No large country in the world as productive as the United States averages more hours of work a year. obsessed with material success and the exhaustive striving required to earn it.
The American dream-that hoary mythology that hard work always guarantees upward mobility-has for more than a century made the U.S. Homo industrious is not new to the American landscape. What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. Read: “Find your passion” is awful advice They are reared from their teenage years to make their passion their career and, if they don’t have a calling, told not to yield until they find one. Rich, college-educated people-especially men-work more than they did many decades ago.
But those figures don’t tell the whole story. The average work year has shrunk by more than 200 hours. By some counts, Americans work much less than they used to. These post-work predictions weren’t entirely wrong. “The increasingly automatic nature of many jobs, coupled with the shortening work week an increasing number of workers to look not to work but to leisure for satisfaction, meaning, expression,” he wrote. In a 1957 article in The New York Times, the writer Erik Barnouw predicted that, as work became easier, our identity would be defined by our hobbies, or our family life. “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem,” Keynes wrote, “how to occupy the leisure.”
I n his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek in the 21st century, creating the equivalent of a five-day weekend. He is the author of Hit Makersand the host of the podcast Crazy/Genius. About the author: Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics, technology, and the media.
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