Keynes Predicted We Would Be Working 15-Hour Weeks. Why Was He So Wrong? (2015)
npr.org
npr.org
Change the tax policy to one with a Georgist bent and this issue should be rectified.
One of Æsop’s fables is about a goose who laid golden eggs: https://read.gov/aesop/091.html
Confiscating all the wealth of the richest folks and dividing it up evenly amongst everyone would be similar. Sure, there would be a one-time benefit, everyone not among the richest would get a bit extra — but soon enough it would all be gone. And what would be the follow-on consequences? Who would invest in new technologies, knowing that profits would be socialised and losses privatised?
Oh and because a new iDevice comes out every year.
Many people in tech have had a moment in life where they either had a windfall or could have saved aggressively for a few years before moving somewhere low cost and working a 15-hour workweek. (Or retiring.) Almost nobody I know who has had this option, self included, took it.
All this is before getting into scarcity of labor as a factor for making such changes unviable to undesriable. Even if we had fully automated basics provided for it wouldn't make sense to cut down on the hours for the remainder that are in high demand and limited supply due to reasons like requiring talent and/or other personality qualities (most people don't have it in them to be a surgeon cutting people open even if their skill level is irrelevant), and have a high lead time in "production". We just plain wouldn't have enough qualified top end people to deal with the number of people who need say brain surgery to have brain surgeons working fifteen hour weeks. Even if it was somehow the norm elsewhere in the economy they would be paid/incentivized up to work longer hours than others.
And this is before touching the final issue of "would there be enough productivity produced with a fifteen hour week" to support the resulting society? You have to do the math here, you can't just assume "it's the CEO's fault for being paid so much" when if the math actually says that even if you could do that they would actually get $2.52 more a year.
Unfortunately upon closer examination the projection of fifteen hour work weeks amounted to just wishcasting.
Not an economist.
After that what’s left? Wants. We should be able to work way less to just survive in this world. We shouldn’t need to work 70 hours a week to afford a small apartment.
edit: I was going to speculate about equilibrium in the housing market, but it looks like there's already a conversation about that
What is actually much closer to the reality of the majority of working people is that they work 15hours a day and STILL they can't earn what they need to live a quality life.
His prediction was wrong because his theory was wrong
This is counterintuitive because the cost of producing anything goes down, so you'd assume cost of living goes down. Unfortunately all production (and consumption) requires land, and as productivity rises, so does the cost of land. This isn't because the inputs into land get more expensive. It's for no other reason than that landowners are able to charge more because the land is able to produce more.
To point out the obvious: a landowner in a low productivity region does just the same as one in a high productivity region, which is to say nothing at all.
The land would be there available for use even if no one at all owned it.
This cost gets baked into every single input into every single good and service. The reason a meal is so expensive in New York City as compared to Oklahoma City isn't shipping costs. It's the rent of the restaurant and then the higher wages needed to pay everyone in the restaurant due to their elevated rent needs.
Rent rises (and falls, but more slowly) to exactly the level required to keep some portion of people in poverty and near-poverty, no matter how productive the local area is.
That's an interesting claim. While it does seems there are some kind of structural forces that all but guarantee a certain percentage of people will live in poverty, I'm not certain that changing rent prices is necessarily a significant factor. I tried to find evidence that changes in rent prices "keep[s] some portion of people in poverty and near-poverty."
Can you point to any references that suggest this is the case?
An extreme example is Palo Alto where local productivity is so high that a family income of ~$200k/yr qualifies for public housing assistance. These are people who are outputting massive amounts of productivity but in dire need of public assistance.
Why? Rent.
There is an equilibrium between rent prices, people's willingness to live in a region, and the productivity of that region.
Trivially: If you imagine a plot of land next to One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan that for some soil/geological region can't sustain a building taller than 2 stories, that lot will be worth far, far less than the lot upon which One World Trade Center was built.
Another example: If you imagine that elevators were outlawed for some reason, suddenly the value of all high-density developable land would fall.
A source for you and the classic HN bubble living downvoters
44% Of global population lives under the line of poverty:
> A source for you
Seems tangential to your original claim ?
People dont work less because they will make so much more money that they just don't want to leave it on the table.
I said: it is more realistic to say that people don't work less because even if they worked for 15 hours they would still not make a living wage.
The difference: The first argument says people work more because they are greedy. My argurment says people work more because they can't survive if they work less.
> no country is even remotely close to 15hours per day.
