This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this.
There’s every reason to believe he was right. In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week.
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