The Three Goals

Essay · economics · September 2026

This series set out to ask, as fairly as it could, whether an economy and its institutions could give people more free time, put less pressure on the planet and leave them more satisfied. The answer from the evidence is a qualified yes, with the qualifications doing most of the work. Shorter hours raise satisfaction a little and cut emissions a little; the climate depends far more on how energy is made; and all three goals are easiest when productivity is growing, which in Portugal it has hardly been.

Reading time ≈ 14 min The case for growth → the evidence → a scenario → a verdict Closing essay

The question

The essays collected in Work, Time and Money began with Keynes’s prediction of a fifteen-hour week and followed the question into wages, pensions, housing, growth and waste. Behind them was one question: can a modern economy be arranged so that people have more time for themselves, the environment bears less, and people are more satisfied with their lives? This essay tries to answer it directly, and to do so without favouring the answer the series may seem to lean towards.

It does four things. It states the case for growth at full strength. It reviews the evidence on the three links the series had not tested: whether shorter hours make people more satisfied, whether they reduce environmental pressure, and whether more consumption still makes people happier. It runs a simple scenario for Portugal to 2050. And it gives a verdict on each goal, including where they conflict.

+0.13 SDrise in leisure satisfaction among Portuguese workers after the 1996 cut from 44 to 40 hours

39% vs 22%of workers who wanted to work fewer hours in 2017, in Portugal and in the EU

−9.7%yearly fall in emissions per euro of output Portugal would need for a 90% cut by 2050; since 2008, −3.3%

35 ha week by 2050 if half of 1% yearly productivity growth were taken as time, with income per worker still up 13%

The other side

The case for growth, at full strength

A fair test starts with the strongest version of the view the series has questioned. Growth is how Portugal became a country where almost no infants die: infant mortality fell from 77.5 per 1,000 births in 1960 to 2.5 in 2023, and life expectancy rose from 64 to 82.[1] Across countries, income causes better child health: Lant Pritchett and Lawrence Summers estimated that a 10 per cent rise in income cuts child mortality by 2 to 4 per cent.[2] Growth also pays for the transition away from fossil fuels: the costs of solar power, wind and batteries have fallen by about 10 per cent a year as their use has grown, and solar by 15 per cent a year between 2010 and 2020, far faster than forecasters expected.[3] And an ageing country needs rising resources for health and care: in the Commission’s projections Portugal’s public health spending rises from 6.2 to 7.2 per cent of GDP by 2070 and long-term care from 0.5 to 0.9 per cent, or to much more if care coverage rises to European levels.[4]

Most important, when the choice is put as time against money, the Portuguese have chosen money. In the 2005 International Social Survey, the last to ask Portugal the question in that form, 49 per cent of Portuguese workers said they would like to work more hours for more pay, and 3 per cent fewer hours for less; even in richer countries, few choose less pay.[5] The gap between Portugal and the rest of Europe in how people rate their lives is not about time: Portuguese satisfaction with their use of time is now above the EU average, and satisfaction with their finances well below it (Figure 1).[6] Economists Timo Boppart and Per Krusell show that in rich countries hours fall of their own accord as productivity rises, by a little under half a per cent a year: people take more time as they can afford it, without a policy telling them to.[7] And the academic literature proposing to shrink economies is thin: a review of 561 studies found almost 90 per cent were opinion pieces, and fewer than 2 per cent used a formal model.[8]

Fig. 1 — Mean satisfaction (0–10) with use of time, personal relationships, job and financial situation, people aged 16 and over, Portugal and the EU (27 countries), 2022 (job, 2018). Data: Eurostat, EU-SILC ad hoc modules on well-being (2018 and 2022).

This series has leaned the other way in its choice of questions: waste, the manufacture of wants, the growth imperative. The essays themselves cited the critics, but the questions were chosen from one side. The verdict below tries to weigh both.

Link one

Does more time make people more satisfied?

Somewhat, when it comes without a cut in pay. The best evidence comes from laws that shortened the working week. When Portugal cut the legal week from 44 to 40 hours in 1996, affected workers’ hours fell by about 1.7 a week with no fall in pay, and their satisfaction with their leisure rose by 0.13 standard deviations and with their jobs by 0.07, with no sign of fading over four years; France’s 35-hour week had similar effects.[9] Those are modest effects on satisfaction with leisure and work; the survey did not ask about life as a whole. Hours cuts in Japan and Korea raised life satisfaction slightly, though the authors caution that other changes at the same time could explain it, and another study of Korea found no effect.[10] Four-day-week trials, including Portugal’s, report large falls in burnout, but among firms that chose to take part, without a comparison group, as The Fifth Day discussed.

