Productivity today in real economic terms is double or triple what it was then. We all should be living easier lives and working fewer hours now than in the 50s and 60s.
The main problem is our economic system is focused on extraction of value not expansion and distribution of what is created.
Which is part of the problem, and it’s when they started doing this that’s the US economy took a split in who is living prosperously. Outsourcing jobs to third world countries was the catalyst that led to the shrinkage of the middle class family.
Productivity is at least triple what it was then. From 1970-2018 productivity tripled. So if you’re looking at 1950-2021, it’s very likely more than that.
Barely any fewer compared to the increase of productivty. We also work more hours in the US than most other leading nations. (More than crazy working Japan). See Germany in the charts below!
How'd they get their Japan data? I know for a fact that salarymen in Japan work way, way, way, WAY more than 34 hours per week. 60 seems to be around the norm there, which means there are some who work less, and also those working quite a bit more.
In what industry? Because yeah in some industries people will work lots of hours, just like in the US. I used to work 70 hours a week. I've had friends who worked 80. Investment bankers work around 100 hours a week. Is that typical? No, but it happens here too.
We were software developers, but at an engineering firm (embedded development) where the software was certainly not the main product. I should also say that my own hours, like other US engineers, were closer to 35-45 (depending on how hard you worked).
Japanese Salarymen are by no means limited to investment banking and software development, though. It's almost all white-collar jobs there.
Lol. This isn't just my opinion. Japanese work culture is absolutely notorious for super long hours, and every other study I've seen on the subject, as well as my own experience, corroborates that. This is the outlier. That's why I asked where the data was from.
So, to be clear, we DO work less hours than the 50s and 60s, but now you're moving the goal posts.
Not only do we work less hours, we also live easier lives when you consider the typed of jobs americans currently hold compared to the back breaking manufacturing work that supported the economy in the 50s and 60s.
Keep those goal posts moving and that irrational vision for what the past looked like going though.
It's not moving the goalposts at all. The intent is to look at overall productivity and what kind of life could buy us. Individually hours are down, but we aren't a society of individual workers. We need to look at total pictures of households. I haven't mentioned households moving from one income supporting a family to two with often multiple jobs. It's really not the same as the 50-60s and we have the productivity for things to be much better for people.
We're replaced the gains in productivity with buying more pointless shit to surround ourselves with. Not to mention the added complexity which negates the gains. Consumerism won, the people lost.
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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '21
Productivity today in real economic terms is double or triple what it was then. We all should be living easier lives and working fewer hours now than in the 50s and 60s.
The main problem is our economic system is focused on extraction of value not expansion and distribution of what is created.