Why hasn’t economic progress lowered work hours more?
Here is a 42-minute video of a talk I gave on that topic at Duke University recently.
I start with Keynes’s prediction that we will be working 15 hours a week by 2030 and ask why it doesn’t seem to be coming true. Along the way, I consider the dominance of the substitution effect over the income effect for labor supply, and ponder why we don’t all have more sex. I conclude that progress is real rather than illusory, and we are not all caught up in a destructive rat race.
A paper on the same is forthcoming.