Arkady
President
The world's second-wealthiest man is talking about a three-day work-week:
http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/21/news/economy/three-day-work-week/index.html?iid=HP_LN
His idea is coupled with longer working days and later retirements, so it's mostly just a shift of when the hours will be put in. Few people, today, are talking about making it so people can actually work fewer hours. But, such talk used to be common among economists and sociologists, back in the 1950s and 60s. When it became clear how much productivity was growing, it also became clear that we could maintain our then-current amount of consumption with dramatically fewer hours devoted to labor, and many thought that's how things would go.
Instead, we went the other way: longer hours for workers, and a much higher percentage of the population working. Remember, for all the griping about a falling labor force participation rate, the rate today is much higher than in the 50s and 60s -- the rate in the 1950s was as low as 58.1%, whereas today it's 62.8%. To get the participation rate back down to where it was in the mid-50s, we'd need about 7.3 million people to exit the labor force. In the same period, retirements have been pushed back, too, so that people are working more at the tail end of their lives.
Some of the impact of this combination of growing productivity, growing hours, and growing labor force participation has shown up as a rising family income. The median family earns twice what it did in 1954, in inflation-adjusted dollars. But much has shown up simply as a vast enrichment of the economic elite. To give you a sense of that, look at what has happened to real GDP per capita. In the same time that median real family income doubled, real GDP per capita rose by 3.2 times. To put it another way, if the growth of family income had kept pace with the per capita growth of the economy, then a median family, which earned $49,146.26 in 2012, would instead have earned $78,388.28.
Of course, such an equitable portion of economic growth wouldn't necessarily need to take the form of higher consumerism. It could, instead, take the form of a higher quality of other aspects of life, such as free time. In theory, we could be working 31.3% as much as in the mid-1950s, while still having a real median Family income the same as back then. So, a standard 40-hour week would instead be about 12.5 hours. If we put our high productivity to work for everyone equally, bringing down the workweek, you could be working one and a half days per week, and still living a median 1950s lifestyle (modest by modern standards, but not exactly suffering).
http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/21/news/economy/three-day-work-week/index.html?iid=HP_LN
His idea is coupled with longer working days and later retirements, so it's mostly just a shift of when the hours will be put in. Few people, today, are talking about making it so people can actually work fewer hours. But, such talk used to be common among economists and sociologists, back in the 1950s and 60s. When it became clear how much productivity was growing, it also became clear that we could maintain our then-current amount of consumption with dramatically fewer hours devoted to labor, and many thought that's how things would go.
Instead, we went the other way: longer hours for workers, and a much higher percentage of the population working. Remember, for all the griping about a falling labor force participation rate, the rate today is much higher than in the 50s and 60s -- the rate in the 1950s was as low as 58.1%, whereas today it's 62.8%. To get the participation rate back down to where it was in the mid-50s, we'd need about 7.3 million people to exit the labor force. In the same period, retirements have been pushed back, too, so that people are working more at the tail end of their lives.
Some of the impact of this combination of growing productivity, growing hours, and growing labor force participation has shown up as a rising family income. The median family earns twice what it did in 1954, in inflation-adjusted dollars. But much has shown up simply as a vast enrichment of the economic elite. To give you a sense of that, look at what has happened to real GDP per capita. In the same time that median real family income doubled, real GDP per capita rose by 3.2 times. To put it another way, if the growth of family income had kept pace with the per capita growth of the economy, then a median family, which earned $49,146.26 in 2012, would instead have earned $78,388.28.
Of course, such an equitable portion of economic growth wouldn't necessarily need to take the form of higher consumerism. It could, instead, take the form of a higher quality of other aspects of life, such as free time. In theory, we could be working 31.3% as much as in the mid-1950s, while still having a real median Family income the same as back then. So, a standard 40-hour week would instead be about 12.5 hours. If we put our high productivity to work for everyone equally, bringing down the workweek, you could be working one and a half days per week, and still living a median 1950s lifestyle (modest by modern standards, but not exactly suffering).
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