By 2030, we will work 15 hours per week.
That’s what the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted almost 100 years ago.¹ He believed our needs would be met with little to no work, and that mankind’s biggest problem would be our abundance of leisure. Today, combine harvesters produce food for the thousands, yet the 40-hour week remains the standard. This makes you wonder — how much must we actually work to produce what we need?
Answer: 10 hours per week.
To be in good health, each person needs a living-income.
Or, rather, they need the goods and services that such an income can buy. As such, what we must produce, and how much, can be estimated by the money required to provide a living-income to the population.
In 2019², the average American living income was $26,421 per person.³ Meanwhile, the US population was 329 million,⁴ whereby we needed to collect $8.7 trillion dollars to provide everyone with a living-wage. This is a lot of money. For reference it was about 41% of GDP at the time.⁵
In other words: to satisfy everyone’s needs in the year 2019, we needed to produce $8.7 trillion dollars worth of goods and services. This can be imagined as a pile of the things we need. A pile we must create.
The next question is how much time it takes to do so.
The hours we must work can be estimated through average productivity.
In 2019, every hour of work produced an average of $77 dollars worth of goods and services.⁶ If you want to get depressed, compare this to your hourly wage.
To produce the $8.7 trillion pile of goods and services with average productivity, we had to work about 113 billion hours over the year. This may sound like a lot, but spread over the population it’s about 7 hours per person per week. However, not everyone can and should work — some are babies, sick, or elderly, whereby a better way is to split the hours between those of working ages (ages 15–64). In this case, we get about 10 hours per worker per week.
This means that if every able-bodied person pitched in, we could work a 10-hour day and then have a 6-day weekend. Or, why not work for 2 years and then rest for 6 years? And we could enjoy this abundance of leisure while everyone got what they needed.
Meanwhile, the average workweek in 2019 was 34 hours⁷— and many people had to work much more to make ends meet.
To be clear, I am not dreaming of utopia: it is unknown if and how any of this can be achieved.
But, it seems clear that we should be able to work much less — and be much more free — than we currently are.
Footnotes
¹For Keynes prediction, see pages 364–365 and 369 in [1]. Also see [2].
²We focus on 2019 because it’s the year before Covid and other economic troubles, thus avoiding excuses such as “well, because pandemic” or “well, because recession.”
³The average living-wage per US citizen (in 2019) was calculated by summing the living-wage of a single individual multiplied by the state population, and then dividing by the total population. The original source of the living wage data is [4], but was downloaded 26 August 2022 from https://public.knoema.com/uombotf/living-wage-by-county-in-u-s (where the data is behind a paywall). The variable used was the living wage of a single adult, specified for each US state in units of US dollars per hour. This was assumed to apply to every individual in the population, making it a conservative estimate that neglects that people who live together have lower living costs. (In other words, it neglects economies of scale of consumption.)
⁴The 2019 US population was 329,064,917 people. Data retrieved from (Feenstra and Inklaar, 2021) — see source [3].
⁵According to the International Monetary Fund, US GDP in 2019 was $21,389.950 Billion (in current prices). See [5].
⁶Average productivity is given by GDP per hour worked (measured in national currency at current prices) by persons engaged (employees and self-employed). Data retrieved from (Feenstra and Inklaar, 2021) — see source [3].
⁷The average working hours are the average number of hours worked per year per person-engaged (employees and self-employed). Data retrieved from (Feenstra and Inklaar, 2021) — see source [3].
Bibliography
[1] Keynes, John Maynard. Economic possibilities for our grandchildren (1930). In Essays in Persuasion. Norton Paperback. New York: Norton, 1963.
[2] Crafts, Nicholas. “The 15-Hour Week: Keynes’s Prediction Revisited.” Economica 89, no. 356 (2022): 815–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecca.12439.
[3] Robert C. Feenstra, Robert Inklaar. “Penn World Table 10.0.” Groningen Growth and Development Centre, 2021. https://doi.org/10.15141/S5Q94M.
[4] Glasmeier, Amy K. “Living Wage Calculator.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2022. livingwage.mit.edu (accessed 26 August 2022)
[5] “Report for Selected Countries and Subjects.” Accessed August 8, 2023. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2023/April/weo-report.
