Walter Cronkite Imagines the Home of the 21st Century … Back in 1967

Yes, what hap­pened to that 30-hour work week? Here is what Bertrand Rus­sell wrote in ‘In Praise of Idle­ness’ (1932). It’s a rather long text to quote in a com­ment, but I think it’s worth it. If you’re in a hur­ry read only the sec­ond para­graph.

Mod­ern tech­nique has made it pos­si­ble to dimin­ish enor­mous­ly the amount of labor required to secure the nec­es­saries of life for every­one. This was made obvi­ous dur­ing the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the pro­duc­tion of muni­tions, all the men and women engaged in spy­ing, war pro­pa­gan­da, or Gov­ern­ment offices con­nect­ed with the war, were with­drawn from pro­duc­tive occu­pa­tions. In spite of this, the gen­er­al lev­el of well-being among unskilled wage-earn­ers on the side of the Allies was high­er than before or since. The sig­nif­i­cance of this fact was con­cealed by finance: bor­row­ing made it appear as if the future was nour­ish­ing the present. But that, of course, would have been impos­si­ble; a man can­not eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed con­clu­sive­ly that, by the sci­en­tif­ic orga­ni­za­tion of pro­duc­tion, it is pos­si­ble to keep mod­ern pop­u­la­tions in fair com­fort on a small part of the work­ing capac­i­ty of the mod­ern world. If, at the end of the war, the sci­en­tif­ic orga­ni­za­tion, which had been cre­at­ed in order to lib­er­ate men for fight­ing and muni­tion work, had been pre­served, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demand­ed were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unem­ployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in pro­por­tion to what he has pro­duced, but in pro­por­tion to his virtue as exem­pli­fied by his indus­try.

This is the moral­i­ty of the Slave State, applied in cir­cum­stances total­ly unlike those in which it arose. No won­der the result has been dis­as­trous. Let us take an illus­tra­tion. Sup­pose that, at a giv­en moment, a cer­tain num­ber of peo­ple are engaged in the man­u­fac­ture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, work­ing (say) eight hours a day. Some­one makes an inven­tion by which the same num­ber of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hard­ly any more will be bought at a low­er price. In a sen­si­ble world, every­body con­cerned in the man­u­fac­tur­ing of pins would take to work­ing four hours instead of eight, and every­thing else would go on as before. But in the actu­al world this would be thought demor­al­iz­ing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employ­ers go bank­rupt, and half the men pre­vi­ous­ly con­cerned in mak­ing pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the oth­er plan, but half the men are total­ly idle while half are still over­worked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoid­able leisure shall cause mis­ery all round instead of being a uni­ver­sal source of hap­pi­ness. Can any­thing more insane be imag­ined?

You’re wel­come, Mike. If you’re inter­est­ed in read­ing Rus­sel­l’s essay in full, you can do so here: http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/praiseidleness.htm.

Inter­est­ing how he hit on 3D print­ing on the kitchen plates.

For­get the 30-hour work week — I want to know what hap­pened to the Wood­mere Wasps and the Stony Brook Samu­rai!