The Fifteen-Hour Week
In 1930 Keynes predicted that within a century the rich countries would be four to eight times richer and would work fifteen hours a week. The first half came true with seven years to spare. The second did not come close, and the machines he feared would cause mass unemployment never did. Ninety-four years of data on output, hours, pay and jobs show where the productivity went: mostly into income rather than time, none of it into idleness, and since 1980, in America above all, a large part of it to the people at the top. Nobody chose that split; it was made for them.
In the autumn of 1930, with the world sliding into the worst depression in its industrial history, John Maynard Keynes published a short essay that ignored the depression almost completely. “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” had started as a talk to schoolboys at Winchester two years earlier, was polished for an audience in Madrid in the summer of 1930, and appeared in two instalments in The Nation and Athenaeum that October.[1] Its argument was that the gloom was a misreading. What looked like the end of prosperity was, in Keynes’s phrase, the growing pains of over-rapid change. Underneath it, technical progress and the accumulation of capital were compounding at a rate that would, within a hundred years, do something no generation before had come near: solve what he called the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence that had occupied the species since it existed.
He made two predictions with numbers attached. The first was about income: “the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day.” The second was about time. With needs that modest to meet and productivity that high, people would work far less; he suggested “three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week”, and spent the rest of the essay worrying about what a species bred for toil would do with the leisure. On the way he gave a name to the fear that runs under every argument about machines and work: “technological unemployment”, meaning unemployment caused by our finding ways to economise on labour faster than we find new uses for it. He thought it a temporary maladjustment. Plenty of people since have thought it the whole story.
The century is nearly up. It is 2026; Keynes’s grandchildren, had he had any, would be old. This essay asks three questions of the data. Has productivity really grown exponentially, or only fast? Where did the gains go: into more things, into more time, or into fewer jobs? And what does the answer say about the second machine age now arriving, which is aimed at exactly the kind of work that was supposed to be safe from the first?
Is it really exponential?
Mostly, yes, with an asterisk. “Exponential” means growth at a roughly constant percentage rate, so that each year adds not a fixed amount but a fixed fraction of what is already there. On an ordinary axis that shows up as a curve that looks flat for a long time and then shoots upward; on a logarithmic axis, where equal distances mean equal ratios, it is a straight line. That is the test. Figure 1 plots output per hour worked, the cleanest measure of what an hour of human work produces, for the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Portugal from 1890 to 2024, on a log scale.[2]
The American line is close to straight for a hundred and thirty-four years. A single constant rate, 2.2 per cent a year, fits it with an R² of 0.987: nearly all of the variation in the logarithm of American productivity since 1890 is explained by the passage of time alone. At 2.2 per cent a quantity doubles every thirty-two years, and that is what has happened, nearly four times over. An American hour of work in 2024 produced about seven times what it did in 1930; a British hour about six times; a French or German hour about ten times, and a Portuguese hour twelve.
The asterisk is that the rate is not constant in detail, and the recent detail is not encouraging. For the United States the rate was 1.9 per cent a year from 1890 to 1929, then about 2.6 to 2.7 per cent through the Depression, the war and the post-war boom until 1973, then 1.3 per cent until 1995, a burst of 2.4 per cent in the decade when computers finally showed up in the statistics, and 1.3 per cent again since 2005. Europe and Japan are more dramatic: France and Germany grew at five to six per cent a year from 1950 to 1973 as they caught up with American methods, Portugal at seven, and since 2005 all of them have grown at under one per cent, Britain at about half a per cent. The lines in Figure 1 bend upward in the middle of the century and flatten at the end. What looks like one exponential is several, at different rates, joined end to end.
Over the really long run the picture changes again. Before about 1800 output per person barely moved for millennia, and the modern two per cent is itself a break from a near-zero past, which is why economic historians describe the whole of human history as faster than exponential: the growth rate itself grew, from nothing to two per cent, over two centuries.[3] Inside the last hundred and thirty years, though, and inside the countries that led, “exponential at around two per cent, slowing lately” is the honest summary.
As for what drives it, technology is only part of the answer, and not in the way the word usually suggests. Robert Solow’s famous 1957 calculation found that only about an eighth of the growth in American output per hour between 1909 and 1949 could be attributed to more capital per worker; the rest was a residual he called technical change, which is to say everything the accounting could not name.[4] Later work named some of it. Much of the residual is education, the rise in the skill of the average worker, which Goldin and Katz trace through the American high-school movement and the expansion of universities.[5] Some is the movement of people out of farming, where output per hour was low, into factories and offices, where it was high: in 1900 about four in ten American workers were on farms, and by 2000 fewer than two in a hundred.[6] Some is cheap energy, some is the scale of markets, and some is institutions, which decide whether any of the rest can be used. Robert Gordon’s argument, the most influential pessimistic account, is that the great burst between 1920 and 1970 came from a handful of one-off inventions, electricity, the internal combustion engine, running water, chemistry, telecommunications, whose effects could only be felt once, and that nothing since has matched them.[7] The flattening at the right of Figure 1 is the evidence he points to.
