What if the work week had kept getting shorter during the past fifty years?
Early in the nineteenth century, most Americans worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. The work week shrank gradually during the nineteenth century and more quickly during the twentieth. The traditional six-day week was shortened to five and a half days during the 1920s and to the five-day, forty-hour week during the 1930s. But the work week has stagnated at 40 hours for more than fifty years. The long historical trend toward shorter work hours stopped completely during the 1950s and 1960s, during a period of rapid economic growth, rising wages, and widespread affluence. And now work hours are increasing. When hourly wages began to go up during the nineteenth century, workers did taken the entire raise in the form of higher earnings: they took some as increased earnings and some as increased free time. If people had continued doing this during the past fifty years, the economy would have grown more slowly. Americans today would have less money and more time. We would not have had
