Economists Predicted We'd Be Working Just 15-20 Hours A Week By Now — Instead We Work More For Less
The future seemed so bright it would create a new "leisure class." What the heck happened?
Face Stock | Shutterstock Ask pretty much anyone these days, and they probably feel like they're overworked, not to mention underpaid. Which is strange, isn't it? Shouldn't all the technology we have be making our lives easier? It turns out, several economists and world leaders predicted just that at the dawn of the computer age. Instead, it's gone the opposite way.
Economists once predicted we'd be working just 15-20 hours per week by now.
John Maynard Keynes is one of the most influential economists in history, often called the "father of macroeconomics," the branch that focuses on all the day-to-day aspects of economics, from measures like GDP and unemployment rates to pricing, inflation, and investments. His theories fundamentally changed the way governments approach their economies forever (so far, anyway). Suffice to say, he knew his stuff!
So when he issued a bold prediction for the future back in the 1930s, people listened, and they listened for decades. Keynes said that the five-day, 40-hour work week would eventually be reduced to just 15 hours as technology continued advancing.
Keynes' prediction led to even bolder ones about even shorter work weeks, as recently as 2017.
Over the years, as technology continued advancing, once daring claims like Keynes' became commonplace. Then-Vice President Richard Nixon predicted a 20-hour workweek in 1956, a claim echoed by Time Magazine a decade later in a 1965 article about how computers were already so advanced that they would usher in "a 20-hour workweek… thus creating a mass leisure class" within the next 100 years.
We still have 40 years to go before that prediction is disproven, but for others, the deadline is rapidly approaching, if not long since passed. In 2017, for instance, historian Rutger Bregman envisioned Keynes' 15-hour week being feasible by 2030. We're just five years from that, and so far it feels like a swing and a miss.
Still, he's doing better than a Senate subcommittee in 1965, the same year as Time's prediction. They did Keynes and Time several notches better, proclaiming we'd be working just 14-hour weeks by the year 2000. Oh, if they only knew.
Instead of working fewer hours, our workload has actually increased, and wages have stagnated.
Starting in the late 1800s and stretching through the 1950s, it was often predicted that new-fangled electric appliances like the vacuum cleaner and washing machine would make housework take so little time, women of leisure would do them in a full dress and heels.
Nothing of the sort has come to pass, of course. Instead, we've found ways to fill that freed-up time and now do, on average, the same amount of housework as we did 100 years ago. We're doing so much, in fact, that it's fueling a wave of divorces initiated by women who can't keep up due to their husbands' lack of contribution.
For our lost dream of a 15-20 hour work week, experts blame a myriad of factors, including longer life expectancy and higher consumer demand, chief among them. There's a lot more cool stuff to spend money on than there was back in the '30s, '50s, and '60s when these bold predictions were made, after all.
Others blame a different problem called the substitution effect, the notion that since our work is so much more monetarily valuable, we consistently choose to "substitute" it for leisure time.
Which, of course, is mind-boggling to anyone who has worked a non-elite job in the most overworked developed nation in the world or has even a passing understanding of the concept of wage stagnation. Nobody is "choosing" work over leisure because it's so lucrative. We are "desperately clinging" to work over leisure, because if we don't, we can't afford to live.
AI may bring about a 15-hour work week, but nobody has a plan for replacing the lost pay.
Ask many workers and they'll tell you: The same thing that happened with housework is happening at the office, especially as AI takes over. Instead of having more free time or a slower pace as AI takes on some of the workload, many workers report being asked to take on even more, to fill the freed-up time.
What makes this even more galling is that most of our corporate world is based on what late London School of Economics anthropologist David Graeber called "[BS] jobs," which he defined as "employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence… [but]... feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."
In the end, it seems like the answer is very simple. Keynes and his devotees simply did not account for the underbelly of all the economic wonders technology would bring. They naively assumed that those in power would altruistically "let" us work, instead of taking advantage of innovation to extract ever more capital from workers by paying them less for their ever-increasing workload.
One economist saw this coming, however. Thomas Piketty warned in 2013 that 21st-century capitalism would bring runaway inequality. Wealth inequality in America is now so bad that some economists are calling our time a "second Gilded Age," a reference to the post-Civil War era of robber barons and peasantry.
In the end, we seem to be heading toward a rather ironic conclusion to this story, one in which the rise of AI seems poised to bring about precisely the future Keynes predicted. The problem is, nobody seems interested in solving the pesky problem of replacing the 25 hours or more of pay that will be dried up by AI. But hey, at least the powers that be will have more money to send Katy Perry into space or whatever.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