Four to eight: right, early
Keynes’s income forecast was a statement about GDP per head, and it can be checked directly. Taking 1930 as the base, real GDP per head by 2023 had risen by a factor of about 7.7 in the United States, 6.7 in Germany, 5.9 in France and 5.1 in Britain. All four are inside his range of four to eight, with seven years still to go. An older set of historical estimates, the Maddison Project’s, puts the American multiple lower, at about 5.5, and the British at 4.4; the range survives that too.[8] The countries that were poor in 1930 overshot it: Portugal is about fourteen times richer per head than it was then, Japan about twelve.
This is worth pausing on, because economic forecasts over a century are usually not worth the paper. Keynes got it right for a reason he stated himself. He took capital to be growing at about two per cent a year and technical efficiency at better than one, and compounded them. The number was not a guess about which inventions would come; it was an assumption that the process that had been running since the eighteenth century would keep running. It did.
Where the fifteen-hour week went
Now the hours. Figure 3 shows annual hours per worker from 1870, drawing on the long series assembled by Michael Huberman and Chris Minns and continued with modern national accounts.[9] In 1870 a worker in any of these countries put in about three thousand hours a year: sixty hours a week or more, fifty-two weeks a year, with Sunday off and not much else. By 1929 that had fallen to about 2,200 to 2,300, and by 2023 to 1,790 in the United States, 1,520 in Britain, 1,490 in France and 1,340 in Germany. Figure 2 draws the American numbers as a week, next to Keynes’s.
So hours did fall, by between a quarter and a little over a third per worker since Keynes wrote, and by half since 1870. The fall is steady on average, between 0.36 and 0.59 per cent a year across these countries over a century and a half, which is roughly a fifth of the rate at which productivity rose. That ratio is itself a regularity economists have tried to explain: Timo Boppart and Per Krusell showed that the same slow, steady decline appears across many countries and argued that it is what you get when people are slightly more inclined to spend a rise in their wage on leisure than on goods.[10] Slightly, not mostly. And Figure 3 shows the other thing plainly: the American line stops falling around 1980 and is nearly flat for forty years. Nowhere is within a mile of the dashed line.
Hours per worker, though, is the flattering measure. It counts how long the average employed person works, and in 1929 a large share of adults, mostly women, were not counted as employed at all. Their work at home, which was long and hard, does not appear in these series. Over the century they entered paid work in large numbers, so the number of workers per head rose while the hours of each worker fell. Figure 4 does the sum: total hours worked in the economy divided by the whole population, children and pensioners included.
France and Germany took a real share of their productivity as time: hours per head fell from about 1,230 to 670 in France and from 1,120 to 730 in Germany. In the United States the line ends where it began. Americans worked 836 hours per head of population in 1929 and 847 in 2023. The fall in hours per worker was entirely offset by a rise in the share of the population at work, from roughly 36 per cent to 47 per cent. The Netherlands, with its short part-time weeks and high participation, lands in the same place by a different route. In the aggregate, per person alive, the richest large economy in history works exactly as much as it did in the year of the Crash.
Some of that is demography, since the share of children in the population fell and the share of pensioners rose, and some is the welcome fact that women’s work now shows up in the accounts and is paid. It would be wrong to read Figure 4 as saying nobody gained any time. But it does say, unambiguously, that the gains were not taken as time on the scale Keynes imagined.
Things, not time
Put the two pieces together. If productivity rises by some factor, a society can take that factor as more output, as fewer hours, or as any mix of the two. On a logarithmic scale the split is additive, so it can be written as a share: what fraction of the rise in output per hour between 1929 and 2023 was spent on working less? Figure 5 does this for thirteen rich countries with long records, once per worker and once per head of population.
Per worker, the share runs from about a tenth in Italy and the United States to just over a quarter in the Netherlands. Per head, it runs from nothing, in the United States, Australia and the Netherlands, to about a quarter in France. There is no country that took most of its gain as time. There is no country that took even a third. The typical rich country took something like one-fifth of a century of productivity growth as shorter working lives and four-fifths as more income.
The same numbers can be turned round to ask what Keynes’s world would have looked like. American output per hour in 2023 was high enough that the 1929 standard of living, everything the country produced in the year of the Crash divided by everyone in it, could be produced with the 1929 share of the population at work putting in six and a half hours a week, averaged over the year. The British figure is almost identical. Keynes was not too optimistic about productivity. If anything he was too cautious: at the living standard he knew, the fifteen-hour week was available twice over.
Run it the other way and the answer is more pointed. Suppose today’s share of Americans in work each worked fifteen hours a week, every week of the year, at today’s productivity. They would produce about $31,000 a head in 2020 dollars: three and a third times the 1930 standard of living, inside Keynes’s range, and exactly the American standard of living of 1977. The British equivalent is 1979.
A fifteen-hour week at today’s productivity buys the standard of living of the late 1970s. The rich world took the income instead.US and UK, output per hour in 2023
That is the whole of the Keynes question in one sentence. The fifteen-hour week was never technically out of reach. It was, and is, an offer on the table at a particular price: a house, a car, food, clothes, medicine and holidays at the level of 1977, with the phones, the computers and the drugs that did not exist then subtracted, and the time of two and a half days’ work a week added back. In aggregate the rich world has consistently turned that offer down. “In aggregate” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and the rest of this essay is largely about how much. The offer was made to the economy as a whole, not to any particular worker, and whether most workers ever saw it depends on who received the income, what it could buy, and whether they could choose their hours at all.
