American employees currently generate the equivalent of a 1973 40-hour workweek in just 16 hours, yet per capita hours worked in U.S. business actually rose 10 percent between 1973 and 2024. National accounts reveal that 18 of those 24 freed-up hours bypassed paychecks entirely, while the remaining six arrived in forms that workers could not convert into time off. This dynamic has prevented society from realizing historical predictions of shorter workweeks. Modern automation increasingly handles cognitive functions like reading, writing, and decision-making, uncoupling wage rates from overall productivity growth.
Key points
Economic productivity per person expanded nearly eight-fold since 1930 without lowering t…: Economic productivity per person expanded nearly eight-fold since 1930 without lowering the federal 40-hour baseline set in 1938.
Gains that could have enabled a 15-hour workweek were captured as higher national product…: Gains that could have enabled a 15-hour workweek were captured as higher national production rather than converted into personal leisure.
As emerging technologies automate cognitive functions like decision-making, the conventio…: As emerging technologies automate cognitive functions like decision-making, the conventional role of wages in distributing wealth is deteriorating.
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In 1973, what a forty-hour week of work produced takes sixteen hours to produce today.
That’s according to Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) input output tables. An hour of work in American business now makes two and a half times what it made in 1973. For every forty hours that used to be needed, twenty-four have been freed.
You have probably not noticed them. The forty-hour week was written into American law by an act of 1938, and hasn’t changed. Counted for each head of population, the hours worked in American business in 2024 were 10 percent higher than in 1973. As a country, the US took the whole of fifty years’ progress as more output and none of it as time.
It was supposed to go differently. In 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a short essay about the world his grandchildren would live in. He predicted that “the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day.” And with so much plenty, he…
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