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I doubt he actually believed this. He thought people would be working 16 hours a week with zero caveats?

Sure if all things remained equal, if basically nothing changed at all from 1929 to 2029 then yes his prediction would be accurate. But did he actually believe that?

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J.M. Keynes was basically just spitballing when he said that, in an article called "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren". Basically a non-academic article to make some long-term predictions based on trends of the time. Also this was 1929 and some notable events happened not long after.

Yeah - it effectively took He Who Shall Remain Godwin-ley Nameless to get all the governments of the world to print enough money for a burst of consumption that ran from 1939 until around... 1973?

And that, really, only in the US.

What I'm saying is that, if someone is predicting a certain amount of economic progress for the year 2000 in 1929, then the fact of the Great Depression and WWII will tend to make predictions more optimistic than reality. Those two events caused a huge amount of damage to the world economy and set it back a long way from where it would otherwise have been a few decades later.

Well said.

Working hours had been trending down for a while at that time, so it must have seemed reasonable.

They've continued trending down since then, especially when you count hours of domestic labour, which has dropped a lot (and no surprise, since you're not getting paid wages for those hours generally.)

This, I think, leaves out how much formerly domestic labor has been converted into social labor provided either by the state or market forces. Which could be responsible for a lot of reduction as well, as when one does this efficiencies of scale and rationalization can take place in an organization. I have no idea how or why either aspect would be bigger. Hypothetically, reduction of (for example) childcare hours could be as much about proliferation of daycares and kindergarten and schooling in general as it's about development in domestic childcare technologies. Eating and fix prison is microwaves and McDonald's, etc.

But what I'm saying is that both paid labour and unpaid labour (or "domestic labour") are both going down in number of hours. People working in daycares and kindergartens are already counted in the paid labour hours. What technology does is make domestic labour time-effective enough so that keeping house is no longer a full-time occupation, which permits for the expansion of other kinds of work.

s/fix prison/such things/

How can you claim this when essentially they have doubled - two wages are (usually) needed to provide for a family these days.

So don't family. Problem solved :)

Seems like a reasonable solution for the whole world to adopt. What could go wrong?

I know, right?

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