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Salemicus comments on On not getting a job as an option - Less Wrong Discussion
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To sharpen my question a bit:
Back during the heyday of the industrial revolution, people have been predicting that people will work less and less due to vastly increased productivity. This did not happen, which is interesting, because it seemed like a reasonable prediction at the time and still seems that way to me today. People are making similar predictions now. I am curious if these predictions will similarly not pan out, and if so why. Coordination being hard would be a "good reason," digging holes would be a "bad reason." If we are really digging holes, it just seems better to implement a minimum income instead.
But we are working less and less due to vastly increased productivity, and it's very clear in any graph of hours worked over time. And the effect is even bigger than the statistics show, because of the big shift from non-market to market labour - don't tell me that doing the laundry by hand, or being a subsistence farmer, isn't work, just because it's hard for government statisticians to measure! People today have far more leisure than at any time since the dawn of agriculture.
What is true is that hours worked haven't fallen as much as some people predicted (e.g. Keynes in "Economic Possiblities for our Grandchildren"). The reason for that seems pretty obvious - innovation doesn't just make us better at making the same old things, it also creates new things we want, and people have a pronounced tendency to underestimate the latter.
This is commonly asserted, but I have my doubts.
Consider, for example, that agriculture is a very seasonal activity (in most places). You have a few high-intensity periods during the year, but the rest of the year is low-intensity and provides enough opportunity for leisure time.
Some arguments can be found here and here.
I've heard that modern hunter-gatherers do about twenty hours of "work" per week...
Do you have any references for this claim? One thing I have read is this paper:
http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~vramey/research/Century_Published.pdf
To sharpen my question a bit further still: how much is the length of our workday shaped by necessity and how much by custom and culture.
I had not seen that paper; it is interesting and I will look over it more fully at another time. I should note that
Really? Despite the gas oven, the washing machine, the dishwasher, etc? They claim that the typical 25-54-aged woman worked 50.4 hours per week in home production in 1900, and 31.1 hours per week in 2005. This change is way too small to be plausible. I think, frankly, that all kinds of activities are now being classified as home production work that would not have been so classified in 1990, and that their broad categories ("childcare", etc) are unable to measure this.
You can see a general overview of the subject for the US here:
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
A nice blogger put together a graph over hours worked over time in US history here:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_9kFluQyx4tM/TIcLhFVzVNI/AAAAAAAAAG8/hwfkDvU14-Y/s1600/Avg+Hours+Week.jpg
Data from various developed countries here:
http://phe.rockefeller.edu/work_less/
More Work for Mother argues that the most of the physical labor was taken out of housework, but the amount of time required stayed high because standards went up.
It seems to me that there's a tremendous amount more fiction available in various media, and people are finding time to consume quite a lot of it.