Who wants the time matters, and here the Portuguese evidence is clearer than the 2005 question suggests. Asked about the hours they would like, taking account of the need to earn a living but without being forced to accept a pay cut, 39 per cent of Portuguese workers in 2017 wanted to work fewer hours and 6 per cent more, against 22 and 14 per cent in the EU (Figure 2). In Portugal’s 2015 time-use survey, 48 per cent wanted fewer hours, and among those working more than 40 hours, 70 per cent of men and 76 per cent of women did.[11] Across the EU, about a third of workers want fewer hours, and almost two-thirds of those working 41 or more.[12] The Portuguese want more time; what they cannot easily afford is less pay.

Fig. 2 — Share of employed people who would like to work fewer or more hours, taking into account the need to earn a living (2017), and share of part-time workers who work part-time because they could not find a full-time job or to care for others (2024), Portugal and the EU. The 2017 question allowed but did not require interviewers to mention the loss of income. Data: Eurostat, Labour Force Survey 2017 ad hoc module (lfso_17cspwt) and part-time employment by reason (lfsa_epgar); author’s calculation.

People who value time over money are happier a year later, in one large study, though that is a correlation.[13] What is certain is the other side: time that comes as unemployment is a disaster for wellbeing, with psychological problems about twice as common among the unemployed.[14] More free time helps only if it comes as a choice or a shorter week, not as a lost job.

Link two

Does more consumption?

Still yes, but weakly, and less for society than for the individual. The long dispute over whether happiness stops rising above a certain income was settled, in 2023, by its two sides working together: for most people, happiness keeps rising with income, and only for the least happy fifth does it level off.[15] But the relationship is weak: in American data, the correlation between income and momentary happiness is about 0.09. Much of what income buys is rank, and rank is zero-sum: a review of the evidence concludes that, at the level of a whole society, “only the consumption benefit of income remains”.[16] People who put material goods at the centre of their lives tend to be less satisfied with them.[17]

In Portugal income plainly still matters: in 2018, the poorest fifth of the population rated their lives at 5.6 out of 10 and the richest fifth at 7.6.[6] The evidence supports the view that more consumption is a weak route to satisfaction in rich societies, not that income no longer matters in a country where many are still short of it.

Link three

Does more time help the planet?

Only as far as it means less income and spending. The most thorough review, by authors sympathetic to shorter hours, found about 2,500 papers on the subject and only 15 that tested it properly; it concluded that most find shorter hours reduce environmental pressure “primarily by decreasing incomes and consumption expenditures”, and that the evidence beyond that link is “inconclusive”.[18] A cross-country study found that 10 per cent shorter hours went with a 12 per cent smaller ecological footprint, but that holding income constant the effect on carbon dioxide disappeared: “the scale effect of work hours is much larger than the compositional effect.”[19] A Swedish study found that the effect of more free time itself was less than a tenth of the effect of lower income.[20]

Free time has a footprint too. An hour of leisure at home produces about 1 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent; an hour of travel about 5; leisure away from home that includes holidays and restaurants, more than 9.[21] A four-day week at the same pay, spent on weekend flights, could raise emissions. For the climate, the decisive variable is not hours but how energy is produced.

A scenario

Portugal to 2050, two ways

To see how the goals fit together, consider a simple, transparent scenario for Portugal. Output per hour grows by 1 per cent a year, above Portugal’s recent record but below its long-run past. Employment stays constant, as immigration offsets ageing. Inflation is 2 per cent, the interest rate on public debt 3 per cent, and the State runs a primary surplus of 1.9 per cent of GDP, its best five-year record. Emissions per euro of output keep falling at the 3.3 per cent a year of 2008–2024. In scenario A all productivity gains are taken as income; in scenario B half are taken as shorter hours. This is arithmetic, not a forecast: it ignores how people, firms and prices would respond.[22]

Fig. 3 — Scenario for Portugal, index 2025 = 100: output per worker in A (hours constant) and B (hours per worker falling 0.5 per cent a year), and hours per worker in B, with output per hour rising 1 per cent a year. Data: author’s calculation (scripts/capstone.py); hours from OECD.

