There is literally an infinite amount of work to be done. being 1,000% more efficient doesn't change that.
32 hour work weeks are difficult to apply in many industries. Health care is already insanely expensive.
Decreasing number of workers means buildings are built slower and more expensively (resulting higher housing costs).
Along with productivity gains, we also have quality gains. Previously all houses did not need air conditioning, but because things are more efficient, more people can afford one.
> Decreasing number of workers means buildings are built slower and more expensively (resulting higher housing costs).
In the markets were housing costs are out of control, it's mostly down to legal and political bans on construction, not so much cost of construction itself.
It's perfectly possible for people who want to spend less of their life working to do that. It's true that if you want to work the same number of total weeks, but fewer hours per week that constraints what jobs you can take; but it's straightforward to retire early on a modest nest egg: you don't even need to tell your employer that this is what you are planning to do.
In principle modern conveniences like Uber make it more possible for more people in more industries to decide how many hours they want to work. But there are substantial political barriers to widening these models.
> Health care is already insanely expensive.
It's fairly cheap where I live, even though wages are some of the highest in the world here in Singapore.
Yes, I fully support people's desire to work 20% less hours, if they're willing to take a corresponding 20% cut to total compensation (note that's not the same as a 20% pay cut; benefits are often really expensive).
Right now there are some cultural barriers to this. Many employers aren't willing to be that flexible, and I think that's a shame. I'd love to see 32-hour or even 24-hour workweeks become more normalized as possible options on the job market. There are also probably some legal barriers to this, with a lot of employment laws counting 40 hours as "full time" but I'm not sure how significant a factor that is.
> Yes, I fully support people's desire to work 20% less hours, if they're willing to take a corresponding 20% cut to total compensation (note that's not the same as a 20% pay cut; benefits are often really expensive).
I suspect even a 20% cut in total comp isn't going to cut it (for most jobs). That's because up to a point there's economics of scale in working hours. Ie in many jobs you need to spend a certain amount of time each week just trying to stay in touch with everything else that's happening, but once you paid that cost every extra hour is pure benefit in terms of productivity---up until the point you work so much that you see diminishing returns. But eg going from 30 to 31 hours per week is productive more productive than going from 0 to 1 hour.
However, I didn't even have in mind cutting the amount of hours you work every week. You can make use of the extra productivity and real pay you get these by eg retiring early and then live in modest circumstances. Or you could take sabbaticals every so often. All while still working 40 hour work weeks, when you actually work.
This is what economists in the very early 1900s thought that increasing industrial efficiency would eventually lead to. Ie. that we'd all work maybe a day or two per week or less.
But that's not what happened, for various reasons relating to the nature of how capital grows and how that impacts increasing production volumes.
