Where Keynes Went Wrong With his 15 Hour Work Week Forecast
(I wrote this when I read David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs a few years ago and forgot about it. Since AI and automation are having a moment I’m making it public. It feels somehow incomplete, but I try to keep these as short as possible. A couple relevant quotes from Graeber are attached to the bottom of this article.)
I’ve written before how Keynes’s 15 hour workweek prediction has frequently been misrepresented by either cynical actors or sincere morons. My all time favorite was someone who said it’s actually already here if you’re rich. (By this logic, the 15 hour workweek has always been around. As has the 0 hour workweek.)
There are plenty of explanations for what Keynes “failed to consider” that clearly are considered in his relatively brief speech. I’d like to actually examine his statements in context before getting into my analysis.
(The first section is praise for the progress of the last hundred years as well as the unfortunate, but temporary side effects like technological unemployment.)
“In spite of an enormous growth in the population of the world, which it has been necessary to equip with houses and machines, the average standard of life in Europe and the United States has been raised, I think, about fourfold. The growth of capital has been on a scale which is far beyond a hundredfold of what any previous age had known…
technological unemployment… is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is.”
(In the second section he talks about the societal implications of this rapid growth over the next 100 years.)
Leisure
“A point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.”
Keynes predicts that in a hundred years or so humanity will face a new dilemma of eliminating the “Struggle for subsistence.” We may obsolete “the primary, most pressing problem of the human race-not only of the human race, but of the whole of the biological kingdom from the beginnings of life in its most primitive forms.” He refers to this primary problem as “economic necessity” throughout. Of course this is desirable even if it requires a painful readjustment. Once we are freed from “economic necessity” we face a more human dilemma.
“for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well… there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.”
It’s hard not to identify the overlap here to communist philosophy. Compare that to Friedrich Engels 50 years earlier, or Marx 63 years earlier.
“Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization.” -Socialism Utopian and Scientific
“society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” — The German Ideology
Marx and Keynes share the belief that the logical and desirable conclusion of capital accumulation is a life of leisure and abundance. The difference is their enthusiasm. Keynes views industrial labor as a source of meaning. (At least for the time being) Marx views this labor as a thief of meaning.
I don’t think Keynes is sincerely saying that we will be worse off with a reduced workload. Such a statement would be a hard sell to the toiling masses of the world in the 2020s, let alone the 1940s.
I agree with Marx here. Less work is good. Rutger Bregman summarized here debunks a lot of concerns surrounding decreased work hours. When given the opportunity to work less, people spend more time with their families, participate in civic life, volunteer more, etc. without really missing a beat. Also it might help us survive on earth a little longer if that matters.
The Moneymakers
Here’s where Keynes breaks down.
“The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.”
Keynes doesn’t really elaborate on how this change would actually come about. He just says “It will all happen gradually” Will we just be given higher wages and lower costs as the years go by? I don’t think it’s working out like that. These strenuous purposeful money-makers (or more realistically their children) have all the capital, fund the politicians, and own the media. When exactly would they grant us these concessions and why?
For what it’s worth Keynes isn’t exactly a fawning admirer of these “money-makers.”
“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 semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease… For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”
Basically he’s saying greed is bad but useful. Greed will bring us to post scarcity. I agree in a way. My problem with it is that it feels like he’s giving credit to the whip crackers of society as opposed to the workers.
There is a bizarre contradiction here where Keynes sees the profit motive as a “disgusting morbidity” that basically deprives the extremely wealthy of their humanity. But he also thinks this group of people who are obsessed with money to the point of mental illness aren’t going to do anything to preserve their political/economic status. (They do.)
He even says “there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth-unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them.”
But we are. We definitely are. He would be right if these people didn’t dictate economic policy for the rest of us. But they do. And that tiny distinction is the difference between a 15 hour workweek and a sixth mass extinction.
Summary
Keynes presupposes two major concepts that are not borne out by real existing capitalism a hundred years on.
One is meaningful democracy. People can’t sustainably vote their way to a more equitable distribution of wealth which would be required to reduce working hours. This is a very basic concept that has been recognized for a while.
The other is meritocracy. The issue is not whether meritocracy is good; the issue is whether it exists on a meaningful scale. He believes it does. We know better.
TL;DR At its core Keynes sees the people on top of society as deserving & competent, but still accountable to the desires of the masses. He’s wrong.
This is not a roast of Keynes. Predicting anything is hard. Who could have possibly predicted these things a hundred years out? Who could have predicted that there would be a contradiction of interests between workers and owners? Who could have predicted that such a small class of people would have such a disproportionate share of economic and political power?
Keynes is right about a lot of stuff, but it doesn’t matter who’s right about the most stuff. It matters who’s right about the most important stuff. Great economic theory without great social change theory will never be more than a thought experiment.
“In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanisms wrong. We’re not working harder because we’re spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving one another sushi. Industry is being increasingly robotized, and the real service sector remains flat at roughly 20 percent of overall employment. Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of — as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it — “a life,” and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford. Sitting around in cafés all day arguing about politics or gossiping about our friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs takes time (all day, in fact); in contrast pumping iron or attending a yoga class at the local gym, ordering out for Deliveroo, watching an episode of Game of Thrones, or shopping for hand creams or consumer electronics can all be placed in the kind of self-contained predictable time-slots one is likely to have left over between spates of work, or else while recovering from it. All these are examples of what I like to call “compensatory consumerism.” They are the sorts of things you can do to make up for the fact that you don’t have a life, or not very much of one.”
Since at least the Great Depression, we’ve been hearing warnings that automation was or was about to be throwing millions out of work — Keynes at the time coined the term “technological unemployment,” and many assumed the mass unemployment of the 1930s was just a sign of things to come — and while this might make it seem such claims have always been somewhat alarmist, what this book suggests is that the opposite was the case. They were entirely accurate. Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up. A combination of political pressure from both right and left, a deeply held popular feeling that paid employment alone can make one a full moral person, and finally, a fear on the part of the upper classes, already noted by George Orwell in 1933, of what the laboring masses might get up to if they had too much leisure on their hands, has ensured that whatever the underlying reality, when it comes to official unemployment figures in wealthy countries, the needle should never jump too far from the range of 3 to 8 percent. But if one eliminates bullshit jobs from the picture, and the real jobs that only exist to support them, one could say that the catastrophe predicted in the 1930s really did happen. Upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work. — David Graeber
