Back during the heyday of the industrial revolution, people have been predicting that people will work less and less due to vastly increased productivity. This did not happen, which is interesting, because it seemed like a reasonable prediction at the time and still seems that way to me today. People are making similar predictions now. I am curious if these predictions will similarly not pan out, and if so why. Coordination being hard would be a “good reason,” digging holes would be a “bad reason.” If we are really digging holes, it just seems better to implement a minimum income instead.
But we are working less and less due to vastly increased productivity, and it’s very clear in any graph of hours worked over time. And the effect is even bigger than the statistics show, because of the big shift from non-market to market labour—don’t tell me that doing the laundry by hand, or being a subsistence farmer, isn’t work, just because it’s hard for government statisticians to measure! People today have far more leisure than at any time since the dawn of agriculture.
What is true is that hours worked haven’t fallen as much as some people predicted (e.g. Keynes in “Economic Possiblities for our Grandchildren”). The reason for that seems pretty obvious—innovation doesn’t just make us better at making the same old things, it also creates new things we want, and people have a pronounced tendency to underestimate the latter.
People today have far more leisure than at any time since the dawn of agriculture.
This is commonly asserted, but I have my doubts.
Consider, for example, that agriculture is a very seasonal activity (in most places). You have a few high-intensity periods during the year, but the rest of the year is low-intensity and provides enough opportunity for leisure time.
I had not seen that paper; it is interesting and I will look over it more fully at another time. I should note that
They aren’t measuring work, they are measuring leisure. For example, they count the big increase in time spent in education as eating into our leisure, which is true, but irrelevant to the question of whether we are working more.
Even those authors agree that per capita leisure increased by 4 hours per week over the past century in the USA.
Some of their claims are hard to believe. For example, they claim
Home-production time averaged over the population ages 14 and older decreased by only half an hour per week from 1900 to 2005.
Really? Despite the gas oven, the washing machine, the dishwasher, etc? They claim that the typical 25-54-aged woman worked 50.4 hours per week in home production in 1900, and 31.1 hours per week in 2005. This change is way too small to be plausible. I think, frankly, that all kinds of activities are now being classified as home production work that would not have been so classified in 1990, and that their broad categories (“childcare”, etc) are unable to measure this.
You can see a general overview of the subject for the US here:
More Work for Mother argues that the most of the physical labor was taken out of housework, but the amount of time required stayed high because standards went up.
people have been predicting that people will work less and less due to vastly increased productivity. This did not happen, which is interesting, because it seemed like a reasonable prediction at the time and still seems that way to me today.
Well, let’s think about it. When people work they produce value (I’ll handwave the concept of “value” into existence skipping the fiddly parts like the definition, constraints, caveats, etc.). That value either gets consumed or gets added to the accumulated wealth which we can also call capital.
So what happens when productivity rises? People can work less but that means that consumption and capital accumulation remain constant. Or people can work similar amounts of time which means that the consumption and/or the capital accumulation will go up.
In other words, people can work less time at higher productivity if they are willing to accept that their consumption (=standard of living, more or less) will not rise.
Essentially you have a trade-off between leisure time and consumption (mostly of material goods, but not only). Given historical evidence, it’s pretty clear that since the heyday of industrial revolution people prefer more consumption to more leisure time. Of course leisure time increased as well (e.g. we have a five-day 8-hour standard workweek now) but consumption increased MUCH more.
Now that trade-off is not constant and depends on how much leisure time and how much consumption is on offer. I think we see leisure time valued more and more as our consumption gets saturated, but that’s purely a guesstimate as I haven’t seen any data (I haven’t looked, I’m sure it exists).
Of course there is also a lot of individual variation. Some people prefer more leisure time (part-timers & vagabonds), some people prefer more money (A-types).
As to digging holes, I don’t think that in reality this is mostly a function of mistakes in planning and allocation. I think that in reality this is mostly a way of redistributing value towards entities (such as social groups and companies) which have sufficient power to make it happen. A construction company gets paid for the bridge to nowhere and from its point of view it is a highly successful thing.
Of course leisure time increased as well (e.g. we have a five-day 8-hour standard workweek now) but consumption increased MUCH more.
There was once a movement for a six-hour week. I haven’t read the book I just linked, but clearly, the movement failed. I don’t know if that was because of Evil Bosses wanting to stop the working classes from having the leisure to think (although that was explicitly said by some of them), or Greedy Kulaks grasping for as much work as they could get.
