Productivity and the Workweek
Erik Rauch wrote an article entitled, Productivity and the Workweek: What if, instead of using productivity increases to buy more possessions, we used them to get more time instead?. Erik used US Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 1950 to 2003 to calculate that a worker in 2003 should be able to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker working 40 hours per week in only 11 hours per week due to productivity increases.
Sadly, Erik died in a hiking accident in 2005 and the analysis has not been updated. I was curious how productivity has changed since 2003 and how many hours per week a worker in 2016 would need to work to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker working 40 hours per week. The annual output per hour of the business sector was used to calculate the hours relative to a 1950 worker using data extracted with the Bureau of Labor Statistics Data Tools. We find that now only 9.3 hours per week would be needed to earn the same standard to living as a 1950 worker working 40 hours per week.
Would that really be to produce the same standard of living, or just accomplish the same productivity output?
Or is it saying that the standard of living was so poor in 1950, that a person who works a fraction of the time today can achieve that same standard?
Ya, technically just the same productivity output. I guess you'd have to define what the standard of living is that you're comparing to in order to fully quantify this.