In B, hours per worker fall by about 12 per cent by 2050, from about 1,760 a year to about 1,560, roughly from 40 hours a week to 35, and income per worker still rises by 13 per cent, against 28 per cent in A (Figure 3). Public debt falls in both, to about 42 per cent of GDP in A and 51 in B (Figure 4). If migration fell to the low level assumed in the official projections, so that the workforce shrank by almost 1 per cent a year, debt would fall only to about 59 per cent in A and 71 in B.

Fig. 4 — Scenario for Portugal: public debt, per cent of GDP, 2025–2050, in A and B, with a primary surplus of 1.9 per cent of GDP, interest of 3 per cent and inflation of 2 per cent. Data: author’s calculation.

Emissions per person fall by 45 per cent in A and 51 per cent in B (Figure 5). The difference between the two scenarios is small next to the gap between either and a 90 per cent cut: that would need emissions per euro of output to fall by almost 10 per cent a year, three times the recent pace.

Fig. 5 — Scenario for Portugal: greenhouse gas emissions per person (excluding land use), tonnes of CO2 equivalent, 2025–2050, in A and B, with emissions per unit of real GDP falling 3.3 per cent a year; dotted: a straight path to a 90 per cent cut. The direct effect of hours on emissions, beyond income, is set to zero, as the evidence suggests. Data: Eurostat, env_air_gge; author’s calculation.

The missing institutions

Why wanting time is not enough

If many Portuguese want fewer hours, why do so few work them? Part of the answer is money. The rest is that the arrangements which, elsewhere, let people take time without losing their job, their career or their pension are thin or absent in Portugal.

A right to shorter hours. In the Netherlands any employee of a firm with ten or more staff can ask to work more or fewer hours, and the employer can refuse only for serious business reasons. Germany gives a similar right in firms of more than 15 employees, and since 2019 a right to reduce hours temporarily and return to full time. Britain gives a right to request from the first day of a job.[23] Portugal’s law is strong but narrow. Parents of children under 12 and carers have a right to half-time work for up to two to four years, and to a flexible schedule; an employer who refuses must justify it to the equality commission, CITE, and needs a court ruling if the commission disagrees. Everyone else can change their hours only by agreement; the law says the employer should consider such requests “if possible”.[24]

Paid time credits. Belgium pays an allowance to workers who reduce their hours or take a career break; about 240,000 people a month used such schemes in 2024, most often to work four days a week, and most of them towards the end of their careers.[25] Portugal has nothing similar outside parental leave: time off beyond holidays is unpaid and at the employer’s discretion.[24]

Time accounts and collective agreements. In Germany, 37 per cent of employees have a working-time account in which extra hours are banked and taken as time off, and the metalworkers’ union negotiated in 2018 an option to take eight extra days off a year instead of a bonus.[26] Portugal abolished the individual hours bank in 2020, keeping versions set by collective agreement or group vote, which mostly give employers flexibility. Among Portuguese collective agreements that set weekly hours, 40 hours remains the norm, with 35 hours mainly in municipal companies and insurance; the public sector returned to 35 hours in 2016.[27]

Part-time jobs worth having, and pensions that allow them. In Portugal only 7 per cent of workers are part-time, and 36 per cent of those would rather work full-time, twice the EU rate; only 8 per cent work part-time to care for others, against 21 per cent in the EU and 32 in the Netherlands (Figure 2).[11] Part-time years still count towards a pension, but on lower earnings, so the pension is lower; parents on the legal half-time are the exception, credited as if full-time. There is no partial pension that would let older workers reduce hours gradually; the 2021 Green Book on the future of work recommended one, and the 2024 Green Book on Social Security did not take it up.[28]

The evidence on how much these institutions are used is sobering as well as encouraging. Germany’s right to temporary part-time is used by about half of one per cent of employees, mostly women and higher earners, because it comes with no pay replacement; Belgium’s paid scheme is used widely, and costs public money.[26][25] Rights alone serve those who can afford a smaller pay packet; paid schemes reach more people at a price. That is the Portuguese trade-off in miniature.

The verdict

Each goal, and where they meet

More time. Achievable, in moderation. With productivity growing 1 per cent a year, Portugal could reach something close to a 35-hour week by 2050 while still raising incomes, and the public finances would bear it. That is Boppart and Krusell’s trend, which Portugal has not followed: its hours per worker were the same in 2025 as in 1995. Productivity is what makes time cheap, but it is not the only source. Time can also come from a different split between wages and profits, as the 1996 cut from 44 to 40 hours at the same monthly pay showed, and from time wasted elsewhere, in long commutes and at home, as Hours on the Road and The Unpaid Ledger found. And many Portuguese who would choose fewer hours now cannot, because the institutions that let people take them, described above, are narrow or absent.

