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The 15-hour Work Week: Keynes And AOC Disagree

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attracted ridicule for a simple error about John Maynard Keynes, but her greater error was believing people cannot support a family by working 15 hours a week—at the standard of living of Britain in the days of Keynes. (See note at the bottom regarding Ocasio-Cortez’s minor errors.)

Keynes wrote an essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren in 1930 speculating that tremendous growth of productivity might enable us to eventually work only 15 hours a week. Ocasio-Cortez says that since then, the gains in productivity have come, but not been distributed to the workers doing the more productive work. She implies that a working person cannot support a family working just 15 hours a week.

But what if the worker would be satisfied with a 1930 standard of living? Earnings in 1930 for British workers were equivalent to $252 per week in today’s U.S. purchasing power. And the average worker put in 48 hours of work. (Annual earnings averaged £152.9, which I have converted to weekly earnings, then into dollars at the 1930 exchange rate, then adjusted for inflation with the U.S. Consumer Price Index.)

Could an American family live on 15 hours per week if they accepted the old British standard of living? Today’s average hourly earnings across all private sector workers is $28.58, so 15 hours of work would provide $429 a week. That is 70% more than needed to maintain the standard of living common Brits had back in 1930. The most important thing to remember is that in 1930, most everyone lived very poorly compared to how most of us live today. The average British family lived in rental housing, cramped quarters, with a monotonous diet, few clothes, no vacations, and they paid for their own health care. (The National Health Service was started in 1948.) Some people still used chamber pots for lack of flush toilets.

These calculations are subject to many caveats, including the challenge of inflation adjustment over long periods of time, international income comparisons, taxes and government benefits. Nonetheless, the numbers can be a little bit off and leave the main point standing: that 15 hours of work per week could more than duplicate the average British standard of living of 1930.

Families that want more leisure, whether for fishing or art or nothing in particular, can live a minimalist lifestyle. Find cheap housing close to public transportation (no car, or one older model for the family). Own a couple of shirts, a couple of pairs of pants, a few pieces of underwear. Use the public library for entertainment. Cook at home.

Some Americans are doing something like that today, often taking advantage of fluctuations in labor demand to work the most lucrative shifts. Many servers (waiters and waitresses) work three or four hours a day during the prime shifts. Their total weekly earnings may be less than if they found a 40-hour job, but they have much more time off than 9-to-5ers. Some Uber and Lyft drivers wait until surge pricing will provide high income per hour worked. In another approach, some construction workers put in maximum hours during periods of strong demand, such as the summer road paving season. Then they spend a few months at leisure in a low-cost location.

That’s not the life I have chosen, but it’s an option for people who don’t want to work 40 hours a week. A family can, indeed, live on 15 hours of work in a week, though not at the lifestyle advertised on television. The key point is that people have choices. Hard work for long hours can help a person buy lots of stuff, or careful spending decisions can help a person have lots of leisure. The choices is for each individual to make.

John Maynard Keynes was right about the strong productivity of the years since he wrote that article, and the gains have indeed filtered down to working people. The challenge for us, now, is to choose wisely how much we work, and at occupations.

Note: Ocasio-Cortez was ridiculed because she referred to the great English economist as “Milton Keynes,” which she later said was her mistake conflating Milton Friedman with John Maynard Keynes—perhaps the first person to confuse the American free market economist with the English advocate for government management of the economy. More likely, she had heard of the English town named Milton Keynes and that was the first thing to come to mind—an understandable error showing a lack of proofreading more than a lack of knowledge. She also mispronounced Keynes’ name: should sound like “canes,” not like “keens.”

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