Retirement: where much of the time went
Figure 5 counts hours in a working year. It misses the time that was taken at the two ends of a working life: people start later, because they study longer, and until recently they stopped earlier and then lived much longer. The OECD has tracked the second half since 1970.[11] In 1970 men in most rich countries left the labour market between 63 and 69. By 2000 the average had fallen to between 58 and 63: 58.4 in France, 59.5 in the Netherlands, 60.7 in Portugal, 62.5 in the United States. At the same time life expectancy at 65 rose by several years. Figure 6 shows the result: the number of years a man could expect to live after he stopped working went from between ten and fifteen in 1970 to between seventeen and twenty-three today. For women the figures are longer still, about 26 years in France and 25 in Spain.
Counted this way, Europe took much more of its productivity as time than the yearly ledger suggests. Take a man who starts work at 20 and leaves at his country’s average exit age, working the average annual hours of his time. Between 1970 and 2024 his career shrank by 32 per cent in France, 27 in Spain, 26 in Denmark, 22 in the Netherlands and 17 in Britain. Measured on careers rather than years, the share of productivity growth since 1970 taken as time comes to about 37 per cent in France, about 30 in Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands and 20 in Britain. In the United States it is about 5 per cent, because American men now leave work later than they did in 1970. And these figures understate the time gained: they ignore the later start, since the average American adult had about 8 years of schooling in 1930 and about 13 in 2020, and they leave out the extra years of retirement that longer lives added on top.[12] The rough rule of the ledger, a fifth as time and four-fifths as income, is about right for America. For much of Europe, close to a third or more was taken as time, a good part of it at the end of working life.
That part of the dividend is now being clawed back. Since about 2000 average exit ages have risen by three to six years: in Portugal from 60.7 to 66.5 for men, in the Netherlands from 59.5 to 65, in the United States from 62.5 to 67.3. Pension reforms raised the official ages and, in many countries, tied them to life expectancy. The OECD calculates that a man entering the labour market at 22 today will reach the normal pension age at 68 in Portugal and Britain, 70 in Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden, and 74 in Denmark. The retirement that productivity paid for in the twentieth century is being shortened in the twenty-first, for the demographic reasons in the outlook section below. Whether the extra working years are healthy ones, and whether the pensions at the end are enough to live on, is the subject of the third essay in this series, The Long Retirement.
Why the time was not taken
The explanations are not exclusive, and most of them have evidence behind them.
The wage cuts both ways. When the hourly wage rises, an hour of leisure costs more in forgone income, which pushes people to work more; but they are also richer, which pushes them to buy more of everything, leisure included. The two effects roughly cancel, which is why hours fall slowly rather than fast. Keynes assumed the second effect would dominate once basic needs were met. The data say it dominates only slightly.[10]
Keynes saw the catch himself. Halfway through the essay he divides human needs into two classes: those that are absolute, felt whatever other people have, and those that are relative, felt “only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows”. The first class, he says, can be satisfied. The second “may indeed be insatiable”. His whole prediction rests on the first class mattering more than the second. A century of consumption data suggests the reverse. A great deal of what rich people spend on is position: the better neighbourhood, the better school, the car that says something. Positional goods cannot be produced in greater quantity by any amount of productivity, because their value lies in being scarcer than someone else’s. Samuel Bowles and Yongjin Park found that across rich countries over several decades, working hours were longer where income inequality was higher, which is what you would expect if people are working to keep up with those above them; they called their paper, fairly, “Was Thorstein Veblen Right?”[13]
The long hours moved to the top. In the 1890s the lowest-paid men worked the longest days, because they had to. By the 1990s the pattern had reversed: the highest-paid worked longest.[14] Leisure, which had been the mark of the rich in every earlier society, became something the less educated had more of, much of it involuntary.[15] For the people whose hours set the tone of professional life, an extra hour of work is worth the most and a fifteen-hour week looks like giving up the race.
What we buy got more expensive in hours. Productivity has grown fastest in making things and slowest in services that consist of one person’s time spent on another: teaching, nursing, caring, performing. William Baumol pointed out that these services must still pay wages that keep up with the rest of the economy, so their relative price rises steadily; a string quartet needs as many musician-hours as it did in 1800.[16] As a society gets richer it spends more on health, education and care, exactly the sectors where an hour of work buys least, and the average productivity of what it consumes grows more slowly than the headline figure. Housing, whose price is mostly the price of land in the right place, is the extreme case and a positional one at that.
Institutions decided the split. Europe and America had similar hours in the 1960s and then diverged, with Europeans working about a third fewer hours per adult by the early 2000s. Edward Prescott attributed most of the gap to higher European taxes on labour, which make an extra hour of work less worth doing.[17] Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote attributed it to unions and regulation: legal limits on the working week, mandated holidays and collective agreements, which coordinate a choice that no individual worker can make alone.[18] Their coordination argument is the important one. If everyone works less, nobody falls behind; if one person works less, they do. Taking productivity as time is partly a collective decision, and countries that made it collectively, through law and bargaining, took more of it.
