The 15 Hour Work Week

Exploring Keynes Prediction 100 years ago

Could we earn enough to live from only 15 hours of work each week?

In a famous essay, “The Economic Possibilities of our Grandchildren”, John Maynard Keynes in 1930 asserted that in one hundred years we'd be working 15 hour work weeks because we’d all be so rich and just needed something to do with our time.

I’d suspect most of us are thinking “Haha he was so wrong, there’s absolutely no way I could afford to work only 15 hours a week, that’s impossible!” While the main thrust of his argument doesn’t seem to be true that we’d all be so wealthy that we only worked to fill our time, I think there might be something there.

Do we actually know how wealthy we’ve become? Could we actually live off 15 hours of work a week? This is the question I seek to explore today.

Could we live off 15 hours work?

To start, what do we need to live? I’m not asking what we need to live a good life or our best lives, but what is the bare minimum to live? We need food, water, shelter, and energy to regulate our temperature and cook our foods. While there are many other things that make our lives better, these are the absolute minimum requirements. 

For this thought experiment I’m going to make a couple assumptions. First, I assume this is someone willfully choosing to try and live off 15 hours a week. This is not an essay about how the poor should live their lives. Secondly, I’m going to assume some basic equipment that this person possesses. This person starts off with one set of clothes, one pair of shoes, one electric cooktop like an induction cooktop or hotplate, one pot, and one can opener (am I a real economist now that I’m literally assuming a can opener??). If this is what the person owns in total, can they survive?

Let’s start by looking at water. I know it’s not perfect but let’s say the average human needs about 100 gallons of water per day. This goes between drinking, cooking, sanitation, hygiene, and any other use. Since water and sewage are tied together this can be hard to get an exact estimate, but using my own personal water bills let’s say you need to spend $50 a month on water.

Second, we have energy. This varies widely between different climates. But since I live in Illinois I’m going to assume they have to heat their living space but won’t necessarily have air conditioning. They’ll also need energy for cooking. Since this can vary widely on all fronts I’m going to use another estimate, let’s say $100 a month on energy. 

This gets us to $150 a month.

Next let’s look at food. What is the minimum cost of food for one person? I’ll be using prices from Walmart because they are on the cheaper end of the price spectrum and I can take nice little screenshots from the comfort of my desk instead of going to Aldi to write down prices even though Aldi is  cheaper.

So how much food does a human need? Let’s put the average daily caloric need at 2,200 calories a day. Over an assumed 30 day month we’ll need 66,000 calories in total to be adequately fed. 

Between a 20lbs bag of rice, a 20lb bag of Pinto Beans, 30 cans of chicken, a jug of cooking oil, and Salt we get to 74,040 calories out of the 66,000 needed, all for $66.17. This could be reduced even further if you take the meat out and make it vegetables or more beans. Let’s just call it $70 for the accounting since this is all estimates. 

So here’s the breakdown so far:

Water - $50

Energy - $100

Food - $70

This gets us $220 a month to sustain life. I’ll throw in an additional $10 a month for clothing needs and repairs, and $10 a month for cleaning and hygiene supplies. This gets us to $240 a month. 

The last crucial element is shelter. This cost varies so wildly that it’s hard to even give an estimate. But you do not need to consume much housing to survive. Even simply renting one room with 4 other people is still shelter, more shelter than many in history have ever had. So we can just take the remaining money we make each month and put it towards housing. The estimated costs will be $240 a month plus housing.

All this is great, but how much money will you be making? The assumption is 60 hours of work a month, 15 hours a week for 4 weeks. 

Federal Minimum Wage: $7.25 x 60 = $435. Annual income $5,220. After taxes $413 a month. 

Illinois Minimum Wage: $14 x 60 = $840. Annual income $10,080. After taxes $779 a month.

 Average Hourly Wages in US**: $34.55 x 60 = $2,073. Annual income $24,876. After taxes $1800 a month. 

**I wanted to use Median because I feel that would be more representative but I could not find median hourly wage without the assumption of full time work. 

So after deducting the $240 this leaves for housing:

$173 a month for the Federal Minimum Wage.

$539 a month on the Illinois Minimum Wage.

$1560 a month on the Average US Hourly Wage.

While you may not be able to rent an apartment, much less a decent apartment, you might be able to room up with someone or a few people. It may just be a couch or a section of floor, it most likely won’t include a private room to yourself, but there still could be shelter depending on the area and the people you know.

So accounting for the pure necessities of life it could theoretically be possible to work only 15 hours a week in the US at any wage level and still be able to have your absolute basic needs met.

What Am I Trying to Say?

How about I list off all the things I’m not trying to say with this:

I’m not saying it’s easy to be poor.

I’m not saying the poor should be grateful.

I’m not saying this is a good life.

I’m not saying this would be good nutritionally.

I’m not saying I expect people to eat only beans, rice, canned chicken, and vegetable oil.

I’m not saying this would have good health outcomes.

I’m not saying that housing cheap enough to do this exists everywhere

I’m not saying this is something anyone should do.

I’m not saying this is a life anyone should aspire to do.

What I am saying is that we in the US are wealthy compared to the rest of the world today and especially wealthy compared to all humans of all history. There are still a billion people who live in extreme poverty today which is classified as less than $2.15 a day. Even the person who works 15 hours a week at the federal minimum wage makes $14.50 a day over 30 days. This is still more than the $6.85 a day or less which half the population of the world lives on.

But I’d imagine every single person reading this article would never choose this life, including myself. None of us would choose to give up the lives we have for this reduced life. 

The life I described in this thought experiment only includes food, water, energy, and shelter. This does not include any of the many things that we consider essential to our lives: phones, new clothes, cars, other transportation, health insurance, entertainment, food beyond rice and beans, housing beyond just a bunk bed in a room shared with other people, all of our appliances, travel, air conditioning, gym memberships, hobbies, internet, and literally anything else we want. 

We could all theoretically choose to live a dramatically different lifestyle than any of the ones we’re living in order to work considerably less. We could technically live off the wages earned from 15 hours of work each week, but we choose not to. We choose to put our extra money into things we want. Some will say that’s shallow but working more to buy more things means more people have incomes from you buying the things. If everyone chose to live the absolute basic life then society would hardly progress at all.

While you could make that choice, I am firmly not going to make that choice. In my life I even want to devote more time to my writing, but at this time I’m not willing to give up my current lifestyle that my income affords me. 

So while working a lot can be taxing and hard on the body and brain I want us to be under no illusions. In this country you can work 15 hours a week and have your most basic needs met if you’re able to find cheap enough housing that is as basic as it gets. In Galesburg it may even be enough to get a bedroom in a shared apartment. 

This would be a life that has greater security than half the world’s living population, and better than the lives of 99% of people who lived before the year 1700. 

We have the option for more leisure time, but we aren’t willing to trade that for the lifestyles we currently have. People will work more to get more, and we’re all doing that. Maybe in another 100 years there will be someone like me who will write something along the lines of “If you work 15 hours a week in 2124 you can afford the standard of living of the average person in the US from 2024, but we consider that so primitive now that nobody chooses to do that.” 

IN CONCLUSION

We work more because we value what we get when we work more. If streaming services, cars, and healthcare were just as important to us as sitting around and doing nothing, surely we would’ve all chosen to sit around and do nothing. But we haven’t, and acknowledging that we’re making this choice can make us feel better about where we’re at. 

So while Keynes’ prediction is wrong in some ways it is true in others, we may still work full time but we work because we want better lifestyles. We could choose to work only 15 hours a week, but I’m certainly not going to make that choice and neither will you.