The Poverty of Affluence. Paul Wachtel

half as much access to the goods and services the economy provides? There would be little enthusiasm for a shift to shorter working hours if we do not clearly address this issue.

      In thinking about this question, it is useful to begin by looking back at the history of the progressive reduction in working hours that for so many years characterized the dynamics of industrial societies. This significant reduction in the workweek over the years did not lead to a decline in living standards, even though it meant people were working less. Quite the opposite. The reduction in working hours was more than compensated for by technological advances that enabled workers to turn out more product per given hour of work, and thus the decline in working hours proceeded side by side with an increase in living standards. (When Ford adopted the forty-hour week at his company in 1914, he doubled workers’ pay at the same time).

      It is conceivable that even more could have been produced if people continued working sixty, seventy, or eighty hours a week,^* but in essence workers took some of the fruits of increasing productivity in time rather than only in material goods. Time is a much more scarce and precious commodity, and it is consistent with the central theme of this book that, at our society’s level of economic development, our once again beginning to take some of the dividends from increasing productivity in time will be much more humanly satisfying than just being able to buy more and more. Indeed, as noted in the witty quotation I cite in Chapter Seven from Swedish economist Stafford Linden, there are limits to our very ability to consume; consumption takes time, and time is the very commodity we deprive ourselves of in our otherwise ever expanding economy.

      Nonetheless, it is important to understand that a significant reduction in the standard workweek—especially when it is a response to technological advances that enable much of the work formerly done by people to be effectively done by intelligent machines—need not mean that the populace now enjoying shorter working hours will lose access to the package of goods and services to which they had become accustomed. But for this to happen, we will need to rethink some of our familiar assumptions.

      Useful perspective on some of the rethinking that could lead to maintaining current standards of consumption while reducing the workweek is provided by returning to the example of the truck drivers whose jobs may be threatened by the adoption of driverless vehicles. It remains important to notice that if this happens, the amount of goods being delivered will not diminish one iota. The driverless vehicles will be able to deliver the exact same amount of goods as before (indeed, more, because they will not need to stop for sleep, food, or bathroom breaks). The question then is how to enable the people who once drove trucks to have access to the goods they once delivered. The same total supply of goods will still be there, so in principle the former truck drivers could continue to consume the same share of that total without anyone else having less.

      Framing it in this way, of course, does not take into account that we are not comfortable with just “giving” it to them, and they would likely not be happy with simply getting a “handout.”^* Thus, ultimately, the challenge remains one of helping them find alternative jobs—and an important purpose of transitioning to a shorter workweek through most of society would be to make that easier to accomplish. But such a shift to new lines of work for millions of people is no small matter. The purpose of my odd thought experiment—asking why, if the same stuff is still there, they can’t continue to get the same stuff—is to invite us to step back from our familiar assumptions and confront anew questions we had long thought were settled.

      Much the same questions just raised about the delivery of goods can be asked regarding their manufacture. There is a similar prospect in this realm of intelligent machines taking over more of the work once done by people—and we can include here as well medical diagnoses offered by computers, programs that generate wills or tax returns, online search sites for booking flights and hotels, and other such substitutions of technology for human work that we are already seeing emerging. Such technologies do not totally do away with the need for doctors, lawyers, accountants, or travel agents—and as discussed earlier, they can potentially create the need for whole new categories of work. But they certainly disrupt the professional lives of those who had previously been doing what the program now does. And once again, we confront a situation (especially clearly evident in the manufacture of actual physical products) in which the same total output is available to the public even if the same input of labor is not required. Thus, here too the problem can be translated into one of finding a way to get the very same product to the very same set of people.

      Casting the question in this very basic, concrete, and purposefully naive way has the potential to make room for fresh ways of thinking about access to the economy’s output and about the foundations for an economy organized around goals other than the frantic, environmentally hazardous pursuit of growth. It enables us to view the problem less exclusively as one of increasing production and points toward the task of creatively devising new rationales and strategies for distribution.

      None of this means that we do not need to be concerned about ensuring that people can find jobs. Loss of income is not the only reason that unemployment is consistently found to be one of the most stressful experiences a person can undergo. For many people, their jobs are a central source of meaning, identity, and belonging. What people see as threatened by the prospect of unemployment is not just their access to material goods but their place in society and their way of life.

      Indeed, it is the very importance of maintaining high levels of employment that leads to my interest in the shorter workweek as a key element in a way of life that is sustainable on both human and environmental grounds. Reducing the standard workweek would enable more people to have jobs for any given level of demand for work, and it would thus enable more jobs to be available without requiring that the demand for work continue to grow unceasingly, as in an economy characterized by the imperative of growth. If full time work became consensually understood as twenty hours a week, that would begin to be experienced as the norm, and people working that number of hours would experience themselves as full stakeholders, just as people who today work forty hours do not see themselves as working part time just because people once worked sixty or eighty. But this would still leave the question of how to ensure that as working hours diminished across the society, people’s material standard of living did not diminish as well.

      It is instructive to note that we are already confronting a version of this challenge right now. Even without any reduction in the standard workweek, the share of economic output going to the people doing the work has been continually declining for some time. In 2013, Steven Greenhouse reported in The New York Times that “Until 1975, wages nearly always accounted for more than 50 percent of the nation’s G.D.P., but last year wages fell to a record low of 43.5 percent.”¹⁶ Two years later, Derek Thompson in The Atlantic noted that the share of U.S. economic output paid out in wages is “at its lowest level since the government started keeping track in the mid-twentieth century.”¹⁷ Thus, even apart from the challenges that would be posed by a concerted effort to bring down the standard number of hours in the workweek, there is already much reason to rethink the way the fruits of the economy are distributed. The goods and services that people want are still getting produced; they’re just not as effectively getting to the people working to produce them.

      A wide range of factors have contributed to changing the dynamics that determine wages and pay scales so that they no longer keep up as readily with advances in productivity as they did in the past. Among the most obvious are the decline of unions and the powerful impact of globalization. Important as well are the accelerating technological changes discussed above, which enable employers more readily to replace human labor if it becomes too expensive. These and other influences place great pressure on wages, and they create serious challenges at a time when a conversion to shorter working hours may be a key tool in maintaining the availability of jobs while averting the dangers of climate change. In order to ensure that such a transition does not mean a decline in living standards, we need to consider a broader spectrum of ways in which to enable people to have access to the output of the economy.

      Some of the answer to developing means and rationales for distribution in these new circumstances entails reworking and expanding upon policies that