In 1930, he predicted a fifteen-hour workweek by 2030.
In 1930, while the Great Depression was devastating economies across Europe and the United States, John Maynard Keynes published an essay titled "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." He predicted that within a century, productivity gains would raise living standards four to eight times above their current level.1 At that point, he argued, humanity would face a new problem entirely. The challenge would no longer be scarcity, but what to do with all the free time.
His proposed solution was a fifteen-hour workweek.2 Three-hour shifts, five days a week, would be enough to satisfy what he called "the old Adam in most of us." The rest would be devoted to leisure, culture, and the arts.
Keynes was born in Cambridge in 1883, studied mathematics at King's College, and shifted to economics under the influence of Alfred Marshall.3 He served as a Treasury representative at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, resigned in protest over the reparations imposed on Germany, and published The Economic Consequences of the Peace that same year. The book made him famous at thirty-six.
His most influential work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, appeared in 1936.4 It argued that markets do not automatically return to full employment after a shock, and that governments must intervene through fiscal and monetary policy to stabilize demand. The book reshaped how governments managed their economies for the rest of the century.
His prediction about living standards turned out to be remarkably accurate. Real income in the United States is more than five times greater today than in 1930.5 His prediction about working hours did not. Average weekly hours in industrialized countries have fallen since 1930, but nowhere close to fifteen. Keynes overestimated people's desire to stop working and underestimated the pleasures and rewards that work provides, as the economists in Revisiting Keynes later observed.6
In 1944, Keynes represented Britain at the Bretton Woods Conference, where the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were established. He was made Baron Keynes of Tilton in 1942.3 He died on April 21, 1946, at the age of sixty-two, survived by his father, the economist John Neville Keynes.