Less environmental pressure. Achievable, but not mainly through time. Shorter hours help to the extent that they mean less income and consumption; the climate is decided by energy and carbon intensity, where carbon pricing, the fall in clean-energy costs and the rules described in Worth Producing do most of the work. Growth and falling emissions have coexisted in Portugal since 2008; whether fast enough is the open question.

More satisfied people. Achievable at the margin. Shorter hours raise satisfaction with leisure and work modestly; unemployment destroys it; more consumption helps individuals weakly and societies less, though income still matters where money is short. For Portugal, where people are more dissatisfied with their finances than with their time but a large minority want shorter hours, the gains are likely to come from letting those who want time take it, not from a uniform cut paid for by everyone’s income.

Together. The three goals are compatible when productivity grows and energy is decarbonised by price and rule; then an economy can offer more time, lower emissions and at least as much satisfaction. They conflict when productivity stalls, because then time costs income, and in a country where income is the main source of dissatisfaction that is a hard trade for most, though not for all. The evidence does not support forcing the choice on everyone, but it does support giving people the choice: the gains in satisfaction come mostly from those who want fewer hours and get them.

For Portugal

What follows

The sequence the evidence suggests is: raise productivity first, as The Stalled Hour described, by investing in capital, firms that grow and the people who run them; price and regulate carbon so that the climate does not depend on hours at all; give every worker, not only parents and carers, a right to reduce hours and return, with refusals limited to serious business reasons; consider a paid time credit and a partial pension, so that time is not only for those who can afford it; bring back individual time accounts on terms workers choose; make pensions and public debt robust to slower growth, as Off the Treadmill set out; and measure progress by more than GDP, including satisfaction with time and finances, which INE already collects.

Keynes expected the choice between more goods and more leisure to become easy as societies grew rich. For Portugal, still two-thirds as productive as the European average, it is not yet easy for most. But it is available to many now, and wanted by more than the old surveys suggested; the question for the next quarter-century is less whether the country can afford more time than whether it builds the institutions that let people take it when they want it.

On method and tools

This piece was written collaboratively with Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic): human specification, editorial direction and critical review; machine data research, analysis and drafting. The scenario is computed by scripts/capstone.py with the assumptions stated in the text; it is an accounting exercise, not an economic model, and ignores behavioural responses, price changes and feedbacks between growth, debt and interest rates. Several studies were read in working-paper versions (Lepinteur; Hamermesh, Kawaguchi and Lee; Knight, Rosa and Schor; Boppart and Krusell; Way et al.), and some only in abstract (Nässén and Larsson; Kasser and Sheldon); the only Portuguese survey that set time explicitly against pay dates from 2005; later surveys ask about preferred hours without forcing a pay cut, so the two cannot be read as a trend. Results are in docs/capstone-results.json and the figures in docs/capstone-figures.html; the downloaded sources, with a page reference for every number, are kept with the script’s data.

The cover photograph is Beach life in Cascais by Daniel from Glasgow; CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.

Authored by: Luis Matos Ferreira — Physicist, Developer, Writer

Related essays on this blog

1. Work, Time and Money — the reading guide to the whole series.
2. The Fifteen-Hour Week — where the series began.
3. Off the Treadmill — policies that could loosen the dependence on growth.
4. Worth Producing — what productivity measures, waste, and what debt is for.

