"The Workweek" is, surprisingly, a really deep topic.
Keynes' 15 hr work week prediction, for example, is a fascinating rabbit to travel down. The typical economics professors' "why it failed" explanations (at least circa 2005) are tellingly evasive. They preserve all Keynes' premises^ with a "what "happened" scenario that threads a tiny needle.
IMO, regardless of which rabbit hole you follow, it turns out that workweek is a very culturally defined thing. It isn't very reactive to economic forces at all. People get rich. Societies get rich. Women join the workforce. Efficiency rises by N000%. Workweeks remain similar.
Where quantity of work does change, it tends to be outside the workweek paradigm. Retirement became a big thing. Children don't work. Young adults do a lot of college. Women join the workforce, or don't. IE, we might work fewer years. Fewer people might work. Shortening workweeks rarely happens.
IMO, empirically, workweeks seem to be mostly a social institution... not an "economic" one. IE, economic explanations have very little predictive power because "out-of-theory" stuff is more important.
^[1]advancements in efficiency, [2] substitution effects, [3] income effects.
When my grandparents entered the workforce in Norway, the working week was typically 54 hours. When my parents entered the workforce it was limited to no more than 45 hours, and a couple of years later it was down to 42.5 hours. By the time I was born it was 40 hours. Before I entered the workforce, it was down to 37.5 hours for most employees (it is legally limited to 40 hours, but 37.5 has been the norm since 1986).
While you have a point that other factors like retirement age (and in recent years, a growing fear of an aging population) has certainly been part of the reason why it hasn't dropped as fast as some expected, in countries with a strong labour movement it certainly has dropped significantly, and even in countries with a weak labour movement it is still lower than it used to be.
I think you may be misunderestimating the original prediction.^ He predicted those drastic reduction in working hours within a generation or two, writing in 1930... It was supposed to happen by 1980.
The prediction was widely head, and relied on two non controversial ideas: income effect and substitution effect. Higher hourly wages make working more worthwhile, so people work more; Higher overall wages allow people to trade work less opt for leisure. It also relied on efficiency and gdp growth predictions which did really come true.
The orthodox reasoning for why the prediction failed is basically: We invented all this awesome new stuff. People prefer to work more, and buy more of this new stuff rather than work less. I don't believe this holds up, but it's what I was taught at uni.
Anyway... my point is that looking at the history of employment, it doesn't seem like these "economic" (in the literal sense) explanations have any predictive power. Actual changes in working patterns seem to be governed by "outside factors." Women joined the workforce. Children exited the workforce. People go to uni more. Retirement became statistically more common. Laws change. Norms change. Culture changes. Those things do affect how much we work. Economic factors like efficiency don't.
Norway is a small-sih country, and often an outlier, so IDK if it makes a good example. That said, I imagine that these changes in working hours were caused by rule changes: labour laws, union demands or somesuch. They aren't economic.
My point is that the model of the economy and the model of a worker used by Keynes to make the prediction, and by most commenters on the topic since are clearly bad models.At the margin, it doesn't even make sense to most workers. We (most of us) don't choose our work hours. We don't work 8% less because 92% of the money is enough. That marginal choice doesn't even exist. We work a job, and job hours are defined by convention.
Efficiency, GDP growth and such, over the last 91 years, haven't affected the number of hour we work. Work hasn't been static. It's just governed by other things.
If you met Keynes in 1930, you would be right to say "No. How rich we get, how technologically advanced or how productive our industries are will have no effect on how much we work...." You would have been correct. Keynes, and every economist from austrians to marxists would have been wrong.
Even today, after the prediction has long-failed empirically, economists have a hard time facing this.
I'm fully aware of the original prediction. The point is that while it was overoptimistic about the pace of reduction, working hours have declined, and have done so substantially.
I don't think you can suggest that economic factors like efficiency has not affected this - increased efficiency has been an enabler that allowed these reductions in working hours to happen without according income reductions. Without efficiency improvements, demanding these kind of reductions would not have been viable.
> Norway is a small-sih country, and often an outlier, so IDK if it makes a good example.
There is not a single country in Europe that hasn't seem a similar pattern of reductions. I used Norway as an example because I was familiar with the reductions, but this is not isolated by any means.
I don't think it's a question of pace. 20% over 90 years instead of 70% over 40 years isn't "pace." Also, Keynes predicted that people would choose fewer hours. I assume that what you are describing about Norway is an advancement of worker rights. That's not really the Keynes prediction.
It is a question, to some extent, of definitions. Does average workweek increase because more women joined the workforce? Decrease because children left the workforce? Does college count as "work? Does unemployment factor in? Should we consider Norway's average workweek shorter than Spain's because of unemployment rates? etc. There are lots of definitional issues. I'm interested in this, honestly.
The definition I'm interested is a the common sense one. What does "full time," generally, mean? Is there a normative choice, at scale, for a 15 hr workweek that is normative. The answer to this is no.
>> increased efficiency has been an enabler that allowed these reductions in working hours to happen
This why looking at old predictions is interesting. It's easy to narrate things that have already happened in ways that don't challenge our views.
Maybe there is a direct relationship between efficiency and working hours. It's just 50X weaker than Keynes (and current microeconomic theory still) predicts. That's it's an uninteresting theory. The difference between true and false is unimportant.
>> There is not a single country in Europe that hasn't seem a similar pattern of reductions
IDK... European countries are pretty different from eachother. Here in ireland, I think average workweek has increased just based on labour force participation. Historically, unemployment has been high here. In our generation it is very low. Female participation also went from very low to very high here. We also went from mostly self employed to mostly employed in that period.
Ireland was never very industrial, so the "standard" or union normative working conditions are not as specifically defined as it is in Germany, for example.
Keynes' 15 hr work week prediction, for example, is a fascinating rabbit to travel down. The typical economics professors' "why it failed" explanations (at least circa 2005) are tellingly evasive. They preserve all Keynes' premises^ with a "what "happened" scenario that threads a tiny needle.
IMO, regardless of which rabbit hole you follow, it turns out that workweek is a very culturally defined thing. It isn't very reactive to economic forces at all. People get rich. Societies get rich. Women join the workforce. Efficiency rises by N000%. Workweeks remain similar.
Where quantity of work does change, it tends to be outside the workweek paradigm. Retirement became a big thing. Children don't work. Young adults do a lot of college. Women join the workforce, or don't. IE, we might work fewer years. Fewer people might work. Shortening workweeks rarely happens.
IMO, empirically, workweeks seem to be mostly a social institution... not an "economic" one. IE, economic explanations have very little predictive power because "out-of-theory" stuff is more important.
^[1]advancements in efficiency, [2] substitution effects, [3] income effects.