The 15-Hour Work Week Was Always a Terrible Idea
Some fantasize about a dramatically reduced work week because they misunderstand the purpose of work and the importance of leisure.
This is an updated version of an article that was published at the Foundation for Economic Education on 7/18/2019.
There is an allegedly beautiful vision shared by many economists, policymakers, and workers: One day, it is supposed, working hours will become so productive that each worker will only have to work a few hours per week and then they will luxuriously spend the rest of their time on leisure.
The New Economics Foundation advocates for a 21-hour work week. Sociologist Peter Fleming suggests a three-day work week in his 2015 book The Mythology of Work. Historian Rutger Bregman argues in his bestselling 2017 book Utopia for Realists that a 15-hour work week is achievable and desirable. Business Insider claims that “The 40-hour week isn’t working anymore,” and advocates instead for a 15-hour work week. These are just a few of countless examples.
John Maynard Keynes, one of history’s most influential economists, predicted in 1930 that the grandchildren of his generation would enjoy 15-hour work weeks. The rest of the labor would be done by machines. This was a popular idea. In 1965, a Senate subcommittee projected that we would only work 14 hours per week by the year 2000.
These projections are now typically understood to have been wildly off. Productivity has indeed massively increased, and so have the material living standards of workers. But this has not seemed to result in the massive decline in working hours that many predicted.
According to recent data from Gallup, full-time employees were working an average of 42.9 hours per week as of 2024. This alone doesn’t mean that Keynes was wildly wrong. The math is a lot more complicated. Matthew Yglesias defends Keynes in a recent article by pointing out that, even if Keynes was wrong to imagine each work week being radically diminished, he may have been right to imagine that hours worked over a lifetime would go significantly down in some way. Yglesias points out that people spend many more years in retirement than they used to, and also that many hours of household drudgery have been transformed into leisure time by the spread of technological advancements such as washing machines and dishwashers.
But none of these people seem to question the assumption that more leisure time and fewer working hours would be a desirable outcome. Regardless of how accurate Keynes’s prediction was, I think the question of how desirable leisure time is compared to working hours is more important and less frequently discussed.
Leisure Versus Investment
When you gain access to a time-saving innovation such as a dishwasher or other labor-saving technology, you have two options: You can fritter away the newfound time on leisure and relaxation, or you can spend your extra time increasing your productivity. This dilemma of time expenditure is equivalent to the more frequently articulated dilemma of money expenditure. When you have extra money, you can temporarily increase your leisure (or your consumption of some other luxury good), or you can invest that money in future productivity gains.
And these are not new dilemmas introduced by modern technology. These problems have been with humanity since time immemorial. Whichever Stone Age hunters first invented the spear, the axe, the sling, and so on had these same two options. They could spend extra time on leisure, or they could use their newfound hunting abilities to bring extra meat home to their kin. Those who chose option B enabled more population growth and probably aided in our ability to exist today.
The cultivation of domestic crops and livestock over 10,000 years ago was probably one of the greatest innovations for economic growth in human history. For the first time, humans had the ability to create a massive food surplus. Yuval Noah Harari, professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explains in his international bestselling book Sapiens that, “With the move to permanent villages and the increase in food supply, the population began to grow. But the extra mouths quickly wiped out the food surpluses, so even more fields had to be planted.”
People theoretically could have chosen leisure over investment in new children and more crops. If everyone had chosen leisure, the population would not have boomed. If some people chose leisure, they were out-populated and outcompeted by those who chose investment. Harari calls the agricultural revolution “history’s biggest fraud” because the early agriculturalists likely intended to increase their leisure and instead increased their productivity.
Like the grandchildren of Keynes’s generation, they probably fantasized about using technological productivity gains to increase their leisure.
People in hunter-gatherer societies worked far fewer hours than people in agrarian and modern societies, but that is because they lacked the opportunities for productive work that more advanced societies offer. In their book Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know, Ronald Bailey and Marian Tupy explain:
Based on their observations of extant hunter-gatherer societies, scholars estimate that our foraging ancestors worked anywhere between 2.8 hours and 7.6 hours per day. Once they secured their food for the day, they stopped. The foragers’ workload was comparatively low, but so was their standard of living. Our ancestors’ wealth was limited to the weight of the possessions they could carry on their backs from one location to the next.
About 12,000 years ago, people started to settle down, cultivate crops, and domesticate animals. The total number of hours worked rose, but people were willing to sacrifice free time in exchange for a more stable food supply. Since artificial lighting was prohibitively expensive, daylight regulated the amount of work that could be done. In summer, most people worked between 6 and 10 hours in the fields and an additional 3 hours at home. In winter, daylight limited the total number of work hours to 8.
Only by developing the tools to productively work longer hours did agrarian societies lay the groundwork for the massive gains in safety, life expectancy, and wealth enjoyed by most people today.
To Stagnate or to Achieve Great Things?
We face the choice between leisure and productivity every day of our lives. As Harari points out, an email is a lot faster and cheaper to send than a snail mail letter. When email was invented, people could have made their lives more leisurely by writing to people just as infrequently as they ever did—and more efficiently than before. Instead, people invested their saved time in writing to more people and doing so more frequently. As a result, people are more productive through their email and just as stressed as they used to be.
Leisure is just one of countless nice things that increased productivity can buy. It is no more desirable, and ultimately probably far less desirable, than other things that can be achieved instead, such as more scientific knowledge, more medical research and other investments in health, improved safety, transportation technology, communications technology, and other upgrades to the human condition.
At any level of technological and economic advancement throughout the last many millennia of human civilization, humans could have stopped advancing and simply “taken it easy.” If they had done so, the “taking it easy” phase would have only lasted a short period, and then the human project would have stagnated or succumbed to any number of new threats that inevitably arise as the result of constant exogenous change. What is more, their “taking it easy” in the distant past would have included far more pain from horrible diseases, famines, wolves, tribal violence, and so on than the weekends, evenings, and vacations of most modern people. The project of human civilization and prosperity has gotten as far as it has because people often invested in the future instead of indulging in those temporary opportunities to “take it easy.”
None of this is to suggest that people should never take a day off, or never indulge in leisure or frivolous consumption and luxury. Sustainably accomplishing great things and creating value requires spending time and resources to rest, experience beauty, grow as an individual in ways that are hard to measure, and maintain psychological and physical wellbeing. Taking vacations, relaxing for some portion of every day, and partaking in some frivolity can be important aspects of this process. But the idea that productivity should serve the purpose of facilitating leisure, and not the other way around, puts leisure unfoundedly high on the hierarchy of achievable values. This is pessimistic. There are far greater things to be achieved.
When they put their mind to it, humans can imagine possible achievements of vast and heroic magnificence. If enough hard work and ingenuity is invested, humans could build or terraform new and better worlds in outer space, develop radically more illuminating scientific theories than have yet been fathomed, dramatically extend human life expectancy, and so on, ad infinitum.
As significant productivity gains continue to be made, instead of seeing this as an opportunity to shorten the work week, people could better serve themselves, their grandchildren, and humanity generally by thinking of the newfound wealth as an opportunity to keep working and gain more ground in the march toward greater and more brilliant horizons of human achievement.