1½-Day Work Week

Notes

If we wanted to, we could work just 1½ days a week, and enjoy 5½ days of freedom

According to US government figures, we were over 3 times more productive in the year 2000 than we were in 1950. If we had chosen to take all those productivity gains as time off work, we could now be working just 1½ days a week, and taking the other 5½ days to explore, invent, compose, draw, write, read, play, relax and love.

Instead, we chose to take all those productivity gains as more stuff. About 16 times more stuff, to be precise, after adjusting for inflation. Some of that stuff is pretty neat. I like being able to download radio shows from around the world to my MP3 player (NPR's Planet Money as well as BBC's Thinking Allowed), and use the web to order almost any book delivered to my local library.

But let's be clear about all that stuff. There were plenty of poor people in 1950 – just as there are plenty of poor people today – but the typical American was reasonably comfortable back then. As far as sociologists have been able to tell, all the extra stuff we have been accumulating since then has not made us any happier.

Extra time, on the other hand, and freedom from the indignities of work, might have made us a whole lot happier.

Let's not be all-or-nothing about this. I would happily work, say, 2 days a week rather than 1½ if it meant that I could still buy the occasional avocado or mango from my local fruit and vegetable store. But given that most of us are still working 40 hours or more a week – given that we've taken none of the productivity gains as time off work – we've surely got the balance badly wrong. We just don't need to work so hard. If we made a collective decision to work less, we'd still be grotesquely rich, we'd just be, well, able to lead fuller, more fulfilled lives.

Of course, there's reason to be skeptical about the US government productivity figures. I suspect that they don't fully take into account house price rises; perhaps, instead of buying 16 times more stuff, we're just spending 16 times more for the same old houses. I'd love to put together another things made thinkable presentation investigating such economic perversities, but right now, with the demands of my full-time job, not to mention my part-time job, I just don't have the time.