People don't only work for what their legal framework says. Apart from working un-registered overtime that can go up to 9-10-12 hours, many people also work second jobs, participate in gig-work and such. Easily adding up to 12-14 hours a day, and factor in 6days out of 7days per week instead of your regular 5.
Yes, 15 hours may be an exaggeration, but not by a lot. And definitely closer to the reality of things than what Kayne said.
This might even be workable if there were a corresponding government policy to gradually redefine full time employment as an ever lower number of hours. But instead we've been steeped in fallacious "free market" ideology that would paint any such thing as government meddling, even as it hypocritically gives a pass to the inflation treadmill itself.
It would take quite a lot of studying to complete the picture, and it also requires a high level of discernment (this area often becomes a deranged quagmire on both sides), and a lot of mental gymnastics due to the high level of indirection and false methodology are needed to come to a sound conclusion.
As a TL;DR, Socialist propaganda often blames Capitalism while ignoring its own faults. Capitalism has issues as well and does the exact same.
Both versions today create a false dichotomy without provable identity (necessary for rational thought), that systems of truth seeking can then be used to identify the truth of reality. The truth is somewhat more nuanced.
Many cohorts regardless of classification engage in push-pull dynamics; you may be more familiar with the term "shock doctrine". I've heard that variations on forms for this date back to Rome.
It is impossible to have a power base within the population without a strong need. This works out in practice that a group has part of it, which calls on and publicizes the abuses of the other to engage their platform to rise up, and a small part of that group also that subverts and seeks to induce and create those same publicized problems within the other group.
So Capitalists are not necessarily Capitalists but a mixture of both, the same goes for Socialists, and the failure domains are at the edges (where the extremes of both meet).
It also works out that in modern fiat economies, dynamics with money printing can create trends that appear like Capitalism, while not meeting the requirements of such (i.e. there being a market).
This can progress right up until the market itself disappears. Participants in a market are adversarial, they do not cooperate.
Adam Smith's requirements are no longer met for the two groups involved in economies when the only participants cooperate, and when certain measures are met fiat economies collapse and become non-market Socialist economies. These then fails for a number of reasons best covered elsewhere.
So if you look closely, the problem areas are really at both of the extreme ends of the perceived groupings, and when Capitalism goes too far to the right; it becomes Socialism which structurally is just another form of statism. The fundamental underlying structure and its inherent failures are derived from the central hierarchy which any society based in statism meets as a function of structure.
Mises wrote extensively on this subject, but has largely been dismissed today without a rational basis for the dismissal.
To muddy the waters as well, there is also the problem of mass delusion. Given the high level and number of indirection, and mental gymnastics needed to get to the bottom these things which are often more falsehood than truth, or in other words to make a correct distinction; Many cannot do this on their own as they lack the mental capabilities, wherewithal, or gumption.
Mises often refers to these people as destructionists because the outcome of blind support towards falsehood inevitably leads to destruction, especially in the cases of non-market Socialism.
Those that are deluded and delusional are quite common in all camps, which is why its important to keep a proper and rational head on these matters when discussing such things.
b) From: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/cont...
> I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is.
Note the qualification "in progressive countries"; have we any?
c) I've heard that the ratio between the cost of nails and the price of lettuce is still more or less the same as it was in the 1770s; the big difference is that in the 2020s a "yeoman farmer" doesn't want to buy nails with their market goods, but wants to buy cars and smartphones.
d) Finally, on the parochial basis that my life revolves around informatics, we've vastly exceeded the 4-8 times Keynes actually predicted.
His future is here — it's just not evenly distributed.
Lagniappe: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1729266273-20241018.png
This feels like it can’t be correct.
Nails were expensive and difficult to obtain in the American colonies, so that abandoned houses were sometimes deliberately burned down to allow recovery of used nails from the ashes. This became such a problem in Virginia that a law was created to stop people from burning their houses when they moved. [0]
And nails were a significant expense in Thoreau’s cabin in _Walden_, c.a. 1850s
Maybe lettuce was a lot more expensive back then than I realize, though. I assume that produce is close to “free”, since you can grow it yourself.
So, especially in the northern cities, maybe the lettuce:nails ratio held true.
That makes it feel like a trick question, though. I wonder what the situation looked like for hardy vegetables like potatoes, onions, corn, squash.
(Of course an even better substitution would be purity level 9-n quartz sand but such farmers number in the zero to one)