Will the Workweek Ever Get Shorter?
The national speedup was largely unexpected. Fifty years ago, the conventional wisdom was that technology would deliver us from toil. But as the country has grown richer in monetary and material terms, we’ve seen the opposite, a phenomenon I wrote about twenty years ago and called “the overworked American.”
Juliet B. Schor • True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich,Ecologically Light,Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy
One of the facts of modern life is that a relatively small class of people works very long hours and earns good money for its efforts. Nearly a third of college-educated American men, for example, work more than 50 hours a week. Some professionals do twice that amount, and elite lawyers can easily work 70 hours a week almost every week of the year.
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The Economist • Why Do We Work So Hard?
In short, technology made it much easier to clean a house to 1890s standards. But by mid-century, Americans didn’t want that old house. They wanted a modern home—with delicious meals and dustless windowsills and glistening floors—and this delicious and dustless glisten required a 40-to-50-hour workweek, even with the assistance of modern tools.