Some of the time came in forms the series do not show. Lives got longer and working lives did not get longer to match: people start work later, after more education, and stop earlier, with pensions, and spend a much smaller fraction of their waking lifetime at work than their great-grandparents did. Housework shrank with running water, washing machines and prepared food, which is part of why women could enter paid work in the first place. Valerie Ramey and Neville Francis, adding all of this up for the United States, found that leisure per person rose over the twentieth century, but by much less than the fall in hours per worker suggests.[19] Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, using time diaries, found real gains in leisure between 1965 and 2003, larger for less educated adults.[15] Something was gained. It was a fraction of what was possible.
One popular explanation does not survive contact with the data. David Graeber argued that the fifteen-hour week was absorbed by pointless jobs, roles that even the people doing them privately think should not exist.[20] When Magdalena Soffia, Alex Wood and Brendan Burchell tested this with European survey data, they found that about five per cent of workers think their work is not useful, that the share had been falling rather than rising, and that it was not concentrated in the finance and administrative jobs Graeber blamed.[21] Most people do not think their work is fake. The reasons for the hours lie elsewhere, and two of them, who gets the income and whether anyone chooses the hours, need a section each.
The income went somewhere, but not to everyone
“Took the income” is an average, and averages are exactly where this story hides its most important fact. GDP per head divides everything the economy produces by everyone in it. It says nothing about who receives it. For the first half of the post-war period that did not matter much, because the gains were spread fairly evenly. Since about 1980, in the United States above all, it matters a great deal.
Figure 7 is the American version, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.[22] From 1948 to 1973, output per hour in the business sector roughly doubled and average hourly pay, after inflation, rose by almost exactly as much: the two lines move together. Then they part. Between 1979 and 2025 output per hour rose by 139 per cent. Average hourly compensation, which includes the pay of chief executives and the cost of health insurance, rose by about half. The median full-time weekly wage rose by 13 per cent, or 20 per cent with the price index the BLS itself prefers. The real hourly wage of production and nonsupervisory workers, the four-fifths of the private workforce who do not manage anyone, fell for twenty years after 1973 and did not get back above its 1973 level until 2019.
So the common impression that incomes stopped rising in the late 1970s is right, but it is the typical wage that stopped, not income as a whole. That matters for the Keynes question, because it changes who was offered his deal. A worker whose real wage did not rise for thirty-five years was never offered the 1977 living standard in fifteen hours a week. They were offered the 1977 living standard in 1977 hours.
The gap between the top line and the bottom two is argued over, and the argument is worth knowing, because it is partly about measurement. Economists who have decomposed it, from the Economic Policy Institute on the left to Martin Feldstein on the right, find three pieces.[23] Doing the same sum on the data behind Figure 7 gives roughly this. About a fifth of the gap is a fall in the labour share: the part of business income paid to workers at all, rather than to owners, fell by about thirteen per cent. About two-fifths is prices. Output is valued at the prices of what workers make, which include computers whose prices have collapsed; wages are deflated by the prices of what workers buy, which include rent, medicine and tuition, which have not. Some of that is a real loss for workers, and some is a price index that overstates inflation and misses the value of new goods. And about two-fifths is inequality among workers: the average pulled away from the median as pay at the top rose much faster than pay in the middle, and as more of the median worker’s compensation went into health insurance premiums rather than wages. Lawrence Summers and Anna Stansbury, who looked hardest for evidence that the link between productivity and pay was broken, concluded that productivity still lifts pay almost one for one, but that since 1980 other forces, falling union membership and bargaining power among them, have held the median back about as hard as productivity pushed it up.[24]
Household incomes tell the same story in more detail, and they also show that it is not the same story everywhere. The Luxembourg Income Study measures median disposable income, after taxes and transfers and adjusted for household size.[25] In the United States it rose by 9 per cent between 1979 and 2014, while GDP per head rose by 77 per cent. It then rose quickly, by a quarter in a decade, helped by the tight labour markets of the late 2010s and the pandemic transfers; over the whole period from 1979 to 2024 the median rose by 36 per cent against 112 for GDP per head. Britain is the counter-example: its median disposable income more than doubled between 1979 and 2024, faster than GDP per head. France’s median rose by 43 per cent against 70 for GDP per head between 1979 and 2022; Germany’s by 22 against 43 since reunification; Italy’s not at all. An OECD study of two dozen countries found that median wages fell behind productivity in most of them after the mid-1990s, but by much less than in the United States.[26] GDP per head always grows faster than household income, for boring reasons as well as interesting ones, since it includes depreciation, government spending and profits retained by firms. But the size of the gap is a choice, and it is widest where the least was done about it.
