Economist Maynard Keynes predicted work three hours a week: Why don't people enjoy 200 euros a month?

In 1930, a year after the Great Depression [1929-1933], John Maynard Kenyes sat down to write about the economic opportunities his grandchildren would have.

Despite the intense gloom as the global economy had fallen to its knees, the British economist did not back down, saying that “the dominant pressure in the world... blinds us and makes us not see what happens below the surface of”. In his essay, he predicted that after 100 years, in the 1920 ' s, society would be so advanced that we wouldn't even have to work. The main problem confronting countries like Britain and the United States would become frustration, and people would have to cut their time at work by about three hours a week or fifteen hours a year.

At first glance it looks like Kaynes has done a miserable job as a predictor of the future. In 1930 an average worker in America, Britain, Australia, and Japan spent 45 to 48 hours at work. Nowadays, this is up to 38 hours.

Keynes has a legendary sttura as one of the fathers in modern economics responsible for the way we think about monetary and fiscal policies. He's also famous for the game of words he did with economists who did long-term predictions: “In long-term predictions, all of us are dead”. But the forecast of 15 hours a week may be more likely to be shot than it seems.

If we wanted to produce as much as it did A contemporary of Kaynes in the years of '30s, we wouldn't have to work anywhere from 15 hours a week. If you adjust it for productivity to increase at work, it could take seven or eight hours, and 10 in Japan. This increase in productivity comes from a century of automation and technological advancements: that allow us to produce more things with less work. In that sense, developed nations have actually exceeded Keynes' predictions we have to work on just half the hours he predicted.

Progress in the past 90 years is evident not only when we consider efficiency in the workplace but also when considering all the free time we enjoy. First, consider retirement - an agreement with yourself to work hard while you are young and to enjoy leisure time when you are old. In the '30s, most people never reached retirement age, and they just worked until they died. Today, people live long after retirement, living a third of their lives without working at all.

If you take the job you do when you're young and distribute it to the retirement period, the average number of working hours a week is only 25 hours. There is a second factor that increases the amount of leisure time we enjoy - reducing household chores. Everywhere in washing machines, electric absorbers and microwaves mean that housewives also work 30 hours less a week in their homes than in the 1930 ' s.

So if today's advanced economies have [or exceeded] the productivity point predicted by Keynes, why are there still jobs with 30 to 40 hours a week? And why does it seem that there are no big changes? It's a question about human nature that increased expectations for a good life and also the way work is structured in different societies.

Part of the answer is inflation of our way of life - people have a hungery appetite for more. Keynes spoke of the economic problem and the struggle for survival”, but few people choose to comply with a simple survival. People live in a hedonic routine: we always want more. The standard of life is much higher than that of the people in the years of '30s, where people could live without an expensive telephone, without Netflix, without ever larger and wiser televisions and so on.

In addition, as the economy becomes increasingly productive, employment differs from agriculture and factories towards services industries. Thanks to technological and productive progress, we could cope with our needs for a simple life with little work, thus releasing us for other things. Many people today work as mental - health consultants, visual effects artists, accountants, and vloggers, which are not just for survival. Keynes' essay argues that more people will be able to look for the <x0 life variables” in the future, including a split with the world of survival. In fact, the work world has only expanded to include more activities that are of no importance to economic survival.

In the end, Persian social inequality also helps persistence in 40 hours a week. Many people have to work from 40 hours a week just to be successful. As a society, in general, we are capable of producing enough for everyone. But if the distribution of wealth is all alike. In some countries, like the United States, the relationship between productivity and pay is broken: the recent increases in productivity actually benefit only the highest share in society. In his essay, Kaynes predicted the opposite: a leveling and equalizing, where people would work to make sure other people's needs were met.

In his essay, Keynes despised some of the fundamental trends of capitalism, calling it the motive to earn before “as a devastating morbitade” and complained that this made one of the most terrible human qualities. Of course, these human qualities advance the pgore. And the insistence on progress is not bad. That's what Kaynes knew. But at some point we have to look back to see where we got here.