Increasing labor productivity and the future

This page is inspired by What It Means That an Hour’s Work Yields a Week’s Food, chapter one of The Human Race to the Future: What Could Happen -- and What to Do [1] by D. Berleant, published by the Lifeboat Foundation. It is for crowd sourced commentary and additional informatio, from you and others, about that and related topics. All readers are invited to get edit access to this wiki. Just send your request to: [email protected].

Labor productivity is so high we could all potentially live comfortably working much less than we currently do. What does this mean? Will we work fewer hours in the future than we do now?

Commentary

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References

1. C. Dimitri, A. Effland, and N. Conklin, The 20th century transformation of US agriculture and farm policy, Electronic Information Bulletin Number 3, US Dept. of Agriculture Economic Research Service, June 2005, www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib3/eib3.htm.

2. Economic possibilities for our grandchildren: J. M. Keynes, reprinted in his Essays in Persuasion, W. W. Norton & Co., 1963, pp. 358–373, www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf.

3. Taiwan legislature approves 42-hour workweek, Asian Economic News, June 19, 2000, findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WDP/is_2000_June_19/ai_62835653.

4. W. D. Nordhaus, Do real-output and real-wage measures capture reality? The history of lighting suggests not. Chapter in T. F. Bresnahan and R. J. Gordon, eds., The Economics of New Goods, U. Chicago Press, 1996, www.nber.org/chapters/c6064.pdf.

5. E. L. Forget, The town with no poverty: Using health administration data to revisit outcomes of a Canadian guaranteed annual income field experiment, U. Manitoba, 2011, http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20(2).pdf.