Why Don't We Have a 15-hour Work Week?
The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 14.6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2024
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
By 2030 we'll only work 15 hours a week, predicted the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes back in 1930. He thought advances in technology and wealth would let us earn enough money to live in a day or two - leaving the rest of the week for leisure and community service.
How wrong he was. We seem to be working more than ever - with technology adding extra tasks to our workdays (like answering emails and monitoring Slack). Dr Laurie longs for more leisure time, but how can she tame her fear of being "unproductive"?
Computer scientist Cal Newport explains how we all got into this mess - and why we still treat modern employees as if they were farm laborers or assembly line workers. Reformed "productivity junkie" Oliver Burkeman also offers tips on how to concentrate our minds on fulfilling and important work - and not little tasks that chew up so much of our days.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. |
| 0:05.0 | Since it was established in 1861, there have been 3,517 people awarded with the medal. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and our new podcast from Pushkin Industries and I Heart Media is about |
| 0:17.9 | those heroes. |
| 0:19.4 | What they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. |
| 0:27.0 | Listen to Medal of Honor, stories of courage, wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin. The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed quite reasonably |
| 0:49.8 | scared a lot of people. Fortunes were lost, savings disappeared, |
| 0:54.0 | factories closed, and jobs evaporated. |
| 0:56.9 | The only places doing a roaring trade |
| 0:58.7 | were soup kitchens and breadlines. |
| 1:01.0 | Things looked bad with no end in sight. but one man wasn't that worried. |
| 1:05.0 | We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. |
| 1:11.0 | So said famed British economist John Maynard Keynes. |
| 1:15.0 | It is common to hear people say that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in a decade which lies ahead of us. I believe that this is a wildly |
| 1:26.4 | mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us. |
| 1:31.1 | People were having trouble keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table, but Keynes wanted them to look to the far horizon. |
| 1:37.0 | My purpose is to take wings into the future. What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be |
| 1:46.2 | a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren? |
| 1:52.4 | You might recognize the voice reading, Keynes' for our grandchildren. |
| 1:53.0 | You might recognize the voice reading Keynes's words. |
| 1:56.0 | It's my colleague, The Economist Tim Harford from the Cautionary Tales podcast. |
| 2:00.0 | Tim's very familiar with Keynes's rosy predictions about what life would look like in the year 2030. |
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