Workless

South Africa has Keynes's fifteen-hour work-week. For entirely the wrong reason.

The average South African adult works 15.7 hours a week.

Not the average of those employed. Not the average of those in the labour force. That is the number you get when you take every adult in the country, employed or not, young or old, and divide the hours they spend in paid work by the number of them. Across the 160 countries in a new database by Anthony Gethin and Emmanuel Saez, the people of only nine countries work less. Italy, at 15.3, is one of them. France, at 16.1, sits just above us.

Why that coincidence – a South African working week nearly identical to Italy’s – is the question I investigate in this post. Because 95 years ago, someone predicted that exactly this will happen.

In 1930, in the depths of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes published Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. He argued that, once you looked past the cyclical gloom, the real trajectory of the world economy was astonishing. ‘The standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence,’ he wrote, ‘will be between four and eight times as high as it is.’ Compound interest and compounding knowledge would, within a century, reduce the working week to fifteen hours or so. ‘The economic problem,’ he predicted, ‘may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years.’

His deadline was roughly 2030. We are four years out. And in South Africa, arithmetically, he was right. But for the wrong reasons…