So even if you want a rising standard of living, work hours could conceivably be shorter.
That said, the fundamental point that most of us wouldn't accept 1929 lifestyles for any amount of leisure is right.
It's perfectly possible to opt for 1929 levels of health care.
Washing machines, for example, use less water than dish washing by hand. Laundry machines similarly. I bet printing presses have gotten better too.
If you accept that maintaining a 1929 lifestyle you can do 16 hour weeks: the price of food alone has dropped immensely, I bet fridges are more efficient than they were in the 30s, not even to talk about automation... Shouldn't we be able to do our current lifestyle with less than 16 hours
So, if 16 hours of donating effort to society, in exchange for a standard of living means status quo, would investing in 32 hours now, mean improvements that move the needle forward?
Or... is it possible that we wouldn't be able to exactly measure when 16 real hours are logged, because it would require totalitarian surveillance?
Every office I've worked in is filled with people blathering innanely about things that have nothing to do with finishing up our shared miserable toil, and getting the fuck away from my personal nightmare dungeon.
Then there's the meetings.
The meetings where you sit in a room with people who do almost nothing but talk in meetings. To them? That's what work actually is.
Pointless meetings. Hours long meetings. Reading emails. Emails upon emails. Alerts for alerts. Noise without signal. And why? For what?
Somewhere in all this, there's probably a reason for it, but honestly, I get the feeling that half the people with white collar day jobs serve no purpose other than to dress nice and demostrate headcount to rival departments, to justify budgets and win BIGNESS perception contests among "executives." (my staff meeting is bigger than yours, so who's more important?)
If you started extracting "work that matters" from these kinds of corporate heirarchies, I get the feeling we'd start hemorhaging employment rate, and so it must be prevented because people need boondoggles to feel useful, and have a reason to dress nice and belong somewhere for some reason or whatever.
I know a number of people who've intentionally decided to live pretty much like that. Mostly they don't do it anymore after a few years, but it's totally an available option if you really want it. Saying "society poses" an expensive standard of living is not much proof that you're being forced to do anything.
But iceboxes were certainly common, as were fans. I guess my point being: the people of the 1920s weren't savages, and while it's obvious that they didn't enjoy the same comforts we enjoy today there were still many conveniences that did exist.
The past is a strange place, with odd customs, but it's not totally alien or barbaric.
With an extra 3 days of leisure every week I'd think I could handle not driving 80 mph on the highway. There are pictures of these 20s and 30s cars at the top of dirt roads in the rocky mountains so what ever power they had still let them go places.
Do I really need all the car that the civic is?
And for an extra three days of leisure a week, you'd be giving up not just driving on the highway, but indeed a whole load of things.
Again - for most things, nobody is making you consume these additional goods and services above the 1930 average. But, as we can see, they're quite popular and people apparently prefer to work more and consume more rather than work less and consume less.
Yes, a high infant mortality rate skews the figures. Still, I'd be willing to bet that the average 40 year old in 1929 had a life expectancy at least 10 years less than the average 40 year old in 2017.
Edit: Table 21 in this report is informative: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_11.pdf Expected years remaining for a 40 year old in 1929-31 was 29.67. In 2011 it was 40.58.
If it's per-capita income, is there any weighting done for different groups of income? I feel if the statistics group together Silicon Valley CEOs and Starbucks waitresses, it's easy to get a non-representatively high (though technically correct) per-capita income.
Also, how much of the increase is from the economy simply recovering from the 1929 crisis back to normal levels?
> So even if you want a rising standard of living, work hours could conceivably be shorter.
2) That assumes that jobs that provide such increased wages are also flexible enough that you can freely choose how many hours per week you want to work. That assumption doesn't seem to be the case in practice.