Summary: This article challenges the common perception that human progress has made us work harder and deprived us of leisure. It shows how both market and domestic labor have declined over time, thanks to technological innovations and economic changes. It traces the history of labor alleviation from the Viking era to the present day, and celebrates the benefits of having more time and freedom to pursue our interests.

People often complain that we are all working too hard and that human progress is pointless if we have to labor and strain to achieve our current lifestyles. They say we would be better off curtailing our desires and returning to some Edenic life with more time for ourselves. The problem is that Edenic life never existed. In fact, over the past millennium, humanity has been working less and less. And a thousand years is probably long enough to make the claim that working less is a trend, not a blip.

To understand working hours, it is important to recognize two points. First, households (some societies define households as containing only parents and children, while others extend the definition to cousins and nephews and so on) are the central economic units that should be discussed. Second, labor comes in two flavors: domestic work and market work. Domestic work includes food preparation, childcare, cleaning, or any other labor within the household. Market work generates money or goods to trade for any goods and services that the household does not produce. The “labor burden” on the household is the combined number of hours spent doing those two types of work.

Market and domestic labor can substitute one another. Children can go to kindergarten, and food can be bought as take-out. Likewise, clothes can be purchased from a factory, or they can be stitched at home. People tend to use the option that gets them the desired good or service with the least amount of work. As I will show below, the net effect of changes in those two forms of labor determines the total household labor supply. Or, to put it less formally, it determines how long people have to work to gain what they want. Once those two kinds of labor are added up, a declining trend in the total number of hours worked becomes apparent. Consider this report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston:

Specifically, we document that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). 

And that was just for the period between 1965 and 2003. A closer look at the 20th century suggests that market working hours fell for men and rose for women. The rise in female market working hours was precipitated by technological innovation and a concomitant decline in the number of domestic working hours. Domestic working hours fell greatly for women and, less dramatically, for men. The net effect of the four processes was that leisure hours rose, and total working hours fell, for both men and women.

In his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, the British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that the next century would usher in an age of prosperity. He also forecasted that people would work less and spend more time at leisure. Keynes turned out to be right. But many modern readers, who come across Keynes’ prediction of a 15-hour workweek, wonder why they are still putting in 40 at the office. The answer is that the work we killed was the domestic labor done largely by women. 

One author estimates that it took 60 hours a week of physical labor to keep a 1930 household working. Today, it takes perhaps 15 hours. Those numbers are not exact, but when you consider the washing machine, the gas oven, the vacuum cleaner, prepared food, and steam irons, the amount of household work eliminated is immense. One of Hans Rosling’s TED talks recounts how the washing machine brought him books. According to the Swedish physician, once the washing machine liberated his mother from laundry, she had more time to read to him. The South Korean economist Ha Joon Chang claims that the washing machine – by which he really means all domestic labor-saving technologies – changed the world more than the internet.

But labor alleviation did not begin in the 20th century. In her new book (The Fabric Of Civilisation came out in November 2020), the American writer Virginia Postrel estimates that it took 365 full days of work to spin enough thread to make a Viking sail. Days and days of work to create enough thread to weave a bandana and weeks to make a pair of jeans. The Vikings used the drop spindle to make thread – a basic technology that humans used for millennia. The spinning wheel, which partly mechanized the process, arrived in Europe sometime in the 11^th or the 12^th century A.D. 

Then came the Industrial Revolution, first with the Spinning Jenny, which was followed by Crompton’s Mule and endless other derivatives. These machines progressively automated what was a horrendously time-consuming and nearly exclusively female domestic task for centuries. The economic historian Brad Delong has remarked that when women of any class are depicted in older literature, there is always reference to their spinning. By the time of Jane Austen’s novels in the late 18th and early 19th century A.D., spinning is never mentioned – it was all done in the factories by then.

We all have more leisure now than our forebears did. We have more time to do as we wish and fewer needs that force us to do as we must. But this wonderful outcome of human progress is obscured by the fact that, in large part, it is the household labor that has been automated away. Sure, the Roomba might not be a great leap forward, but it is just the latest iteration of a process that began a thousand years ago. And there is no sign of it ending.

Steve Jobs recruited Pepsi’s John Sculley to Apple by asking him if he wanted to spend his life selling sugared water or if he wanted “a chance to change the world.” Sculley took the chance. In all his enterprises, Jobs offered his employees the same. They were on an intense mission, where much was asked of them. The work was hard, and they were expected to care about it and devote themselves to it. But they could grow and be justly rewarded for their contributions. They were expected to question their boss, who would sometimes change his mind based on the questioning.

Some of the rewards were intangible—the “flow” of losing oneself in an important and challenging but doable activity. Other rewards were tangible. When the first Macs were shipped, Jobs took the Mac team to the parking lot, called each by name, and handed him or her a Mac with the signatures of the 46 main team members engraved inside.

Many of the higher needs that move us in pursuit of a good life are the same higher needs that move us in pursuit of a good job. The psychologist Abraham Maslow famously observed that after we satisfy physiological needs such as food, clothing, and shelter, we seek to satisfy higher needs, such as fulfillment, meaning, control, and creativity, through the choice and pursuit of challenging, meaningful projects. Too often a life of leisure does not allow sufficient satisfaction of the higher needs. It is telling that Europeans have much more leisure than Americans, but Europeans report being much less happy.

