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> I felt that the professor's explanation for why the prediction failed (people decided to keep working lots and buy more stuff instead of chillin) totally unsatisfactory.

I disagree with this conclusion. I, for one, never decided to work more, I simply don't have a real choice. No one will hire a 15hr/wk person except in positions that don't pay enough per hour to make a living wage anyway. If I could cut my current salary to 37.5% to only work 15hr/wk I'd do it in a heartbeat.

The option to quit and only work either every other year or every 6 months is more viable. Though still job/industry specific, many people pull this off.

Yeah, because a resume with that work history is going to go over so well?

Seasonal jobs or contracting work etc can cover up such things.

You can always be eccentric, go off script and life hack Keynes' predictions into existence. However, people mostly don't and economics is about what people do.

I think that’s overly dismissive as many people do work like this.

It’s up to the individual if doing animation work in 6 month bursts for individual movies is enough or if they want near full time employment. 6 month rotations are common in many tiny industries like super yacht crews. Major industries like education, farming, construction, and tourism are quite seasonal and it’s up to individuals if they take that time off or work an off season job.

For those industries you listed the same would have been true in the 1930s when the prediction was made so I don’t think Keynes was referring to those. In all likelihood he was talking about manufacturing and professional jobs. The divergence seems to be that the blue collar workers were fired and/or their jobs offshored while not much has changed for the white collar workers except for the digitization of paperwork and the elimination of support roles with accompanying responsibilities now transferred to the professional. I think we screwed the pooch on this one and we should own up to it.

I hear this a lot but is it really a thing? It’s so normal to have gap years now and I feel the vast majority of employers would be understanding. I certainly wouldn’t find it strange that an applicant had gaps in their CV.

Or work 7 years and then retire. https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

I agree. That means we both disagree with what was (at least circa 2003), a fairly standard economist's perspective.

In a nutshell, Keynes made assumptions about economic growth (correct). He then riffed on assumptions for income effects (if I pay you more, will you work more?) and substitution effects (if you have more money, will you work less?). Those are not very hard to populate. Ask poor people, observe higher income people's behaviours.

The standard retort my professor gave (people decided to keep working lots and buy more stuff instead of chillin)is, IMO, the favoured explanation because it's parsimonious with theory. It fails when it meets reality, in the form of people. Ask a median person why they don't chill more and work less and you'll get strange looks.

If interested, I think concepts in the "cost of thriving index^" are probably key to understanding why economists are (I agree) mostly wrong on this.

In any case, I think the keynes prediction, is an invaluable starting point... being from the past. A modern economist might defend the theory, with the "chill more" defense. I doubt they would bring it up though. No one is going to make a false prediction about the past to test a theory they support.

^ https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/t...

That gets into politics, history, sociology, how the subject of economics itself interacts with politics and affects history. Best to move on quickly and discourage the students from thinking about it.

Same!

Microsoft may be making this more available... https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/9/21508964/microsoft-remote...

> Flexible working hours will also be available without manager approval, and employees can also request part-time work hours through their managers.

> If I could cut my current salary to 37.5% to only work 15hr/wk I'd do it in a heartbeat.

this raises another problem that keynes may not have forseen (not sure when he made this prediction). people don't necessarily realize how much it costs to employ them beyond just their salary. stuff like health insurance, software licenses, and physical equipment/space doesn't scale with the hours worked by an employee (at least, not linearly). 37.5% of pay for 37.5% of the normal work week might sound good to you, but sounds pretty bad to your employer. they get 37.5% of the working hours for you, but pay well over 37.5% of the original cost. even if given the choice, I highly doubt most people would accept a superlinear pay cut in exchange for decreased hours.

You should take a mba class or open a business.

You will see those one time/fee costs do not scale, but to the benefit of the employer.

become a freelancer. i work maybe 20 hrs per week max. and still earn more than i did as director of 30 people

just get your sales in order and fill a niche

Can I ask what your niche is?

sure. deep learning for crowd monitoring and custom IoT solutions

That is fairly specialized!

It sounds like you're in a great position.

"Getting one's sales in order" is by far the hardest part, though. I have no idea how to do that.

its hard in the beginning, true. make sure to tell EVERYONE what you are doing. most early opportunities came through people who knew people who knew people with money and problems. you d be surprised how many companies look for help but dont really advertise it.

after a year or so, new jobs will begin to just flow in as you will have built creds. then you essentially can pick and choose.

also learn to think like your buyers. help them to win. dont sell, cooperate. be a partner.

