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Comment by brainwad | Hacker News Reader

Average hours worked is more or less monotonically decreasing since the start of the industrial revolution, so in the long run we are slowly freeing ourselves. But in the short run, people keep working because a) machines usually are complementary to labour (there are still coal miners today, they are just way more productive) and b) even if some jobs are completely eliminated by machines (ice making, for example), that only "solves" that narrow field. The ice farmers can (and did) reenter the labour market and find something else to do.

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> Average hours worked is more or less monotonically decreasing since the start of the industrial revolution

Although that is true when comparing the start of the Industrial revolution and now, people worked less hours before the Industrial revolution [1]. Comparing the hours of work per year in England between the 17th century and the 19th century, there has been an increase of 80%. Most interestingly, the real average weekly wages over the same time period have slightly decreased, while the GDP has increased by 50%.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo

No, on average people in 1600s England (who were overwhelmingly peasants) worked almost all daylight hours, 6 days a week - perhaps 3000 hours a year. It's simply not possible for the hours worked to have increased a further 80% from that baseline.

Also most labour was not wage labour in the 17th century, so you need to be careful looking at wages. Especially comparing the the 19th century since there was a vast expansion of wage labour.

Are average hours worked decreasing because we have more abundance and less need to work, or are they decreasing because the distribution of work is changing?

I find it hard to accept your claim because at the start of the industrial revolution there were far fewer women in the formal labor market than there are today.

Well there were also barely any men in the formal labour market. Most people were peasants working their family farm + sharecropping on estates of the landed gentry. But that doesn't mean they weren't working hard - both sexes worked well over 3000 hours per year, to barely scrape by.

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