Having a challenging job where you are in control of your time is not only important for satisfying the higher needs; it also is important for satisfying the basic need for good health. One cause of constant long-term stress is boredom, which has been shown to adversely affect hormone levels and heart rates. For men, another cause of constant long-term job stress is lack of control over what projects to pursue or tasks to prioritize. According to a 2011 study published in the journal Health Psychology, men who lacked control in their work had a greater risk of death.

At first glance, it is surprising that among retirees with $1 million to $5 million in assets, 33 percent retire from one job only to then transition to working in a new one. Even among retirees with more than $5 million in assets, 29 percent continue to work. At second glance, these findings are not so surprising in a labor environment where a growing percentage of jobs are good jobs: creative, challenging, satisfying.

A skeptic might object that these findings only apply to the rich. But jobs in construction and trucking are increasingly hard to fill, suggesting that poorer workers who otherwise might build and drive also are finding better alternatives: safer, less physically exhausting, less routine.

Farm to Factory

Innovative dynamism, sometimes less aptly called creative destruction or entrepreneurial capitalism, has a long history of creating new, better jobs and also of nudging old jobs toward the challenging, meaningful peak of the hierarchy of needs. In much of human history, the powerful have been tempted to force slaves to do the most dangerous, exhausting, and boring work. But then inventors created machines that could do these tasks, reducing the temptation to enslave and hugely bettering the work lives of some of the worst off.

An early specific example of innovative dynamism improving jobs happened when kerosene replaced whale sperm oil for high-quality lighting. Collection of sperm oil required the collectors to spend days scraping spermaceti from the brain cavity of the decomposing carcass of a huge whale. Work in oil fields was far from perfect, but it was better than work in decomposing brain cavities.

Some have suggested that some of the early machines of the Industrial Revolution mainly hurt workers by replacing skilled artisans with unskilled factory workers. But most of those who worked in the factories had earlier worked on farms, not as skilled artisans. Victorian-era economist Nassau William Senior observed that the Industrial Revolution’s factory system had improved the conditions of these former farm workers. He described their new conditions as “the comparatively light labor which is exerted in the warm and airy halls of a well-regulated factory.” Charles Dickens, famous for defending the poor in his bestselling novels of the mid-1800s, praised the clean, comfortable working conditions of former farm girls in a Boston textile factory. Before they had the option of mill work, their labor on the farm would have been dirty, physically exhausting, and often dangerous and lonely.

Around 1858 in England, one 8-year-old girl did farm work 14 hours a day; she later testified that “it was like heaven to me when I was taken to the town of Leeds and put to work in a cotton factory.” By today’s standards, the conditions of the early factories were awful, but they were still better than the even more awful conditions that had prevailed in the countryside. The factory was progress, a stepping stone but not a stopping point. In the 1800s a great many people of all ages and genders voted with their feet for the factory over the farm.

Innovative dynamism also eventually greatly improved the conditions of work for those who remained on the land. Railroads opened up the possibilities for farming at a greater distance from the cities. On the fertile and less rocky fields of the Midwest, farmers could now grow more with less effort. Their work, pain, and danger were also reduced by farm innovations such as the McCormick reaper.

Today, many farmers have drones for monitoring crops, computers for calculating yields, air-conditioned tractors for comfortable plowing, and the internet for information and entertainment.

Office to Home

Over the last six decades, more and more workers have been employed in jobs emphasizing expert thinking or complex communications tasks, while fewer have been employed in jobs emphasizing routine or manual tasks.

Nobel Prize winner Edmund Phelps noted that innovative dynamism “has so far been an extraordinary engine for generating creative workplaces” where workers can discover and explore in the pursuit of challenging projects. Walt Disney Productions was once such a place while its founder was in charge, but it declined after cancer took him. Decades later, officials at the Walt Disney Company offered John Lasseter significantly higher pay to work for them. He declined, choosing to stay at then-independent Pixar, which, though strapped for funding, had become a new exemplar of a creative workplace. Computer-enabled innovations gave Lasseter a job at the challenging, meaningful peak of the hierarchy of needs, where he had the freedom to create a new kind of film, starting with Toy Story.

In the past, home workers were paid significantly less than in-office workers because it was harder for firms to measure and manage home workers’ productivity. The internet made this much easier, and the at-home wage penalty substantially fell between 1980 and 2000.

Another example of gains from technology is Amazon Mechanical Turk. The original Mechanical Turk in 1770 was a chess-winning “robot” eventually revealed to cleverly conceal a human chess master within the box allegedly holding the robotic mechanism. Amazon’s version is an internet platform that allows firms to hire participating workers from around the world to perform various online tasks. The surprising punchline is that Amazon Mechanical Turk was rated by its workers as treating them slightly more honestly and fairly than in-person employers in the workers’ home countries.

Almost everyone would like work that is satisfying and doable but challenging; that is in the upper meaningful peak of the hierarchy of needs. Besides that, some people want a difficult project that they can throw themselves into with intensity—what strategy gurus Jim Collins and Jerry Porras call “big, hairy, audacious goals.”