ETA: Here’s a book from 1919 whose first section deals with the six hour week. Some interesting quotes:
Every year the workers become more intelligent and more acute reasoners. Think of the intelligence required in the workers to produce a modern locomotive or a greyhound of the Atlantic, or to work and operate the same, and to make and operate all the thousands of different types of machines now producing and working for the good of man. And each succeeding year demands still higher intelligence to produce still higher, better, and more complex mechanical utilities.
The requirements of our ancestors were few, but as civilization advances, not only do the wants of the body for variety in food, raiment, and shelter increase, but as the mind and soul expand, the intellectual horizon widens and the higher plane of living demands more and more leisure to feed its hunger for better conditions of life.
...
We are all agreed that the industrial situation has become the most pressing after-war problem to be solved, and that the solution will not be easy, not because there is more poverty in the United Kingdom to-day than ever—as a matter of fact there is less poverty than ever before in our history—but because there is a wholesome Labour unrest and national craving for vastly better conditions of life. The poor are not growing poorer, and the workman of to-day is better off than his employer was two centuries ago. But because—and I rejoice that it is so—the workman is each day becoming more ambitious, his mind and soul are expanding at a greater rate than, under existing conditions—even with higher wages—his leisure time permits him to keep pace with. Each year the workman is becoming a better educated man, with better social outlook. Whilst his social outlook is expanding, the workman in the twentieth century finds himself simply a seller of service, and that he has gradually become a cipher in a most complex industrial system, and has his life absorbed and controlled as a mere unit in a great factory or workshop that leaves him no scope for the exercise of the higher intellectual developments of modem life.
There were lots of movements like that—see e.g. this from 1993. France at the moment has the legal 35-hour week.
However these movements, at least historically, were mostly aimed at fighting high unemployment (and probably low demand, too). I think VW workers in Germany had effectively a four-day week during the few years of high unemployment, but when unemployment went down the four-day week ended.
To sharpen my question a bit:
Back during the heyday of the industrial revolution, people have been predicting that people will work less and less due to vastly increased productivity. This did not happen, which is interesting, because it seemed like a reasonable prediction at the time and still seems that way to me today. People are making similar predictions now. I am curious if these predictions will similarly not pan out, and if so why. Coordination being hard would be a “good reason,” digging holes would be a “bad reason.” If we are really digging holes, it just seems better to implement a minimum income instead.
But we are working less and less due to vastly increased productivity, and it’s very clear in any graph of hours worked over time. And the effect is even bigger than the statistics show, because of the big shift from non-market to market labour—don’t tell me that doing the laundry by hand, or being a subsistence farmer, isn’t work, just because it’s hard for government statisticians to measure! People today have far more leisure than at any time since the dawn of agriculture.
What is true is that hours worked haven’t fallen as much as some people predicted (e.g. Keynes in “Economic Possiblities for our Grandchildren”). The reason for that seems pretty obvious—innovation doesn’t just make us better at making the same old things, it also creates new things we want, and people have a pronounced tendency to underestimate the latter.
This is commonly asserted, but I have my doubts.
Consider, for example, that agriculture is a very seasonal activity (in most places). You have a few high-intensity periods during the year, but the rest of the year is low-intensity and provides enough opportunity for leisure time.
Some arguments can be found here and here.
I’ve heard that modern hunter-gatherers do about twenty hours of “work” per week...
Do you have any references for this claim? One thing I have read is this paper:
http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~vramey/research/Century_Published.pdf
To sharpen my question a bit further still: how much is the length of our workday shaped by necessity and how much by custom and culture.
I had not seen that paper; it is interesting and I will look over it more fully at another time. I should note that
They aren’t measuring work, they are measuring leisure. For example, they count the big increase in time spent in education as eating into our leisure, which is true, but irrelevant to the question of whether we are working more.
Even those authors agree that per capita leisure increased by 4 hours per week over the past century in the USA.
Some of their claims are hard to believe. For example, they claim
Really? Despite the gas oven, the washing machine, the dishwasher, etc? They claim that the typical 25-54-aged woman worked 50.4 hours per week in home production in 1900, and 31.1 hours per week in 2005. This change is way too small to be plausible. I think, frankly, that all kinds of activities are now being classified as home production work that would not have been so classified in 1990, and that their broad categories (“childcare”, etc) are unable to measure this.
