In 1930, as The Depression set in, the economist John Maynard Keynes looked past the crisis and predicted prosperity. Within 100 years our grandchildren will have to work only 15 hours a week, he said.
2030 is no longer in the misty future, and Keynes’s prediction isn’t close.
My father lived through the Depression. Throughout a long career, he worked a 40-hour week.
The wonders of technology during my lifetime — personal computers, the Internet, smartphones — have made my life easier in some respects. But I worked longer hours than my father did.
The Project Manager Who Used To Play Whiffle Ball In My Backyard has even more technology to enjoy. He works from home and has more flexible hours. But I’ve seen him work 60-hour weeks, many in a row, to wrap up a job for a client.
I think every revolution in technology shows us new ways to exploit things: natural resources, the labor of other people, ourselves.
• Sources: The essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,”
originally published in 1930, was collected inJohn Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963. You could find it online, but I’d pass. The essay contains an important idea and so I have made a note of it. But an anti-Semitic remark turned delight into dismay for me.
A better alternative: This line of thought about work was prompted by Vivek V. Venkataraman’s intriguing essay “Lessons from the foragers,” Aeon, 2 March 2023.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-hunter-gatherers-demonstrate-about-work-and-satisfaction. Venkataraman, an anthropologist, led me to Keynes’s essay.
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