The dream of less work

[Sempu]

Niri Te, I really admire you for walking your talk. The original utopian dream was that technology would give us more free time; I'm practically old enough to remember it when it was still real. See the House of Tomorrow at Disneyland for instance. The reality has been very different. Wages for Americans have fallen since the 1970s and the number of hours they work has increased (see the two charts on page 339 in Financial Reckoning Day Fallout: Surviving Today's Global Depression - William Bonner, Addison Wiggin, Kate Incontrera - Google Books) and this Harris poll: US Leisure Time Plummets 20% in 2008, Hits New Low showing US leisure time reached at all time low in 2008. Clearly we are not using technology to our advantage.

There is a lot of disagreement if you research this. http://weber.ucsd.edu/~vramey/resear..._Published.pdf says as much, but says that leisure time per week is essentially unchanged since 1900. It is instructive for pointing out that the original utopian leisure dream is probably due to a 1930 paper by Keynes. Cumulative lifetime leisure time is up because people live longer.

While it seems self-evident that the working classes appear to be better off than they were during the Victoria era, that period may have been an anomaly that is revealed when we look back further. Primitive culture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia says that it's a defining feature of primitive cultures that they have more leisure time.

Some anticipated that work would be optional in the future. Robert Heinlein's first novel "For Us The Living" depicted a "social dividend" (presumably from automation) that was enough for everyone. Closest equivalent I can think of is the oil dividend for Alaskan residents. The original Star Trek series showed work being more or less optional and money no longer necessary (they weren't consistent on that point). Now that seems like a cruel hoax.

Partly I think this is a result of ruinous central bank policies and national debt, a topic that I used to find immensely boring until I discovered how much it was affecting my life. And also that we have not as a people matured enough to deal with the social implications of our changing technology.