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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

When Kaynes madd these predictions the world pop wa about 2 billion. With that pop it may be possible to achieve a 1940x level of leisure for everyone. But at 7 billion I’m pessimistic and think it’s unfair to anchor the article on something envisioned 80 years ago.

I’d like to know what the author expects people to do with their free time?

Get immersed in social media/games ?

Get involved in hobbies?

Lifelong learning?

Consumerism/travel?

Just what exactly?

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Anything that they feel makes them happy? I mean, eight hour workdays are an arbitrary invention, just based on the fact that the old "eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure, eight hours of sleep" slogan made for a nice Schelling point. And people mostly didn't expect us to get stuck there like we did. During the industrial revolution, leisure mostly did not exist for the new working class. (On the other hand historically the aristocracy enjoyed a life of pure leisure.) I guess in the 1800s there were some people asking "but what would you do with all that time if you weren't working at a factory 14 hours a day six days a week". The question was as silly then as it is now. Out of all arguments for having to work n hours a day, "but otherwise you'd have too much time" must be the worst.

It was not completely random. There were experiments with working hours. Those 14 hours days are innefective as shown in pretty much all studies on the topic. They also were related to quite a lot of social and societal problems.

> social media/games ... hobbies ... Lifelong learning ... Consumerism/travel

It's really saddening that people bought into the false dichotomy of work VS leisure.

Lifelong endeavors in science, art, activism, politics exist[ed] outside of what we call "work".

Einstein, Maxwell, Darwin and countless others are/were doing something that is not "work" and certainly not a "hobby". Call it a purpose or a mission.

Serious volunteering and activism doesn't require you to be a genius tho. There is plenty of needs that are not addressed in this world.

The thing is that aspect takes care of what, 1, 5, 10%?

What do the rest do? What is there to be activist about once you’ve achieved a 15hr workweek globally?

What's wrong with doing nothing, laying on the couch snuggling your pets / SO / family, or enjoying your friend's company around a meal / drinks?

Off the top of my head:

Racial equality

Gender equality

Rebalancing society so it’s not based on constant overconsumption

Trying to reverse the results of a couple hundred years of treating the world as raw materials for industrial profit (global warming, anthropocene era mass extinction event, pacific garbage gyre, etc)

AI rights maybe?

Fighting people/organizations attempting to pull society back to the current levels of inequity

Plus a bunch of things I am too immersed in the current situation to even imagine. Like nobody even had the concepts for “trans rights” when I was a kid but now that gay marriage is basically a done deal there’s room to fight for that.

You are not working to support and salve 7bn needy fellows, you are slaving for the consumerist benefit of about 7m plutocrats.

Have you ever been to a place where people don’t work all the time? They spend time with their family and relax.

Why would population change the picture?

Impact on limited resources and impact on the environment.

That assumes that technological progress is static, which it patently is not. We are now able to make more out of the limited resources we have.

I believe being able to make more out of the resources does not necessarily translate into actually making more. There are arguments that building infrastructure today is slower than 30 years ago due to regulations/political constraints, despite the technological progress.

I think we surface more of the consequences of infrastructure construction in terms of health and safety and pollution, which appears to be slower, but in fact means much more is done.

Technological progress cannot create more land; housing in more expensive due to lack of land in many places, limited size of woods makes wood furniture more and more expensive, farming becomes more and more intensive. In the time of my grandfathers finding a place to build a house was very simple (and cheap) and there was more than enough wood to make everything out of the best quality wood. Even heating in the winter was done on wood as it was plenty for everyone. But population quadrupled since, the land and wood per capita is a quarter and decreasing.

> Technological progress cannot create more land

The Netherlands did reclaim land from the sea.

That is trolling; the land that can be claimed from the sea is irrelevant on a global scale, especially into the landlocked countries.

> more out of the limited resources we have

Compared to 10 years ago? Maybe.

Compared to... 200 years ago? Absolutely not.

If we are talking about modern people only working 2 days a week and still being as productive as people were in the past while working a whole week, then you have to see that 3.5 times the population increases the number of people able to do work. So either the work is divided among more people and people work even less and are able to live, or the bosses keep all the cash and make people work a full week and give them a marginal percent of what they brought in and everyone is worse off.

I think you are close to falling into the "lump of labour" fallacy. Work is generally done to service consumer demand that scales with the number of people.

All of your suggestions are excellent alternatives to unfulfilling or unnecessary work. (EDIT: Except the consumerism part, but travel 100% solid suggestion)

There is a cluster of super important hard jobs requiring a lot of hours nobody wants to do, that is unlikely to change anytime soon. Then there is a cluster of BS jobs where 2 hours a week is already too much and any additional hour just adds to a damage it causes on company/society. Then there is a misleading average of these two clusters and more regular jobs in-between.

Well, if all else fails they are free to create mock companies that have 7 layers of management, office politics, a commute, and free coffee; then spend 8 hours a day engaging with them.

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