> people decided to keep working lots and buy more stuff instead of chillin

That's not why people don't work 15 hour work weeks, it's because we're forced to due to artificially induced scarcity of essentials like housing, along with a competitive labor market where employers generally demand 40+ hour work weeks and can get away with it because they have the leverage.

Plus laws keep people from organizing in various ways (secondary strikes are illegal) and not in others (combining two companies to cooperate together is generally ok, even if it would be illegal for them to cooperate in certain ways if they were separate). Contractors can't effectively organise in some situations.

Also, they'll totally get flak if they systematically hire part timers. See current Uber/Lyft woes regarding contractors/employees. If the government gets its way, and it may, these companies will eventually go "you're only worth your benefits if you work 40 hours".

> administration (to the extent that measurement is possible) seems to have gotten less efficient.

This is an interesting "problem". After all we now have more ways to manage data, so we generate more data. And usually this means more administration. The question is, are we getting more out of it?

Also, we see what reduced administration looks like. Every webshop, every online platform where you just click something and you can buy/sell/report/ban.

Aaand, there's the incumbent lobby doing regulatory capture to resist de-administration, eg. filing taxes.

> Harvard is still Harvard.

It took this pandemic to show the world how fragile that status quo is. Plus the recent admission discrimination lawsuits and scandals show that it isn't really about education.

>>The question is, are we getting more out of it?

This really is the question, quite literally, in economics. That's basically what economics studies.

The outputs of a car factory are easy to measure. How many cars came out? We can quibble over quality, but quantity is most of the game and that is measurable. Administration is harder to measure.

David Graeber, in his provocateur style, concluded that they are more efficient in the sense that they produce a lot more paperwork... which is their output.

Economists would consider this nonsensical as paperwork itself doesn't benefit anyone and can't be considered an output. He wasn't an economist though.

> Economists would consider this nonsensical as paperwork itself doesn't benefit anyone and can't be considered an output. He wasn't an economist though.

Or they would observe that wages are paid to produce it and estimate it's worth based on the total wages and total pages of paperwork. It's a very blind method, but it makes a certain sort of sense.

..effectively they do do this. The baseline assumption is generally that "prices are correct" and that the value of such paperwork is worth more than the salary to whoever pays for it.

When theorizing though, economists don't consider the paperwork itself an output. If that administrator works for a car company, it's considered to be a contribution towards outputting cars.

To be honest I generally trust anthropologists to deliver more insight at the more human level that administrators work at, economic theory makes most sense only in the special circumstances where a large group of people are trying to be coldly calculating within a market setting.

Most people just try to escape bureaucracy, so good empirical measurement is about all I currently hope to get from economists.

Economics, like a lot of "social sciences" tends to get caught up in hammer-nail problems. But uniquely, economics is highly influential on politics and was at the heart of cold war philosophical battles between the US & USSR. This hardened heads.

Different aspects. It's quite possible that most jobs are low-value bullshit (as observed by anthropologists) while at the same time they have non-zero contribution to the economy, because there's a market for whatever output they happen to produce (as observed by economists).

And both seem to be very much true. After all the economy is not just made of cars, but there are paintings, and festivals, and there are people who pay to travel to other places just to see that place with their own eyes, and it's also charity, and it's also insurance, finance, and other meta-services, and whatever humans prefer more than keeping their money in their wallet (or in ETFs). Add to all this the good old agent-principal problem, and we can quickly see why there are bullshit jobs. Because lot of decision makers (especially when the responsibility is diffused) opt to organize work in a way that helps themselves by helping those who are close to them. (Eg. nepotism, cronyism, but also the watered down versions of them too, when someone just gets a bullshit job.)

Furthermore, it's a testament to how much economic surplus is produced nowadays that so many relatively low-output jobs can be sustained.

Aaand, there's also one other important point considering these seemingly do-nothing paper-pusher jobs. They are (knowledge and know-how) buffers for organizations against fluctuation. They provide stable (hand off) points for more productive more fast moving folks. (Literally, if someone changes positions inside an or between organization(s) they need someone to tell them about the boring details. And since reading all the thousands of documents produced each year is very useless, it's economical to have people keep stuff in their head.)

