In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay in which he predicted that by the time his children were grown up, people would be working just 15 hours a week. Today, in some countries, people do work a bit less than they did fifty years ago, but Keynes’s prediction was essentially wrong. There is a counter-intuitive response to incentives, and that is one factor that keeps people working long hours. According to his descendants, Keynes himself was a workhorse who couldn’t slow down. Listen to this audio story to learn more about Keynes and why making money doesn’t necessarily free us to work less.
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PrintMELISSA BLOCK: The economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote an essay titled “Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren.” It was 1930. And in the essay, he made a startling prediction. Keynes figured that by the time his children had grown up, basically now, people might be working just 15 hours a week. David Kestenbaum with our PLANET MONEY team tried to sort out where Keynes went wrong.
DAVID KESTENBAUM: Since the essay was called “Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren,” we thought we’d check in with Keynes’s grandchildren all these years later and see how many hours they ended up working. It turns out Keynes did not have any kids, so we did the next best thing.
NICHOLAS HUMPHREY: My name is Nicholas Humphrey.
KESTENBAUM: And your relationship to John Maynard Keynes…
HUMPHREY: OK. Yes. I’m Maynard Keynes’s sister’s grandson.
KESTENBAUM: You’re the closest thing we have to his grandkids.
HUMPHREY: Yes. We’re kind of ghost grandchildren.
KESTENBAUM: Humphrey is a retired professor. I asked how many hours a week he used to work – not 15.
HUMPHREY: Oh, I probably worked about 15 a day, and so…
KESTENBAUM: Fifteen a day…
HUMPHREY: Oh, but…
KESTENBAUM: That’s over a hundred hours a week.
HUMPHREY: Yeah. I mean, I worked till, like – from breakfast till I went to bed at night.
KESTENBAUM: We tried another person in the family tree.
SUSANNAH BURN: My name is Susannah Burn.
KESTENBAUM: And what’s your relationship to John Maynard Keynes?
BURN: I’m his sister’s granddaughter.
KESTENBAUM: Susannah Burn is a self-employed psychotherapist. She says she lives in a small, quiet town, and she works 50 hours a week – actually has a little trouble taking time off.
BURN: I used to write, not working in my diary to remind myself not to put in an appointment. And I discovered that I still worked.
KESTENBAUM: (Laughter).
BURN: So I now have to write, don’t work on the page in order to frighten myself when I look at the page and realize that I mustn’t.
KESTENBAUM: John Maynard Keynes’s argument for the 15-hour work week was that over time, thanks to machines and technology and new ideas, people get more productive. An hour of labor produces more and more stuff. Keynes figured we’d just decide to work less. In some countries, the number of hours worked has dropped some. But take the United States. In 1950, people here worked, on average, about 38 hours a week. Today, six decades later, we work 34 hours a week – a bit less but not much. Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, says one of the things Keynes underestimated was the human desire to compete.
RICHARD FREEMAN: Think about these basketball players who get $80 million, $100 million contracts. You might have said they’ll just take one contract. That’s enough money to live your entire life in wealth and just never work a day.
KESTENBAUM: Or just play, like, one year. Or just play, like, a – play a couple years, right? Yeah.
FREEMAN: Yeah, exactly right. But they don’t, and they push themselves. They push themselves. Keynes would’ve had great trouble understanding…
KESTENBAUM: (Laughter). LeBron James – yeah.
FREEMAN: (Laughter). Yes, yes.
KESTENBAUM: In fact, he says, earning more money can make it harder to take time off. If someone is paid $200 an hour, do you really want to leave early and go to the beach? You’ll be sitting there on your towel, reading a novel, thinking, is this really worth $200 an hour ’cause you could be back at the office. The better you are at your job, the harder it can be to not do it. It’s worth pointing out that Keynes himself seemed to have trouble following his own advice.
HUMPHREY: Maynard, of course, died from working too hard.
KESTENBAUM: This is Nick Humphrey again.
HUMPHREY: You know, his heart ran out. He was just – he wasn’t sleeping. He was overdoing it all the time.
KESTENBAUM: World War II had just ended. Keynes was trying to help put the global economy back together. His wife worried working would kill him. Here’s Susannah Burn.
BURN: His wife was very angry about it.
KESTENBAUM: She was angry that he was working so hard at the end.
BURN: Yeah, yeah. She spent a lot of time trying to protect him from himself and would stop him doing things. She tried to help him say no, but in the end, he couldn’t say no.
KESTENBAUM: Keynes once said that his only regret in life was that he hadn’t drunk more champagne, but I don’t think that’s true. He liked working. David Kestenbaum, NPR News.
© 2015 National Public Radio, Inc. Used with the permission of NPR. All rights reserved. Vocabulary
- global economy – the international exchange of goods and services that is expressed in monetary units of account or money
- productive – working hard and getting good results by producing large amounts
- wealth – the value of all the property, possessions, and money that someone or some entity has
Listening Comprehension Questions
- What supported the prediction that Keynes made that, in the future, people would work less?
- How does Richard Freeman explain Keynes’s error?
- How does this story describe the incentives to work long hours?
- How do Nicholas Humphrey and Susannah Burn characterize Keynes?
Discussion Themes
- What works for you as an incentive to devote long hours to a single activity (studies, sports, art, technology, etc.)?
- When you think about your future career, what do you list as the features of an ideal job?
Teacher’s Guide
Activate student knowledge: Have students think about how many hours people in their lives work. Discuss how different careers might require different hours, and what the incentives might be to work longer. Introduce incentives as an important idea in economic theory. Ask students to identify the incentives that operate in their own lives.
Introduce John Maynard Keynes to students and provide some background on his contributions to modern economic theory. Keynes’s ideas about money and monetary policy, the market economy, and the relationship between wages, consumption, and investment were propounded in lectures and publications from the early 1900s until Keynes’s death in 1946, and economists have continued to revise and build on them ever since.
Introduce the story: In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that the number of hours people work would decrease over time. Listen to this story to learn about Keynes’s own attitude about work and why his prediction was wrong.
Active listening supports: Choose one of the following listening organizers to support student understanding as they listen to the story.
- The Response to Keynes’s Prediction chart will help students organize their notes as they listen to the story about Keynes’s prediction.
For example, Kestenbaum’s response includes the prediction was wrong and he wants to find out why, and he explains Keynes’s reasoning: machines and technology would make labor more productive, so people wouldn’t need to work as much.
Nicholas Humphrey says that before he retired he worked about fifteen hours a day, and points out that Keynes himself died from “working too hard.”
Susannah Burn says she works 50 hours a week, has trouble taking time off, and notes that Keynes was a compulsive worker. Richard Freeman says earning money makes it harder, not easier, to reduce work hours, and when people make money, they push themselves to make more.
- The Language Identification organizer allows students to follow along and track important phrases while listening to the story.
Paired Text: Use the blog post Where Keynes went wrong in Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren to activate critical thinking about the story. Have students compare the ideas in the article to the ideas in the audio story.
Reflect on the story: Take time for student reflection on the audio story and discussion questions to check for understanding. Have students reflect on why making more money might push people to work harder.
Listening Organizers
External Materials
- Article: How working less could solve all our problems. Really.
- Article: No Time
- Article: What Are Incentives at Work?
- Article: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
- Website: John Maynard Keynes
- Khan Lesson: Keynesian economics
- Article: Back to Basics: What Is Keynesian Economics?
- Article: Incentives