy, and I think it's a necessity.
On the epoch of the information age, we have been doubling our ability to store, archive and create data. We do it on blogs, on social networks and as we browse each website, and as we search via google. We are creating data from satellites, from outside our solar system and we are creating data at home with phones, camcorders, games, and cameras.
As a software engineer I think that we are upon an age of personal manufacturing and automation like we can not even begin to imagine. With so much data, and so many opportunities to create, organize and discover what all of this data we are entering into an age that demands creativity. It won't be the means of 'work' or 'production' that enables great ideas to flourish, but how we share, discuss and appropriate resources to those ends.
We will demand creative solutions to existing problems rather than productivity. The means of creativity might be described as prolific, but not as something that can be measured in hours. I think going forwards as more jobs implore creative solutions, will will find that productive work will be taken over by systems that can be automated. Our network should start to fall, while our creative means will be required to increase.
Centuries ago economist and philosophers would talk of the leisure economy, but it was something that only the aristocrats could participate in, however, those that did, designed the 1st telescopes to explore the stars and the first microscopes to explore our cells. We had an age of enlightenment like never before in our history. Today we are on such a dawn, such an age where all of us should have the creative freedom to explore again, to investigate the vary nature of our world and to share in the tools to do it.
Software like Code Academy, Udemy, are putting classes online and disseminating knowledge like never before, while tools like 'Light-Table' will make it easier for anyone to understand how programing works. Did you ever wonder how someone might reconfigure a warp coil in 15 min on StarTrek? I can tell you that if they had to use the software debugging tools we have today, that it would always take hours. In the future we will have tools that as you work, as you create, as you think through a problem we will have smart agents that understand us and will test out millions of variants as part of that dialogue between us and our computer counterparts. Debugging and analytics of our designs will be a solve problem, we will measure everything in a simulation and we will be able to predict with ease the results of our creative effort.
The a new age of creativity and leisure is upon us. Those that wish to experience it first will find a way to limit their own 'productive' work, and will increase their creative means.
jdavidnet, I love your dream for the future. We had the Renaissance and the Enlightenment without the tiger moms. Liesure is the foundation for creativity.
But, alas, we shall never have it. There are those who will consider those who aren't punching the time-clock for at least forty hours to be "takers." Extracting the maximum number of hours from workers is ideal - look at teachers. Employers paying workers a living wage for fifteen hours of work a week is only a fantasy.
One reason, among the others brought up, would be wage stagnation vs inflation.
In short, in order for us to convert from a 40 hour week to a 15 hour week, our income would have to increase. Maybe not directly, but a person making $360 a week isn't going to be able to switch to $135 a week. With wages staying flat for several decades, there's not much room to cut down on hours, even once you take pure consumerism out of the equation.
Then there's something people aer mising when they talk about 'oh more are working part time now": the cut in hourly pay as well. People were laid off of their 40k jobs, which amounted to $19/hr. Part time work, however, rarely gives $19. Thus it's more likely the person went from 40 hours at $19/hr to 15 hours at $10/hr.
Note that businesses haven't been too welcome of the idea of 15 hour workweeks either. When the recession came and businesses couldn't afford the workload, they opted to lay off workers fully: some of them turned around and pushed their remaining staff to work longer. Of course, I doubt many workers would've preferred switching to part time for a 63% cut in pay.
In a world where 50% of america makes less than 40k on a 40 hour work week, we're not in much of a position to expect most of us to work far less for far less pay.
Yeah I don't think I'm alone in failing to see "underemployment" as a disease to be cured. Wasn't "less work" part of the promise of technological advancement?
Believe it or not if you work in the IT field you work that or LESS. I know, I'm in the IT field. We're not assembly line workers and what about all the water cooler talk, time wasters online you surf all day, breaks, lunches (we take LOOOOONG one's you know) and other things you're doing that don't "produce" for the company? Even a cashier not ringing someone out and just standing there waiting for a customer isn't "working" in my view.
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