Figure 8 shows where the difference went. The share of pre-tax national income received by the richest one per cent fell in every rich country from the 1920s to the 1970s, the period economists call the Great Compression. Since 1980 it has climbed back in the United States from about 10 to about 21 per cent, the level of the late 1920s, while in France and Sweden it has risen much less, to about 12 and 10.[27] Wealth is more concentrated than income and has concentrated faster. By the Federal Reserve’s own accounts, the richest one per cent of American households owned 23 per cent of all net worth in 1989 and 32.5 per cent in 2026; the richest tenth of that one per cent went from under 9 per cent to 15. The bottom half of all households, some sixty-six million of them, own 2.3 per cent.[28]
Put this back into Keynes’s terms and the fifteen-hour week looks different. The productivity to pay for it was produced. In the United States a large part of it went to people who were already rich, and much of what they did not spend became wealth, which is income from owning rather than working. You cannot take as leisure a raise you did not get.
What the extra income bought
The next question is whether the quality of life rose with the income. Some of it plainly did. A median household today has things no king had in 1930: antibiotics, vaccines, cheap flights, a telephone that is also a library. Life expectancy in the rich countries rose from about sixty in 1930 to over eighty. Some of the flatness in real wages is a measurement artefact running the other way: the official price indices were found in 1996 to overstate American inflation by about a percentage point a year, largely because they missed improvements in quality and the arrival of new goods, and William Nordhaus showed with the price of light that the error compounds over a century.[29] A worker whose measured real wage is flat is still better off than those figures say.
But the goods got cheaper and the things that anchor a life did not. Figure 9 shows American consumer prices by category from 2000 to 2025. The hourly wage of production and nonsupervisory workers rose by 124 per cent, faster than prices in general at 87. Televisions fell by 98 per cent, computers by 92, and clothes did not get dearer at all. College tuition rose by 188 per cent and childcare by 147. Medical care and rents rose about as fast as wages, so they took the same share of the pay packet, and the index for housing measures rents, not the price of buying a home, which rose much faster in most cities.
The pattern is Baumol’s again, with a twist that Keynes would have recognised. What got cheap is what machines make. What got dear is made of people’s time, like teaching and caring, or of scarcity, like land in the places where the jobs are. Many of the dear things are also the positional goods of the earlier section: the house near the good school, the degree that sorts you into the better-paid job. When those rise faster than wages, a household cannot keep its place by working the same hours. It adds hours, most often by adding a second earner. Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi called this the two-income trap: families that sent a second parent to work in the 1980s and 1990s found that much of the second income went on bidding up the price of houses in good school districts against other families doing the same.[30] Nobody chose that outcome. Each household chose sensibly, and together they produced a result that none of them wanted.
Two broader measures make the same point. Charles Jones and Peter Klenow built a measure of welfare that counts consumption, leisure, life expectancy and inequality, and found that Western European countries whose income per head is a third lower than America’s come out close to it, because their people work less, live longer and share the income more evenly.[31] And the United States, which took the least of its productivity as time and let the most of it go to the top, has fallen behind in the most basic measure of all. In 1980 Americans could expect to live about a year less than the average of eight other rich countries. By 2023 the gap was three and a half years: 79.3 against 82.9.[32] Anne Case and Angus Deaton traced much of it to what they called deaths of despair, from drugs, alcohol and suicide, concentrated among Americans without a university degree, whose wages were the ones in the bottom lines of Figure 7.[33]
On happiness the evidence is honestly mixed. Richard Easterlin found in 1974 that average happiness in the United States did not rise as income rose, which fits Keynes’s relative needs exactly: if what makes you happy is having more than others, a country cannot get happier by all getting richer. Later work with better data finds that richer people and richer countries do report higher life satisfaction, and that it keeps rising with income.[34] Both can be true. Income buys wellbeing, but a given rise buys less when everyone else gets it too, and much less when it arrives as more hours.
What long hours cost
The last piece is the one the ledger in Figure 5 leaves out. Hours of work are not just a subtraction from leisure. Past a point they do damage, and they are not always hours that anyone wanted.
Health. A pooled analysis of prospective studies covering more than six hundred thousand people found that working fifty-five hours a week or more, compared with thirty-five to forty, raised the risk of stroke by about a third and of coronary heart disease by about an eighth.[35] The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimated from that and similar evidence that long hours caused about 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease worldwide in 2016, and that 488 million people, about one worker in eleven, were working that long.[36] Long hours are also linked to depression, sleep loss and injury; the evidence there is less certain, but it points the same way.
Output. The extra hours are worth less than they look. John Pencavel went back to records of British munitions workers in the First World War, a rare case where hours and output were both measured carefully, and found that output rose in proportion to hours up to about fifty a week and then flattened: at seventy hours a week, workers produced hardly more than at fifty-six.[37] Modern knowledge work is harder to measure, but nobody has found that it is exempt.
Time squeeze. The fall in hours per worker hides a rise in hours per household. In the United States, Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson found that the combined paid hours of married couples rose by about ten hours a week between 1970 and 2000, as dual-earner couples went from the exception to the rule; and the long hours were concentrated among professionals, while other workers wanted more hours than they could get.[38] Daniel Hamermesh and Jungmin Lee found that feeling pressed for time rises with income across countries, which says the squeeze is not only a problem of the poor.[39] The same household that earns more has less time in which to spend it, and more of what it earns goes on buying back time: childcare, cleaning, ready meals, deliveries.