Could it be done better? Sure. That's what startups try to do, to "disrupt" the old inefficient network of work. But as they grow they too face the same problems (though of course usually on a different level).

>PCs have been on every desk for 25 years.

Actually, this part is regressed back these days. Invention of the smartphone makes many people not to have a computer with efficient input devices: mouse and keyboard. Although smartphone is handy, it makes people dumb. Smartphone makes people a mere consumer of the art, not producing it. Because smartphone is inefficient at input devices but people don't much care about it.

Yes. Majority of the people are consumers but if not for the smartphone, we could have potentially more producers of the art. It's so unfortunate future I didn't expect 25 years ago.

It turns out you cannot simply network computers together - you are connecting them to the existing network, the people network. A non-networked machine is not wired to people. Once machines got wired into the people network, software models needed to be updated to reflect people issues (trust, spam, crime)

Solid point.

This comment really demonstrates why certain kinds of wrong predictions are very valuable.

Extremely relevant as we move into our second attempt at making WFH work.

keynes failed to see that competition is relative- that is, how hard you have to work is relative to the people you’re competing with. so where did all the extra value go? it accumulates to any place that is inadequately checked by competition: monopolies

If this is Keyne's failing (I agree it's a part of it) then the majority of economists still make this mistake.

Where they do acknowledge it, it's usually via frivolous examples. Your friends have cool cars, so you need one too.

Another angle is as discussed in Mythical Man Month - due to O(n^2) growth of communication overhead, the optimal team size is 2. 2 people working 100 hours a week >>> 5 people working 40 hours a week, as is obvious in any early stage startup.

The textbook explanation for why Keynes' workweek prediction failed is that he failed to account for the shift to a service economy, which provides ample room for people to expand what they work on and what they spend on.

The crisis within that explanation is that the number of people employed in the "service" category has not grown proportionately with gains in productivity. In fact, it's barely grown at all. The type of job that has filled the gap is "administrative/clerical."

This observation has led David Graeber to propose that perhaps Keynes was essentially right, and that the only reason we don't have the shorter work week is basically that we refuse to let it happen. We would rather continue "working" whatever number of hours was customary in our culture (40 hours a week in the US, less in Europe, many more in Asia) and if there's not enough to actually do (there isn't) we have a small number of people do the work for 40 hours and the rest are just managers and administrators sitting around in a redundant meeting or staring at a screen waiting for the next redundant meeting.

Monopoly billionaire CEOs worked 100 hours a week during periods of intense competition (pre monopoly) not 40. The extent to which one is not forced to work 100 hours a week is the extent to which competition is not yet very fierce. As discussed in book Moral Mazes, even if there is no work to do, middle managers still must compete for scarce executive positions and thus project an appearance of long hours.

What got me thinking of this prediction was actually Graeber, and Tyler Cowen. Both noted some evident facts about productivity that I hadn't heard mentioned often.

Stuff that was simply "out of theory" and irrelevant to it despite seeming logically contradictory to theory. The observations about efficiency in administration in the digital age is particularly striking.

I do think Graeber tended to overstate conclusions. I actually think we understand inflation wrong, and that this becomes relevant over long time scales. Some productivity trends just overestimate reality. We haven't really become as wealthy and efficient as the measures suggest.

Another problem is non fungibility. Not owning a smartphone in 1970 is different from not owning one in 2020 in ways that we can't be quantified in dollars. You can't buy a 1960 education or 1990 healthcare. It isn't sold, and it wouldn't have the same value even if sold. It's way too complicated to dismiss with a "our expectations have gone up."

To an extent we can compare with less developed countries where it's still possible to buy the equivalent of a 1960 education or 1990 healthcare.

If that hypothesis was correct then why haven't smart CEOs fired all the redundant workers? They certainly have ample incentive to do so, and in the US at least there's nothing to stop them from downsizing if they wanted to.

My guess is that there is political power in employing a lot of people.

On the 15 hour work week front: I think Keynes and other economists missed social trends here. What they didn’t predict was a culture that glorifies being busy. Look at the blogs from entrepreneurs in the past decade bragging about their 60 hour work weeks.

