EDIT: Replace ‘every human in the workforce’ with ‘most people’. I agree efficiency has not been gained equally across all professions.
In: Economics
One problem with your question is that not every occupation has been increasing in efficiency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
So the rest of the workforce is gaining efficiency and the economy is reacting to people able to make more money in less time (example: high wage software engineers in California driving housing prices up because they have tons of cash to spend). While a teacher can technically teach thousands of more students thanks to video calls it’s not something you want so teachers still only teach something like 30-40 students an hour like they have for years and years.
So to keep up with this you have to pay them exponentially more for their labor so they can still have enough money to survive.
Meanwhile everyone with greater efficiency has to pay more and more for every service that hasn’t increased through efficiency. Doctors, construction, child care, (soon to be food preparation and transportation).
Because the average worker still has to pay the bills and feed his family.
Imagine being a boss, you own something simple like a banana stand. You hire a person to work 40 hours a week, along side you. You are running the register and dealing with customers, while your employee is making the banana orders. All fine and dandy.
So one year you decide to invest $500,000 in a banana robot to do most of that person’s job. In fact you only need that person for an hour a day, to get the robot prepped.
So now you only need your employee for 5 hours a week instead of 40. So are you going to keep paying him for 40 hours of work per week? No. The entire point of your automation investment was to eliminate man labor hours.
So that investment helps YOU, the business owner. It doesn’t help the employee.
Because that would mean that you would be able to produce the same amount of products, you’d just need less time. But why would a company wanna do that? Why would they just be happy with the same amount of products produced when they can increase it?
It just wouldn’t make sense to not use that time to producing more.
Because countries run into debt to fund their militaries and their welfare states to support for the poor and the extremely rich classes. So people need to work more comparatively to pay for that debt.
Most of the extra productivity and efficiency has gone straight to the top. Instead of CEOs making hundreds of millions, now they make billions.
Your question is very biaised and assume we are not working less, yet we actually are.
I have some numbers but they are part of a french study made by the official statistics organisation (insee) so you may have some trouble reading them. If you just want the chart, scroll down to “Tableau 1”. You can probably find the numbers yourself pretty easily too, i doubt this data is hidden.
As far as France goes, we used to work 45-46h/week 50 years ago, and now it is 35. We also went from 2 to 5 weeks of paid leave per year between 1950 and today.
The graph also shows a global decrease of 25% of the time of work in the USA from 1950 to 2007, and the trend has not changed since.
Source here:
[https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/1281175](https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/1281175)
Management/ownership still has more leverage than workers. They’d rather make workers keep working same amount of time and reap higher profits than reduce work and keep profits the same. They also have used their leverage to not even increase pay in line with workers’ productivity.
Because each of us makes the trade-off that we want a higher standard of living, within a reasonable cost in terms of hours worked. We seem to be willing to work 25% to 35% of our time (40 to 55 hours per week), and we’ll keep doing so no matter how high our standard of living gets.
One could argue that there is indeed less work to go around now than there used to be. The big labor problem in the first few millennia of civilization was finding enough people to do all the work. This was mostly because that work was grueling agricultural labor where one person could barely support themselves, let alone support a class of people who didn’t participate in that labor. It’s only been in the last century that the big labor problem was instead finding enough work for all the people.
And there are a few reasons why people still want to work a lot even though civilization could probably survive if they worked less. First, work is an intrinsic good for some people. It makes them feel engaged, productive, and/or fulfilled. Some people work until they die. Others “retire” but continue to do volunteer work. Second, work is still the main way to access the things we need to survive/thrive. Not everyone starts life with generational wealth, but everyone starts life with time. They can sell some of their time as work and so have money to buy the stuff they want. In a society without work, someone with only time to offer will be quite poor.
It’s possible to build a post-work society where everybody shares in the wealth. This is the main idea behind current programs like food stamps and social security and proposed future programs like birth trusts and universal basic income. The transition from here to there will be messy because we’ll have to constantly keep track of how much work actually needs doing and calibrate the programs as necessary. We’ll also have to get past ancient ideas of societal fairness if we’re ever going to get to a place where some people can forego work without stigma.
We make things more efficiently but we also want more. An average home in the 50s had maybe 1 television, average homes now have 2-3. We have access to computers, phones, foods, textiles and more that weren’t available before.
Latest Answers