As the TUC annual conference begins, new figures from the UN show why productivity growth doesn’t naturally benefit everyone
“Within a hundred years,” wrote John Maynard Keynes in 1930, humanity’s “economic problem” – the requirement to work to produce the goods and services that sustain us – would be resolved. In his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren he said “the standard of life in progressive countries … will be between four and eight times as high as it is today”. The productivity gains, Keynes thought, would mean people’s material needs would be satisfied. Their dilemma would be how to spend their free time. Some people were stubborn, he accepted, and would still work “three hours a day”, but both the poor and the rich would enjoy such wealth that this would become unnecessary.
History suggests Keynes got it wrong. While workers in the industrialised nations have seen the length of their average working week drop by more than a fifth in the past century, they are still working about 40 hours. Globally, says the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO), men are working 46 hours a week. This hardly fulfils Keynes’s vision of a future global economy distinguished by leisure and abundance. Perhaps he underestimated the human preference to consume rather than relax and unwind.
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