Working more used to hurt your salary, says a recent paper from Cornell University, but not anymore. In fact, say researchers Youngjoo Cha and Kim Weeden, the wage premium for working longer hours is growing. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, "overworkers" earned about 6 percent more than their shorter-working counterparts.
And yet if this society functioned in a mode that was much closer to reality (or had an ideology that attempted to reflect aspects of reality with higher resolution), working hours for all would be sharply lower and overwork practically extinct. The question for us, then, would be one that is completely foreign to economics: what to do with the free time? (I will speak about this subject next week at an Inhabitant Session.) The first important step toward an answer to this post-growth question is to separate free time from work altogether. This argument is made in Andre Gorz's book Critique of Economic Reason. The meaning and character of free time, as we currently experience it, is wholly tied up with the pressures of work. We spend free time recuperating from our jobs. The question of what to do with free time, a question that John Maynard Keynes' asked in his 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," will meet a blank wall in our imaginations if it is not detached from what presently gives it meaning. The most important revolution of our society will involve our understanding of leisure.
