Why are we still working this hard?

In the United States, an hour of business work now produces about two and a half times as much as in 1973, so producing what once took a forty-hour week would take sixteen hours. Yet the legal workweek has not shortened, and hours worked per person are up 10 percent. The essay argues that productivity gains went to output rather than leisure: of the twenty-four hours theoretically freed, eighteen show up as a gap between productivity and ordinary workers’ purchasing power, while the remaining six could have become time off but did not. In 2023, workers received 66 percent of the income generated by goods households buy and owners received 34 percent; the richest tenth of households collected two-thirds of ownership income.

The proposed explanation is that wages do three jobs at once: they price work, distribute access to what the economy produces, and provide purpose and structure. Automation has weakened the link between productivity and ordinary pay by making workers’ skills less scarce; the essay attributes about a fifth of the eighteen-hour gap to machine owners, roughly two-fifths to higher-paid workers pulling away, and the remainder to factors it cannot cleanly separate. At the same time, because most people need wages to live, they cannot freely refuse low-paid work. Wages therefore fail both as a measure of what workers value their time at and as a way to decide whether a job is worth doing. The result is unnecessary work and no reliable market signal for when society has produced enough and people could have more leisure.