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Humans in the west work between 1/2 and 2/3rds the number of hours worked in 1870. The ‘winning’ of the 8 hour work day wasn’t until 1938 in the USA, but there’s no correlate drop off. Instead, it’s the congealment of numerous technological and social changes over time.

we’ve also managed to create a crapload of more wealth while working way less. average westerner is significantly wealthier than in 1950 and works significantly less. also we basically ended child labor in that time period and took entire generations of people out of the workforce via pensions

almost all of the productivity gains that have allowed us to more or less solve child labor and senior poverty have been due to computation and organizational changes begotten by technology

you can say “well women entered the workforce” but we also don’t have 12 children anymore lol (and poor women were already working outside the home).

domestic labor is still tilted against women for a variety of social reasons but even there technology has significantly changed the workload, in addition to allowing many companies to offer generous multi-parent leave.

and even the domestic sphere has had huge gains, breast pumps make entire forms of life attainable without paying e.g. a wet nurse to work at the issue Plus the fact that all genders/people regardless of milk output are now capable of feeding newborns to suitable nutrition levels via formula.

There are entire spheres of life full of labor and toil that functionally do not exist anymore due to technological changes that have reconfigured society dramatically. Washing machines, refrigerators, baby formula, hormonal birth control, etc. People used to be paid to do these things!

that is to say, % unemployed is not really the right metric. All sorts of daily life is now negotiated in terms of monetary exchange. But the numbers of hours worked has gone down massively!

I’m not trying to position this has a criticism here, really, but it’s a huge qualification. The problem I see is that while I’m not sure if we are headed somewhere where mass unemployment is on the table, we are pretty good at creating nonsense jobs for people.

The problem is that those nonsense jobs (not to invoke a certain anarchist anthropologist) that we used to create happily are a) completely automated and rendered totally redundant by modern tech and b) there seems to be basically zero political will to create new nonsense jobs.

maybe this explains the US manufacturing job obsession in US politics? I mean those jobs are also being transformed. There’s no real effort or will to create new jobs, and no clear place for them to go. Bidenomics sort of exhausted the possibilities.

This is getting a little fatigued and garbled, but my point here is that there is essentially no vision for what new jobs could look like here, and all our visions for new jobs are really just old jobs that don’t exist anymore. So I do think there’s a real possibility of mass unemployment!