IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/eccchp/978-3-030-02423-9_2.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Work and Consumption in an Era of Unbalanced Technological Advance

In: Demand, Complexity, and Long-Run Economic Evolution

Author

Listed:
  • Benjamin M. Friedman

    (Harvard University)

Abstract

Keynes’s “Grandchildren” essay famously predicted both a rapid increase in productivity and a sharp shrinkage of the workweek – to 15 h – over the century from 1930. Keynes was right (so far) about output per capita, but wrong about the workweek. The key reason is that he failed to allow for changing distribution. With widening inequality, median income (and therefore the income of most families) has risen, and is now rising, much more slowly than he anticipated. The failure of the workweek to shrink as he predicted follows. Other factors, including habit formation, socially induced consumption preferences, and network effects are part of the story too. Combining the analysis of Keynes, Meade and Galbraith suggests a way forward for economic policy under the prevailing circumstances.

Suggested Citation

  • Benjamin M. Friedman, 2015. "Work and Consumption in an Era of Unbalanced Technological Advance," Economic Complexity and Evolution, in: Andreas Chai & Chad M. Baum (ed.), Demand, Complexity, and Long-Run Economic Evolution, pages 17-35, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:eccchp:978-3-030-02423-9_2
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-02423-9_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:eccchp:978-3-030-02423-9_2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.