I wish I could believe that all this automation would lead to more leisure time for all of humanity, but it certainly won’t happen on its own out of generosity from the robot owners.
The thing is, people don't actually want to tradeoff their labor time for leisure time all that well. They value consumption too much.
There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one right now!
But you'd need to have a smaller appartment, an older car, and eat more lentils.
While people say they want to work less, their [revealed preference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference) is that they value buying stuff above having more leisure.
The "working poor" phenomenon where you can't pay for necessities like rent, healthcare etc. while working full time is the result of declining wage share.
Wage share has steadily declined in OECD countries since early 1970s. In the US since 1960s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS84006173 Wages make smaller and smaller portion of national income while capital share increases.
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2008/where-has-all-th...
Health insurance and other benefits, household composition have hurt wage share. Not that it didn't decline in real terms for the lower skilled workers, just less than the naive chart you put.
Here is good reading on the topic (maybe my favorite paper of the last decade):
We don't actually know that. Most people don't have the option.
For all but a select few industries, there is no such thing as "work a part time job, and trade the rest for extra leisure" since almost no part-time job can sustainably cover cost of living. (Heck, most full time jobs don't really cover basic cost of living today).
> There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. But you'd need to have a smaller apartment, an older car, and eat more lentils.
The average wage in Michigan is currently $21/hr. ($36k/yr after federal, city, and state taxes). The average basic 1-bed apartment here is about $1300/month or $15k/yr. Minimum income requirement to qualify for an apartment is usually 2.5x to 3x times monthly rent.
Math that out and you can quickly see that the vast majority of people simply aren't going to ever afford basic housing on 15hours a week. Or even 30hours a week.
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And on the flip side, when it was actually possible to pull this trick off, more people used to use it. In the 60s and 70s, when you could actually live off a part time 20hr a week job, people routinely did so (and then used their free time to do things like enroll in college and pay for it on the side).
You don't see that anymore, because wages have fallen so drastically, and costs risen so drastically. It simply doesn't math out for the vast majority of folks.
A farm hand only makes like $15/hr on average, which puts it on par with a job at McDonalds or such.
Instead, they get a Master's degree, and use it teach at 2 universities, and work a third job part time so they can afford rent.
Not without a 90% pay cut (i.e. as opposed to the ~60% pay cut you'd expect for working 40% of the hours), I've checked.
What 15 hour/week job pays enough to afford rent, food, medicine?
Try talking to recruiters and tell them you want to work 2 days a week as a software developer and see how far you get.
Or simply they want to live. The amount of money we gotta spend on rent is insane.
You're dreams are not my reality.
Wage share has steadily declined in OECD countries since early 1970s. In the US since 1960s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS84006173 Wages make smaller and smaller portion of national income while capital share increases.
The two remaining problems would be:
- purpose and identity.
- places like Bangladesh where industries like textile will disappear.
Perhaps they believe that you can automate policing as well, at least enough so that social unrest can be suppressed effectively?