Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat and would be much, much happier for it. Unfortunately that option isn't available to me, nor to most people.
John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want their own cars, their own lavish houses filled with appliances, extensive wardrobes, fancy food. As a westerner you do not feel like you live an opulent lifestyle but compared to almost any person in 1900 you do.
Why is this? Advertising continually raised people’s expectations. Now social media does. People are naturally competitive.
It’s obvious that things don’t really make a person happier except in extreme cases. Also, historical comparisons show we are happy with or admire those that have more and when everyone has a thing contentment is not achieved.
It’s easy to imagine different values and lots of social movements have eschewed materialism. Now there is lying down. There used to be hippies living on communes.
This is incorrect: Keynes thought with productivity gains people could eventually satisfy their material needs working very few hours, but their wants could be "insatiable":
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
* http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
* https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/ke...
Let’s try: George Collins believes that people can satisfy their material needs by working only a few hours. People usually want more. But at many times and within many social movements— religious, political, artistic— people have chosen to want less. Maybe that is part of the answer.
And George Collins is wrong. My rent (for two people) is 1000€ (60m²), electricity is 150, food is 600, internet 50, total of about 2000. Say 1000 since we split that in half, and maybe i'll even reduce those needs, live in a smaller space, heat myself less in winter so it goes down to 800.
That's about 35 hours of work for the absolute bare minimum, 70 including my wife. That means no car, using my bike for everything, eating objectively worse food for my health (not talking about caviar there), get rid of pets, etc, etc.
one full week of worth each to cover the bare minimum. and let's be honest, I'm quite well off there. People on median income would _die_. They already do, working the full month.
George Collins would do well to read more sociology and not generalize.
2000/month is 24k/year in expenses.
Doing some rough math, one person working 35/week would be working for about 13/hour to handle that; for two people it would be 6.5/hour each (US federal minimum wage, which hasn't change in decades, is US$ 7.25/hour).
In the EU wages vary by countries, so minimum wages go from Bulgaria's €620/month to Luxemburg's €2700/month:
* https://eures.europa.eu/minimum-wages-eu-2026-what-they-are-...
(You don't say where you are.)
I'm happy to work more to have my small flat to myself; the lifestyle creep is worth it to me here. But I'm still aware that this is lifestyle creep.
Things are cheap. Health care, housing, and education are expensive. The median financed iPhone is $30/mo, health care is $500/mo, college is $800/mo, median rent is $1500/mo. You can get three 75" TVs for the cost of one month of median US rent. The average Millenial does not eat three $15 avocado toasts every day, but the average house actually does appreciate by 10*$15 every day (smoothed). This works in reverse, too: you must forego two 75" TV purchases and an iPhone purchase every month to pay rent. Obviously, unless you have a TV factory in your apartment, this is an extremely stupid plan that outs the person floating it as having been disconnected from reality on the ground for decades.
The modern economy solved material problems but it did not solve gatekeeping and rent-seeking problems and oh boy it has a lot of them. These problems are already gigantic compared to all of the material problems put together, so no amount of material deprivation will solve them.
9 times out of 10, the way someone lands on materialism as an issue is by going down the issue list, crossing out anything that they might share culpability for (which is easy -- having a degree, a brokerage account, a 401k, a house) and then overstating the case for what remains. Materialism, culture, immigration, laziness, promiscuity of the youth (or lack thereof lol), and so on. I don't look forward to unwinding the things that elevate my place in society any more than the next guy, but some of them have gotten pretty torqued and I'd rather let off the tension than see if the next generation is the one that finally turns guillotine memes into reality.
Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive
A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.
I think almost no one would be willing to return, say, to the early 1900s when it comes to medical science and available treatment options.
Things like anti-retroviral therapy and CAR-T are just too nice to have when something otherwise fatal hits you. But that requires top-notch chemistry and biology, which requires top-notch lab equipment and computers, which requires top-notch material science and industry etc.
I am not sure if you can sustain all of this if all the the relevant PhDs work 16 hour workweeks. I am also not sure which parts of the modern economy can be left out to regress to a previous stage of development if you still want to retain the capability to treat cancer with advanced biologicals. The supply chains are just too complex.
Maybe in the age of AI and robots the options are different, but not before.
Smaller local economies/communities like my grandparents had in the 60s don't sound too bad, especially if we keep a few nice things from today. Do you need aliexpress? Fruits shipped form the other side of the planets? Etc. Once everyone has electricity, water, shelter, food and a tight local community were good to go, I'd even argue the "progress" we made since then actually broke some of the core things we require to thrive as humans (purpose, stability, communities,...)
I don't care about medicine that save 0.00001% of the population if the price of it is what we're witnessing today tbh, otherwise there is truly no limits and no arguments to growth at all cost
You personally may not care about regressing to 19xx medicine, but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.
BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago. United Fruit Company and its banana republics have a long, long (and dirty) history.
You have to dig a little deeper with your numbers, because everyone is going to die from something. Deaths from cancer would probably go down without modern medicine because most people wouldn’t be living long enough to die from cancer.
> but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.
Trump was elected twice, the voters are brain dead cattle anyways
> BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago
At what scale? People could go to the US in 1700 too, it doesn't mean that commercial airlines are sustainable at ANY rate
Let us not even go deeper to the Age of Sail. Large-scale trade and consumption of sugar, tobacco and cotton fueled slavery operations from Virginia down to Brazil, long before a lightbulb was even a thing.
