In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes dared to look a full century ahead. He made two bold predictions. First, living standards would rise by a factor of four to eight. Second, as prosperity became increasingly easy to produce, our grandchildren would need to work only 15 hours a week. The remaining work, he suggested, would be distributed sparingly across society – or, as he put it, we would learn “to spread the butter thin on the bread.”
Nearly a hundred years later, the first prediction has proved remarkably accurate. Real per-capita income in Switzerland is now about six times higher than it was in 1930. The second prediction, however, is widely regarded as a spectacular failure. In 1930, a full-time worker in Switzerland worked roughly 47 hours a week. Today, after accounting for absences, the figure is about 40 hours. Factor in paid vacation – then scarcely more than a week a year, now typically five weeks or more, along with additional public holidays – and the average falls to around 35 hours. That is a substantial decline, to be sure. But it remains a long way from the two-thirds reduction Keynes envisioned.
The Real Revolution Came Over the Course of a Lifetime
Economists have a ready explanation for the gap: human wants are insatiable. Higher wages make more leisure possible, but they also make leisure more expensive. Every hour not worked means foregone income – and, with it, reduced consumption. Meanwhile, the range of things money can buy has exploded since 1930. Today, it would be easy to sustain the living standard of 1930 on a 15-hour workweek. Few people, however, would choose to live that way: without a washing machine, without a car, without vacations by the sea.
Many therefore conclude that Keynes did not misunderstand technological progress; he misunderstood human nature. He underestimated people’s desire to convert rising incomes into greater consumption, comfort, and new experiences rather than additional leisure. But that judgment is too hasty. Anyone measuring Keynes’s prediction solely by the workweek overlooks where the real revolution occurred: not in weekly working hours, but across the span of a lifetime.
In 1930, young Swiss men typically entered the labor force at age 16. Most remained employed until just shy of 67. And those who reached adulthood could expect to live to roughly 72 years of age. Today, many people first spend years in higher education and do not begin full-time careers until after the age of 25. Retirement generally comes at 65, while a 20-year-old today can expect to live to around 90.
At both the beginning and the end of life, therefore, far more years are spent outside the labor force than used to be the case. Measured across an entire lifetime, a 20-year-old university student today will average roughly 20 hours of work per week. His counterpart in 1930, calculated the same way, averaged more than 40 hours. By that measure, Keynes was still wrong – but only partly. Rather than the two-thirds reduction in labor he predicted, working time over a lifetime has been cut by about half, a remarkable decline in its own right.
It should be noted that these calculations apply to men. In 1930, women performed large amounts of labor that never appeared on a time clock. Today, women participate far more extensively in paid employment. At the same time, household tasks are more often shared, delegated or eased by technology, while some childcare has been outsourced. Precise comparisons are therefore difficult, but the overall trend likely points in the same direction.
What Will We Do With the Time We Gain?
What does all of this imply for our own era, in which artificial intelligence promises the next great wave of technological change? Some voices in the United States echo memories of Keynes nearly a century ago. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, has predicted that our children may one day work only three and a half days a week. Elon Musk has gone further still, envisioning a future in which “no job is needed.”
The grandchildren of Keynes’s generation are once again probing the economic possibilities of the future. The difference is that they are no longer speculating about their grandchildren. They are talking about ours – or perhaps even the next generation. AI has accelerated the pace of technological change. History suggests that productivity gains will, once again, translate into both less work and many new wants. But will history repeat itself?
Over the course of a lifetime, working hours in Switzerland have already fallen dramatically, even if not to the extent Keynes predicted. If AI accelerates that process further, another question comes increasingly to the fore – one that Keynes himself explored in the same essay: How should human beings cope with the disappearance of economic necessity? One possible answer will be the subject of the next column – arriving just in time for the start of the summer holidays.
This article was originally published in German in the “NZZ am Sonntag” on June 14, 2026.