To be clear, the vast majority of these people are lying, either to us or themselves. What’s important is not what they actually work, but the fact that claiming to objectively overwork is something that they feel is socially necessary.

> What they didn’t predict was a culture that glorifies being busy.

I'd argue the culture glorifies being busy in part because the folks benefitting the most from the current arrangement want it to.

And also because of the whole America/Protestant work ethic thing, which isn't all wrong but ...

why the prediction failed (people decided to keep working lots and buy more stuff instead of chillin) totally unsatisfactory.

Why not?

Why unsatisfactory?

Essentially because I think Keynes (and most economists of his era) were right in their basic assumptions. If you made the average person in the 1920 10X richer, they'd have behaved much like the "leisure class" of the time.

If you ask the average person "why don't you work 65% less and chill?" most people would look at you funny. It's not a choice. I have rent, etc. A solution that relies exclusively on choice fails the smell test.

I have my own ideas about the solution, but that's besides the point. My point was that Keynes, not knowing the future, gave a more intellectually honest projection of what the theories predict than any post facto economist would have.

note: no reason to downvote a respectful, on topic comment. Asking "why not" is the whole point of discussions.

"why don't you work 65% less and chill?" most people would look at you funny. It's not a choice. I have rent, etc.

I see what you're saying, but at the same time, at what annual revenue level do humans actually start "chilling" more and work less? 500 thousand? I'd be curious to see statistics.

Where I live (Canadian city), a lot of parents are working less, through a variety of arrangements (stay-at-home mom, consulting, part-time work, parental leave). Some of them have pretty low incomes. Society doesn't make it exactly easy, but it's certainly possible, it's just not yet the mainstream option. Social safety nets obviously help.

Wikipedia has this nice chart: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Heures_t... . Some countries have seen impressive reductions.

Anyway, I definitely agree with that:

A solution that relies exclusively on choice fails the smell test.

Wealth inequality, etc...

IDK really. Income correlates to a lot of stuff though, and that makes measuring complicated. A lot of high earning jobs are also intellectually stimulating, high status, high power, etc. Those are the jobs people may do regardless.

For his part, I believe Keynes asked (poor) people at what salary they would work less and also observed the "leisure class" of his day.

For my part, I think the "cost of thriving index" is a good starting point. For most people it's $X plus the amount needed to they buy a house, car, pay tuitions, healthcare, etc.. If you add up all these "basic" expenses, the "cost of thriving" has far outpaced official inflation and even median salary.

> I felt that the professor's explanation for why the prediction failed (people decided to keep working lots and buy more stuff instead of chillin) totally unsatisfactory.

If we accepted Keynes' era's quality and standard of care for healthcare, entertainment options, transportation options, clothing options (almost wear the same clothes every day), appliance options, food options, and real estate constraints (for most young people who do not already have pledge-able assets today, that means rent or cash-over-the-barrel-no-mortgages), I can see a 15 hour work week. There are very few people who willingly accept those limits and eschew modern improvements. Keynes to my knowledge never said 15 hours with improved technological benefits in all areas of life [1], only mostly the technological improvements that brought about economic productivity enhancements.

I really like this idea of 'what history didn't happen'. It's not 'alternative history', in the literary fiction sense, but more ... academic? Granted, the fictional sense is more compelling to read.

I think it's partly human behaviour - people like doing things rather than being unemployed even if you have some cash hand out. We are awake about 112 hours a week so 40 hours = 36% and 15 hours = 13% so maybe 13% is too little and we should look to make work fun rather than less hours. I figure even if we have AI robots that can do everything people will still teach each other yoga, acting and the like.

Also people are competitive - maybe 15 hours can pay for food and shelter but then the Joneses next door work 60 and buy a Porsche.

> Keynes' 15 hr workweek prediction

I m optimistic about this , with people who work remotely. There are alot of jobs that dont require a lot more than 3 hours of real effort per day.

Yeah, a backdoor.

If you want people to be able to work 15 hours a week and have enough to make ends meet- I think most people would jump at the chance, but capitalism is not the right economic system if that’s your goal. Capitalism is a machine that maximizes returns on investment; having people only work 15 hours a week doesn’t do that.

Also, there’s a hidden assumption in there that child care doesn’t count as “work”. A child needs 16 hours of care and attention every day and no economic system can reduce that.