Sources

1. Eurostat, infant mortality (demo_minfind) and life expectancy (demo_mlexpec), Portugal, 1960 and 2023.
2. L. Pritchett and L. H. Summers, “Wealthier is Healthier”, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 1150, 1993, pp. 2 and 40 (published in Journal of Human Resources, 1996).
3. R. Way, M. Ives, P. Mealy and J. D. Farmer, “Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition”, Joule, 2022 (working-paper version, pp. 3–4).
4. European Commission, 2024 Ageing Report, Institutional Paper 279, Portugal: health and long-term care projections, p. 81 and country tables.
5. International Social Survey Programme 2005 (Work Orientations III), Portugal, preferred working hours, as tabulated in the research notes.
6. Eurostat, EU-SILC ad hoc modules on well-being: satisfaction by domain and overall life satisfaction by income quintile, 2018 and 2022.
7. T. Boppart and P. Krusell, “Labor Supply in the Past, Present, and Future: A Balanced-Growth Perspective”, Journal of Political Economy 128(1), 2020 (NBER working-paper version, pp. 35 and 52).
8. I. Savin and J. van den Bergh, “Reviewing studies of degrowth: Are claims matched by data, methods and policy analysis?”, Ecological Economics 226, 2024, p. 2.
9. A. Lepinteur, “The shorter workweek and worker wellbeing: Evidence from Portugal and France”, Labour Economics 58, 2019 (PSE working paper 2016-21, pp. 7–9, 20 and Table 14).
10. D. S. Hamermesh, D. Kawaguchi and J. Lee, “Does labor legislation benefit workers? Well-being after an hours reduction”, Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, 2017 (IZA DP 8077, pp. 10–11 and 22–23); R. Rudolf, study of Korea’s workweek reduction, 2014 (secondary).
11. Eurostat, Labour Force Survey 2017 ad hoc module on self-employment, variable on preferred hours (lfso_17cspwt), and part-time employment by reason (lfsa_epgar), 2024; H. Perista et al., Os Usos do Tempo de Homens e de Mulheres em Portugal, CESIS/CITE, 2016, p. 144; Eurofound, European Working Conditions Surveys 2015 and 2021 (Portugal); author’s calculation.
12. Eurofound, European Working Conditions Survey 2024, preferred working hours, pp. 31–32.
13. A. V. Whillans et al., studies of valuing time over money and happiness (2016–2019), as summarised in the research notes; A. V. Whillans et al., “Buying time promotes happiness”, PNAS 114, 2017, abstract.
14. K. I. Paul and K. Moser, “Unemployment impairs mental health: Meta-analyses”, Journal of Vocational Behavior 74, 2009 (secondary).
15. M. A. Killingsworth, D. Kahneman and B. Mellers, “Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved”, PNAS 120, 2023; M. A. Killingsworth, “Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year”, PNAS 118, 2021.
16. A. E. Clark, P. Frijters and M. A. Shields, “Relative Income, Happiness, and Utility”, Journal of Economic Literature 46(1), 2008 (working-paper version, p. 55).
17. H. Dittmar, R. Bond, M. Hurst and T. Kasser, “The relationship between materialism and personal well-being: A meta-analysis”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 107(5), 2014, p. 879.
18. M. Antal et al., “Is working less really good for the environment? A systematic review of the empirical evidence for resource use, greenhouse gas emissions and the ecological footprint”, Environmental Research Letters 16, 2021, pp. 1, 10, 12 and 15.
19. K. W. Knight, E. A. Rosa and J. B. Schor, “Could working less reduce pressures on the environment?”, Global Environmental Change 23, 2013 (PERI working paper 304, 2012, pp. 10–11).
20. J. Nässén and J. Larsson, “Would shorter working time reduce greenhouse gas emissions? An analysis of time use and consumption in Swedish households”, Environment and Planning C 33, 2015, abstract.
21. B. Smetschka et al., “Time Matters: The Carbon Footprint of Everyday Activities in Austria”, Ecological Economics 164, 2019, pp. 2 and 24–27.
22. Author’s scenario (scripts/capstone.py): OECD hours per worker (2025), Eurostat GDP and greenhouse gas emissions (2008–2024), EDP debt (2025), AMECO primary balance; EUROPOP2023 for the low-migration variant.
23. Netherlands, Wet flexibel werken (2016); Germany, Teilzeit- und Befristungsgesetz, §§ 8 and 9a; United Kingdom, Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023; Directive (EU) 2019/1158, art. 9.
24. Código do Trabalho, arts. 55–57, 101-C to 101-E, 155–156 and 317; CITE, annual report 2023 (1,231 notices of intended refusal).
25. Belgium, National Employment Office (ONEM/RVA), statistics on time credit and thematic leave, 2024.
26. IAB (Institute for Employment Research), working-time accounts survey 2023; Germany, federal government evaluation of the bridging part-time right, 2024; IG Metall 2018 agreement (uptake as reported, secondary).
27. Código do Trabalho, arts. 204, 208 and 208-B (Lei 93/2019); Centro de Relações Laborais, report on collective bargaining 2025; Lei 18/2016 (public-sector 35-hour week).
28. Decreto-Lei 91/2009, art. 22; Livro Verde sobre o Futuro do Trabalho, 2021; Comissão para a Sustentabilidade da Segurança Social, Livro Verde, 2024.