Choice. This is where “took the income” needs the most salt. Economists have known since the 1980s that most workers cannot choose their hours. Jobs come as packages; the choice on offer is usually forty hours or none, sometimes fifty or none, and a worker who wants thirty must usually change job and take a cut in hourly pay to get it.[40] When surveys ask, large minorities of workers in every rich country say they would rather work fewer hours for less money, and rather fewer say the reverse. The split between income and time is not a decision each person made. It is a decision made by employers, laws, bargaining and habit, and ratified, one job offer at a time, by people with rent to pay.
So the honest version of the ledger is this. Productivity rose sevenfold. In aggregate, rich societies took four-fifths of it as income and one-fifth as time, but that aggregate was not a choice anyone made. In the countries where the income was shared, where hours were limited by law and bargaining, and where the dear things, health, education, care, were provided collectively, people got more time, longer lives and incomes that rose in the middle as well as at the top. Where they were not, the median worker got little of the income and almost none of the time, and in the United States, on the measure that matters most, a shorter life than their peers abroad.
Technological unemployment
If productivity rises sevenfold and the amount of work per head stays the same, then by arithmetic the economy is producing seven times as much. That is the answer to the third question, and it is why the fear Keynes named has, so far, been wrong about the aggregate. Figure 10 shows unemployment in the United States and Britain since 1870 from the Jordà–Schularick–Taylor macrohistory database.[41]
There is no trend. American unemployment averaged about 7 per cent before the First World War, 11 per cent between the wars, 5 per cent from 1950 to 1973, 6.6 per cent from 1974 to 1999, and 6 per cent from 2000 to 2020. British unemployment averaged 4.5 per cent before 1914 and 5.6 per cent in the twenty-first century. The big episodes, the 1930s, the early 1980s, 2009, were caused by collapses in demand, by financial crises and by policy, not by a sudden jump in productivity; productivity was growing faster in the full-employment decades after 1950 than at any time before or since. France, Germany and the Netherlands have the same shape at a slightly higher level since the 1970s, for reasons economists usually trace to labour-market institutions rather than machines. Over a century in which an hour of work came to produce seven to ten times as much, the fraction of people who wanted a job and could not find one wandered and did not climb.
The reason is the one Keynes’s definition hinted at: the question is never only how fast machines destroy tasks but how fast new uses for labour appear. Four in ten American workers were on farms in 1900 and fewer than two in a hundred are now, and those thirty-eight in a hundred did not become unemployed; their grandchildren became electricians, nurses, programmers and the rest. David Autor and colleagues went through the census occupation lists and found that about six in ten Americans employed in 2018 worked in job titles that did not exist in 1940.[42] Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo formalise the race: automation displaces labour from tasks it used to do, and the creation of new tasks reinstates it; employment and the share of income going to workers hold up only when reinstatement keeps pace.[43] Autor’s own summary is that automation mostly complements labour, raises output in ways that lead to more demand for it, and that the fear of mass unemployment has been wrong because it counts only the first half of the process.[44]
This is not a story in which nobody lost. David Ricardo, who began by thinking machinery harmless to workers, added a chapter to the third edition of his Principles in 1821 admitting that it could make them worse off for a long time, and the handloom weavers of the next thirty years proved him right.[45] The Luddites were skilled men destroying machines that were destroying their trade, and they were correct about their trade. Acemoglu and Restrepo estimate that each additional industrial robot per thousand American workers between 1990 and 2007 reduced the employment-to-population ratio in the affected local labour markets by about 0.2 percentage points and wages by about 0.4 per cent.[46] The cost of technical change has been real and concentrated: on particular trades, towns and generations, and in the widening gap between what the highly educated and everyone else are paid. It has not shown up as a permanent rise in the unemployment rate. It has shown up as a question of who gets the output.
There is one well-known exception to the rule that displaced workers find new work, and it is the reason the argument is not settled. In 1983 Wassily Leontief pointed out that horses were once a central factor of production, that the arrival of the tractor and the car did not create new and better jobs for horses, and that the American horse population, having peaked around the First World War, fell by roughly nine-tenths over the next forty years.[47] Humans are not horses; they can learn new tasks, and they own the machines, and they vote. But the historical record that shows displaced workers always finding new work is a record of machines that were better than people at a limited range of things: lifting, spinning, calculating, repeating. The complement always lay in what machines could not do. The question for the twenty-first century is whether the range of things machines cannot do is still large enough.
What generative AI changes, and what it does not
The machines arriving since 2022 are aimed at the work that the last century moved people into: writing, summarising, coding, answering, drafting, advising. Studies that map what current models can do against occupational task lists find that a large majority of American workers have at least some of their tasks exposed, and that the exposure is highest among the educated and the well paid, the reverse of every earlier wave.[48] That is new. So is the speed at which the capability is spreading, which is closer to the speed of software than of steam.