Well, the good news is that organizing societal and economic complexity and living into it is exactly what differentiate us from other species.
In the extremes, 1 hour weekly is probably too little and 100 hours weekly is excessive. But given how almost the entire world has converged to approx. 40 on average, I'd be surprised if it was very different from 40.
Yes, this may change with robots and AI.
At what point do we say that we don’t need to waste more of earth’s resources and instead find time to enjoy our current enormous wealth?
There will never be a point that society at large will decline to exploit resources when there is competition for those resources. It's easy to see why on average this behavior is common from an evolutionary perspective.
I am convinced there will be a point where humans will find other ways to compete than buying expensive goods. I thought the whole "humans are slaves to their genes" became quite out of fashion already 30 years or so.
While I agree that many people are status seekers, that can be different things. Where I live, a yacht is vulgar. Even a bigger car is looked down on if it isn't for some specific utility. Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.
If your job involves network connectivity and SSH, satellite Internet would allow you to do your job on your yacht where ever it happens to be, even in the middle of an ocean.
James Hamilton, Senior Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, [1] was doing this 15+ years ago as he motored around the world in a Nordhavn 52 [2] with his wife:
* https://mvdirona.com/2009/06/remote-data-communication-costs...
* https://mvdirona.com/2015/08/communications-at-sea/
* https://mvdirona.com/2018/03/kvh-v7-hts-twice-the-speed-more...
Sounds like a poshy neighborhood colonized by expats. I mean, I do share the values but it's definitely a luxury and entitled position (with its own consequences on the rest of the locals sharing the same city)
I genuinely don't understand why you think it is entitled.
What I mean with "entitled" in this context is that this whole "enjoy life, moments, family" movement - which I subscribe to and try to do myself! - comes from people that don't have economic issues at all. So yeah, instead of focusing on buying the fanciest Mercedes or BMW, they can leave work earlier to stay with their kids because they have a highly paid and specialized job where their place is safe, and the employer understands that's what they want and need.
They are certainly better than the hustlers that work 80 hours a week in my world view as well, but they are still entitled because if you were a cleaning lady, a cashier or the guy sweeping the streets you will need to obey to what your employer forces you to do rather than arriving 10 minutes late because you brought your kids to pre-school in a cargo bike.
(And btw, I’m faster with my cargo bike than the car drivers. I never get stuck in traffic chaos outside school and I never get stuck in traffic jams, and I don’t have look for parking. I hate the days when I have to use a car.)
1. View it as an opportunity to question or improve their own situation.
2. Prefer fairness and attempt to tear those people down.
Many Americans prefer 2. It’s fundamentally self destructive, but when they see workers who don’t hate their lives their immediate first thought is “gosh how selfish and entitled, someone has to stop them!” It’s a crab bucket mentality, driven by hyper-individualism in American labor.
Handwaving away constraints on production on physical goods because of advances in code generation is a new one.
African traditional cattle herders are still a thing and they're still living in thatched huts with weave walls.
Elsewhere in Africa, Thatching is still an up market thing: https://www.africathatch.co.za/
Perhaps spend some time learning about the wider world before making such obviously incorrect sweeping generalisations?
UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.
OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves
And a lot of people in the US can't afford hospitals or antibiotics today.
No, it doesn’t make sense, only in your head. We’re not mind readers, please elaborate and at least try to use logic or reasoning. It’s frustrating to readers otherwise.
For a while I had a sweet gig where instead of raises I got to work less but that just bewilders management even though I’m very confident they got more for their money.
It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear.
Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent.
This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.
There is maybe tiny overhead, but there is also more efficiency during time I am actually in, especially in slow moving processes. Plus QoL improvement is massive for me, as an adventurer, mountain lover and first and foremost a parent of 2 young kids.
People are scared these days to look for new job, its same as it was in 2008 in many regards (I personally went in opposite direction during that time despite many people warning me against, and actively started consulting and soon after then relocated to Switzerland), but our lives are short.
Do you want to end up regretting working too much for some empty goals of others, which usually #1 regret of dying people? I sure as hell won't be in that category, company performances, insecure egos of control freaks in management and other bullshit be damned, they are not meaningful part of any life well lived.
I was referring to the commenters talking about working 2/3 days a week. In the Netherlands 4 days a week is also becoming the norm, which I'm not a big fan of but it's not all that bad either, actual productivity doesn't change that much in practice.
I just mean that at some point, if you are not actually focused on your job, you end up creating more work than you deliver, or at least not enough of a surplus to justify a salary. So it's not surprising that managers are averse to reducing hours and salary linearly, the impact is not linear.
I think there are jobs where you need lots of context and there are jobs where other things are more important.
It makes sense too, if I worked two days of the week right now, I'd spend giant majority of that time just catching up and understanding the changing context. It would make more sense to work 4 months a year; 5 days a week.
Unfortunately, it's one of those things that only work in theory and isolation.
What about never working for 2billion% more?
You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.
But this is working less to have more free time.
> You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.
Why not? That's exactly what the person said they want.
The incorrect point that was made is that everyone want to work because they want more stuff, not because they want more free time. People that get more free time typically achieve this by working less, or not working