For those who don't remember in the 50's and 60's I googled this:Newfie wrote:Remember in the 50's and 60's there were predictions that, due to the time saving tools we would all have free time, more time for family, vacation, retirement? Why did that not come to pass?
I was looking for a book or PhD thesis on the phenomenon.It's difficult for those of us here in the year 2014 to appreciate just how certain this exceptional future of leisure was. But the 30-hour work week wasn't just some navel-gazing futurist's dream. It was taken as a given by mainstream prognosticators. With the tremendous advances in automation and robotics happening after World War II, how could you see an abundance of leisure time as anything but inevitable? The media echoed this assurance of inevitability.
In 1967 Walter Cronkite told TV-viewers at home that workers need only wait for the year 2000 for their life of leisure to arrive:
Technology is opening a new world of leisure time. One government report projects that by the year 2000, the United States will have a 30-hour work week and month-long vacations as the rule.
In 1967, some political scientists thought that the work week could be as short as 16 hours by 2020:78
Those who hunger for time off from work may take heart from the forecast of political scientist Sebastian de Grazia that the average work week, by the year 2000, will average 31 hours, and perhaps as few as 21. Twenty years later, on-the-job hours may have dwindled to 26, or even 16.
And in 1969, 30-hours was seen as the futuristic norm:
"The work week and the work day will be drastically reduced," said Gillis. "The majority of the people will be working less than 30 hours a week." He didn't predict just how the populace will adjust to the increased free time.
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The biggest problem we would face with our newfound lives of leisure? Suicide. In 1959, Parade magazine speculated that people of the future would be driven to bouts of extreme depression from the lack of meaning in their lives. When there's no more need to work, who wants to go on living? The world may become a "paradise" where robots do all the work and we have a guaranteed income, but at what price? Crippling depression, apparently.10
Again, this shift—from the inevitability of having "too much" leisure time to the ridicule of anyone who wants to legislate paid time off—finds its roots in the politicization of how we talk about leisure and labor. Mainstream America at midcentury saw the rise of unions as a bare minimum safeguard that would ensure we were heading in the right direction. But even if you hated unions, most people saw a shorter work week as a kind of progress, however it was delivered.
In 1950 the Associated Press insisted that the people reading their article about life in the year 2000 would be able to tell their children about a primitive era when Americans worked more than 20 hours a week.
It's a good bet, too, that by the end of the century many government plans now avoided as forms of socialism will be accepted as commonplace. Who in 1900 thought that by mid-century there would be government-regulated pensions and a work week limited to 40 hours? A minimum wage, child labor curbs and unemployment compensation?
So tell your children not to be surprised if the year 2000 finds 35 or even a 20-hour work week fixed by law.
Alan Watts - The middle way
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZHvfGFyQ14
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