The early evidence is mixed in the way the history suggests it would be. Inside firms, generative tools raise output per hour for some kinds of work substantially: in the best-known field study, customer-support agents with an AI assistant resolved about fourteen per cent more issues an hour, and the least experienced agents gained most, about a third.[49] At the edges of the labour market there are the first signs of displacement. Using payroll data, Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen found that since late 2022 employment of workers aged twenty-two to twenty-five in the occupations most exposed to AI, software development and customer service among them, fell by about thirteen per cent relative to less exposed occupations, while older workers in the same jobs were unaffected.[50] Displacement at the entry level, where people learn the trade, is the form that matters most for the next twenty years. And in the aggregate statistics the signal is still faint: American productivity picked up in 2023 and 2024, Europe’s did not, and nobody can yet separate the machines from the post-pandemic rebound. Robert Solow’s line from 1987, that you could see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics, applied for about eight years that time before the burst of the late 1990s.[51]
What the history of the last century predicts for the new machines is not reassurance and not doom but a reframing. The rate of technological unemployment has depended less on the machines than on demand, on how fast new work was invented, and on institutions: on whether the gains were spread widely enough that people had money to spend on the new things. The split between income and time was a choice made by the people who worked, collectively, through law, bargaining and habit. If generative AI raises productivity growth back to the rates of the mid-century, the Keynes offer gets better every year: at three per cent a year, the output of a forty-hour week today can be had with a thirty-hour week in ten years. Whether anyone takes the offer is the same question it was in 1930, and the evidence of the last ninety-four years is that, left alone, people take roughly a fifth of it.
A short note from the other end of Europe
Portugal is the clearest example in Europe of the gap between where productivity went and where hours went. Output per hour rose about twelve-fold between 1930 and 2024, faster than in any of the large economies, most of it in the extraordinary years from 1950 to 1973, when it grew at seven per cent a year. It has grown at under one per cent since 2005. The Portuguese worker put in about 1,735 hours in 2023, some four hundred more than a German, ten working weeks, for an hour that produced a little under three-fifths as much.[2] The legal working week in the private sector came down from forty-four hours to forty only in 1996.[52] Unemployment went above sixteen per cent in 2013 and came down to between six and seven by the end of the decade, which is a story about the euro and the crisis, not about machines. And in 2023 the government ran a pilot of a four-day week with some forty private firms, coordinated by the economist Pedro Gomes, whose book makes the Keynesian argument that shorter weeks raise productivity and demand at once.[53] The firms volunteered, which is the main caveat on any result; the British pilot a year earlier had the same design and the same caveat, and most of its sixty-one firms kept the shorter week afterwards.[54] These are small, self-selected experiments. They are also the first serious attempts in half a century to take a larger share of the productivity dividend as time, by coordination rather than by each worker alone.
A choice, not a forecast
Keynes was right about the thing he thought was hard and wrong about the thing he thought would follow. The compound interest arrived on schedule; a century of productivity at about two per cent a year made the rich countries four to eight times richer, as he said it would, and the machines that were supposed to throw everyone out of work produced, instead, work nobody had imagined. What did not follow was the leisure. The rich world was offered the fifteen-hour week at the living standard of the late 1970s and took, by a margin of about four to one, the income. It would be more accurate to say the income was taken for it. In the United States the typical worker’s real wage barely moved for thirty-five years while the richest one per cent doubled their share of national income; the things that anchor a life, housing, health, education and care, grew dearer faster than wages; and the hours came as a package that few workers could refuse. Where the income was shared and the hours were limited collectively, people got more time, more of the income and longer lives. Keynes’s arithmetic was sound. What it left out was distribution.
It is easy to moralise about the result and Keynes did, with his line that the love of money would one day be recognised as “a somewhat disgusting morbidity”. It is more useful to notice what kind of choice it was. For most workers it was never an individual choice at all. Nobody can negotiate a fifteen-hour week alone and keep their place in a world of forty-hour weeks, and the gains that were taken as time were mostly taken together: the eight-hour day, the weekend, paid holidays, the forty-hour week, pensions. Each of them was fought for, legislated and bargained, and each looked at the time like a threat to prosperity that turned out not to be one. The next machine will make the offer again, and larger. How much of it is taken as time will depend, as it always has, on whether people decide collectively to take it.
Keynes ended his essay with a warning not to rush. “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.” The hundred years are nearly up.
The next hundred years, roughly
Keynes gave himself a hundred years, and there are four left. On his first prediction the result is already in. If GDP per head keeps growing at its pace since 2005, by 2030 it will be about 8.3 times its 1930 level in the United States, just past the top of his range, 7.2 times in Germany, 6.2 in France and 5.3 in Britain. Every one of them will have landed between four and eight, or a whisker above.
On the second, the honest forecast is that the fifteen-hour week will not arrive by 2030, and on current trends not for a very long time after. Figure 12 extends each country’s hours per worker at the rate they have fallen since 1980. Germany, which has cut hours fastest, reaches Keynes’s 780 hours a year around 2107. France gets there around 2180, Britain around 2370. The United States, whose hours have hardly fallen in forty years, would take until the thirty-third century. At the gentler long-run pace since 1870 the dates come closer together, between 2115 and 2255, but they all belong to Keynes’s great-great-grandchildren. These are extrapolations, not forecasts. Their point is that nothing in the present trend delivers his week; only a change in the trend would.