Big, intense projects appeal to our desire for exhilaration and total engagement. They are especially appealing to those who feel that their lives will be worthwhile only if they “make a ding in the universe.” Many breakthrough innovations are more dangerous at their early stages. But some workers enjoy the adventure of risky jobs, take pride in their ability to get those jobs done, or feel satisfaction at being a part of an important project.

When Joe Wilson committed his little Haloid Photographic Company to develop xerography, it was a big, intense project. Horace Becker led the team tasked to produce the first commercial Xerox machine: the model 914. His account captures something of what it feels like to be part of such a project. By the time they tried setting up their first 914 assembly line, he says, everyone was fully immersed in the project, forgetting grievances and performance ratings. All workers, from engineers to assemblers, were indistinguishable in pulling toward the common goal. They would even sneak in on Sundays to make adjustments or to admire the progress.

Big, risky dreams do not appeal to everyone. But an advantage of innovative dynamism is that it allows everyone to be intense without forcing intensity on anyone. And even though many of us will prefer a more relaxed life, we often benefit from the fruits that the intense create.

This first appeared in Reason.

Marxism was supposed to have brought about a lot of positive changes, including the creation of a classless society, where everyone lived in peace. To these ambitious goals can be added substantial reduction in the amount of labor required from the proletariat. As Rodney G. Peffer from University of San Diego put it in his 2014 book, Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice, Karl “Marx believed the reduction of necessary labor time to be … an absolute necessity. He [claimed] … that real wealth is the developed productive force of all individuals. It is no longer the labor time but the disposable time that is the measure of wealth.” Little did the German economist know that free markets would achieve his objective with aplomb.

The number of hours worked per day has fluctuated throughout human history. Based on their observations of extant hunter-gatherer societies, scholars estimate that our foraging ancestors worked anywhere between 2.8 hours and 7.6 hours per day. Once they secured their food for the day, however, they stopped. The foragers’ workload was comparatively low, but so was their standard of living. Our ancestors’ wealth was limited to the weight of the possessions they could carry on their backs from one location to the next.

About 12,000 years ago, people started to settle down, cultivate crops and domesticate animals. The total number of hours worked rose, because people were willing to sacrifice free time in exchange for a more stable food supply. Since artificial lighting was prohibitively expensive, daylight regulated the amount of work that could be done on any given day. In summer, most people worked between 6 and 10 hours in the fields and additional 3 hours at home. In winter, shorter days limited the total number of work hours to 8. For religious reasons, Sunday was a day off and a plethora of feasts broke the monotony of agricultural life.

Our expectations as to what constitutes a good work-life balance are obviously very different from those of hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. It makes sense, therefore, to compare today’s workload to that at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

In 1830, the workweek in the industrializing West averaged about 70 hours or, Sundays excluded, 11.6 hours of work per day. By 1890 that fell to 60 hours per week or 10 hours per day. Thirty years later, the workweek in advanced societies stood at 50 hours or 8.3 hours per day. Today, people in advanced societies work less than 40 hours per week. That still amounts to roughly 8 hours per day, because workers typically don’t work on Saturdays. The “weekend” was born.

The overall number of hours worked has declined in tandem with increasing prosperity. Plainly put, the richer the country, the less people work. Data for developing countries is difficult to come by, but population adjusted average number of hours worked per worker in high income countries declined from 2,123 in 1950 to 1,732 in 2017. That’s a decline of 18.4 percent. Based on the available data from advanced nations, Germans worked the fewest hours (1,347) and Singaporeans worked the most hours (2,237). With 1,763 work hours per year, the United States was squarely in the middle of the pack in 2017.

Over the same time period, average gross domestic product per person adjusted for inflation and purchasing power rose by 483 percent in Germany, 1,376 percent in Singapore and 290 percent in the United States. Overall, GDP per person in high income countries rose from $9,251 to $47,149 (in 2016 dollars) or 410 percent.

So, people earn more money in exchange for less work. But, do they enjoy more leisure time? International comparisons are difficult, but the American Time Use Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that Americans enjoyed, on average, 5.24 hours of leisure and sports per day in 2017. That was 2.5 percent more than when the survey started in 2003. Whether the United States is representative of a broader trend is unclear. Still, it is undeniable that people have more free time than they used to – at least since our nomadic days.

Marx was wrong about many things. Famously, he thought that market competition would drive down profits, thus necessitating ever greater exploitation of the workers. But, as Johan Norberg of the Cato Institute points out in his 2017 book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, Marx had lived through a period of immense enrichment of the Western worker. “When Marx died in 1883,” Norberg writes, “the average Englishman was three times richer than he was when Marx was born, in 1818.” Blinded by his erroneous ideas, Marx could not see what was actually happening all around him.

Marx’s disciples from Cuba and Venezuela to South Africa and Zimbabwe are committing the same mistake today. Crazed by their ideological hatred of the free market,  they refuse to see that capitalism has delivered what Marx had long desired – less work and higher income. Plus ça change…

A version of this first appeared in CapX.