You can see a general overview of the subject for the US here:
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
A nice blogger put together a graph over hours worked over time in US history here:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_9kFluQyx4tM/TIcLhFVzVNI/AAAAAAAAAG8/hwfkDvU14-Y/s1600/Avg+Hours+Week.jpg
Data from various developed countries here:
http://phe.rockefeller.edu/work_less/
More Work for Mother argues that the most of the physical labor was taken out of housework, but the amount of time required stayed high because standards went up.
It seems to me that there’s a tremendous amount more fiction available in various media, and people are finding time to consume quite a lot of it.
Well, let’s think about it. When people work they produce value (I’ll handwave the concept of “value” into existence skipping the fiddly parts like the definition, constraints, caveats, etc.). That value either gets consumed or gets added to the accumulated wealth which we can also call capital.
So what happens when productivity rises? People can work less but that means that consumption and capital accumulation remain constant. Or people can work similar amounts of time which means that the consumption and/or the capital accumulation will go up.
In other words, people can work less time at higher productivity if they are willing to accept that their consumption (=standard of living, more or less) will not rise.
Essentially you have a trade-off between leisure time and consumption (mostly of material goods, but not only). Given historical evidence, it’s pretty clear that since the heyday of industrial revolution people prefer more consumption to more leisure time. Of course leisure time increased as well (e.g. we have a five-day 8-hour standard workweek now) but consumption increased MUCH more.
Now that trade-off is not constant and depends on how much leisure time and how much consumption is on offer. I think we see leisure time valued more and more as our consumption gets saturated, but that’s purely a guesstimate as I haven’t seen any data (I haven’t looked, I’m sure it exists).
Of course there is also a lot of individual variation. Some people prefer more leisure time (part-timers & vagabonds), some people prefer more money (A-types).
As to digging holes, I don’t think that in reality this is mostly a function of mistakes in planning and allocation. I think that in reality this is mostly a way of redistributing value towards entities (such as social groups and companies) which have sufficient power to make it happen. A construction company gets paid for the bridge to nowhere and from its point of view it is a highly successful thing.
There was once a movement for a six-hour week. I haven’t read the book I just linked, but clearly, the movement failed. I don’t know if that was because of Evil Bosses wanting to stop the working classes from having the leisure to think (although that was explicitly said by some of them), or Greedy Kulaks grasping for as much work as they could get.
ETA: Here’s a book from 1919 whose first section deals with the six hour week. Some interesting quotes:
Every year the workers become more intelligent and more acute reasoners. Think of the intelligence required in the workers to produce a modern locomotive or a greyhound of the Atlantic, or to work and operate the same, and to make and operate all the thousands of different types of machines now producing and working for the good of man. And each succeeding year demands still higher intelligence to produce still higher, better, and more complex mechanical utilities.
The requirements of our ancestors were few, but as civilization advances, not only do the wants of the body for variety in food, raiment, and shelter increase, but as the mind and soul expand, the intellectual horizon widens and the higher plane of living demands more and more leisure to feed its hunger for better conditions of life.
...
We are all agreed that the industrial situation has become the most pressing after-war problem to be solved, and that the solution will not be easy, not because there is more poverty in the United Kingdom to-day than ever—as a matter of fact there is less poverty than ever before in our history—but because there is a wholesome Labour unrest and national craving for vastly better conditions of life. The poor are not growing poorer, and the workman of to-day is better off than his employer was two centuries ago. But because—and I rejoice that it is so—the workman is each day becoming more ambitious, his mind and soul are expanding at a greater rate than, under existing conditions—even with higher wages—his leisure time permits him to keep pace with. Each year the workman is becoming a better educated man, with better social outlook. Whilst his social outlook is expanding, the workman in the twentieth century finds himself simply a seller of service, and that he has gradually become a cipher in a most complex industrial system, and has his life absorbed and controlled as a mere unit in a great factory or workshop that leaves him no scope for the exercise of the higher intellectual developments of modem life.
There were lots of movements like that—see e.g. this from 1993. France at the moment has the legal 35-hour week.
However these movements, at least historically, were mostly aimed at fighting high unemployment (and probably low demand, too). I think VW workers in Germany had effectively a four-day week during the few years of high unemployment, but when unemployment went down the four-day week ended.