Artificial intelligence is the obvious candidate for such a change, and the range of serious estimates is wide. Daron Acemoglu, working up from task-level studies, puts the gain in total factor productivity over the next ten years at no more than about 0.7 per cent in all, and probably less.[55] Economists at Goldman Sachs estimated in 2023 that generative AI could add about 1.5 percentage points a year to productivity growth for a decade, about 16 per cent more output per hour by the end of it.[56] The arithmetic of this essay turns those numbers into hours. If Americans took the whole of the optimistic gain as time, their average week, 34 hours counted over the year, would fall to about 30. If they split it the way they have split every gain since 1929, a fifth as time and four-fifths as income, it would fall by about one hour. On Acemoglu’s estimate it would fall by minutes. The machines, even on generous assumptions, do not bring the fifteen-hour week by themselves. The IMF reckons that about 60 per cent of jobs in advanced economies are exposed to generative AI, roughly half of them in ways that could complement the worker and half in ways that could replace tasks, which makes the distribution question of the earlier sections more pressing, not less.[57]
Demography pushes the other way. Across the European Union, Eurostat’s baseline projection has the number of people aged 65 and over per hundred of working age, 20 to 64, rising from 38 today to 55 by 2050 and 59 by 2070.[58] Hours per head of population will fall as that happens, but not as leisure for workers: the same output has to be produced by relatively fewer of them, which is why pension ages are rising almost everywhere. The coming decades may well give workers less time, over a lifetime, not more.
Politics will decide the split, as it always has. The legal working week has barely moved in most rich countries since the 1990s. The most direct recent attempt to move it, the Spanish government’s bill to cut the legal week from 40 hours to 37.5 without loss of pay, was voted down by the Spanish Congress in September 2025, by 178 votes to 170; the minister behind it has promised to try again.[59] The four-day-week trials in Britain, Portugal and elsewhere are small and self-selected, but they are growing, and most participating firms have kept some form of the shorter week.
So the things worth watching over the next few years are not the ones that make headlines. Whether productivity growth, not AI investment, actually rises in the statistics. Whether the median wage, which has grown faster since 2014 than in any decade since the early 1970s, keeps closing on productivity or falls behind again, as it did for thirty-five years before. Whether the price of housing, care and education keeps rising faster than pay. And whether any country legislates a shorter week and makes it stick. If all four go the right way, the fifteen-hour week stops being a curiosity of 1930 and becomes a political programme. If none does, Figure 12 is roughly what to expect.
Where this could go
A proper leisure ledger. Figure 5 uses hours per worker and hours per head, both of which miss housework, schooling and retirement. Harmonised time-use surveys exist for a dozen countries from the 1960s; a ledger built on them would say how much of the productivity dividend was taken as time over the whole of a life rather than a working year.
The price of 1977. The counterfactual here values the 1977 standard of living at 1977 prices, deflated. A better one would price the actual basket: which goods of 2026 could be dropped to buy back a day a week, and which could not, because they are positional or because their price, like housing, is set by other people’s incomes.
This piece was written collaboratively with Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic): human specification, editorial direction and critical review; machine data analysis, research and drafting. Every number in the text is computed by scripts/keynes.py from public datasets it downloads itself: the Bergeaud–Cette–Lecat Long-Term Productivity Database (output per hour, hours per head and GDP per head, 1890–2024), Our World in Data’s series of hours per worker and the Maddison Project’s GDP per head, and the Jordà–Schularick–Taylor Macrohistory Database for unemployment. The sections on pay, inequality and prices add the BLS series listed in the sources, taken from its public API, the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts, and the WID, LIS and UN series published by Our World in Data. Results are in docs/keynes-results.json and the eleven figures in docs/keynes-figures.html. The photographs are public-domain images from Wikimedia Commons, credited in their captions; local copies are in assets/images/2026/. The decomposition of the gap between productivity and the median wage splits the log difference, 1979–2025, into the change in the labour share (compensation over output at output prices), the gap between the output deflator and consumer prices, and the gap between average compensation and the median weekly wage; it is done twice, with CPI-U and with the index implied by the BLS’s own real-compensation series, and the text gives rounded values from both. The outlook section’s dates are straight-line extrapolations of log hours, and its AI scenarios apply published estimates to American hours arithmetically; neither is a forecast. The career calculation in the retirement section assumes a man who starts work at 20 and leaves at the OECD’s average effective exit age, working the average annual hours per worker of the year; Portugal is left out of it because its hours series before 1990 is unreliable. The shares in Figure 5 are ratios of log changes between 1929 and 2023. The counterfactual weekly hours average annual hours over fifty-two weeks, holidays included, so they compare with the 34 hours a week that American workers average on the same basis today, not with a contracted working week. Hours before 1950 rest on a few benchmark years and should be read as approximate.
The cover is computed by the same script: American output per hour from 1890 to 2024 on a log scale, with Britain and France in grey and 1930 marked, beside three weeks of 168 hours each, filled with an American worker’s average weekly hours in 1929 and in 2023 and with Keynes’s fifteen.
Authored by: Luis Matos Ferreira — Physicist, Developer, Writer
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