alt Hacker NewsYip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed. And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and accomplishment.
Instead our productivity went way above anything he could imagine, yet there was no radical shift in labor. We just instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires. He underestimated how many people were willing to designate the pursuit of wealth as the meaning of life itself.
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In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally insane.
"There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard."
> We just instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires.
Didn’t we also get standards of living much higher than he would ever imagine? I think blaming everything on billionaires is really misguided and shallow.
> We just instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires.
We just instead started doing Bullshit Jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours.
At least since the Industrial Revolution, and probably before, the only advance that has led to shorter work weeks is unions and worker protections. Not technology.
Technology may create more surplus (food, goods, etc) but there’s no guarantee what form that surplus will reach workers as, if it does at all.