Nose to the Grindstone

Keynes assumed that productivity would naturally yield free time, as societies and individuals with the means to replace work with leisure would inevitably choose to do so. But increasingly productive capitalist societies don’t work like that. Instead, they consolidate wealth and power in the hands of a few ultrarich elites. Our productivity has soared as Keynes anticipated, but the profits have gone to a handful of people at the very top who wring more work out of the rest, yielding immeasurable wealth for a few and scarcity for everyone else.

The relationship between economic inequality and longer hours for low earners is fairly straightforward. As wealth concentrates, capitalists reshape the economic landscape, weakening labor protections, breaking unions, halting or reversing wage gains, and pushing for tax cuts that primarily benefit themselves. Resulting budget shortfalls justify austerity measures that gut social safety nets.

Workers thus have to take on longer hours or multiple jobs just to maintain basic living standards. Meanwhile, deregulation enables more exploitative labor practices while rising costs for essentials like housing, health care, and education force additional work hours simply to survive.

But how does runaway inequality compel people who can afford to relax to work more instead? Economists Jan Behringer, Martin Gonzalez Granda, and Till van Treeck attribute it to “Veblen effects,” named for sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s writings on consumption and social status and referring to pressure to keep up with the lifestyles of those on the higher rungs. The problem is that the people above high earners — the top 1 percent towering over the rest of the top 20 percent — have become vastly richer in recent decades.

Consequently, high earners’ sense of what constitutes “the good life” is distorted, producing a permanent sense of subjective material deprivation and endless striving to mitigate it. The researchers point out that the leisure time shift coincided with a significant increase in the income share of the top 1 percent. In this skewed landscape, intangible things like leisure time are less valuable than cash, which workers can exchange for status symbols like a bigger house that shore up their economic position.

In Worked Over, McCallum focuses less on social status jockeying than basic self-preservation in a cutthroat economic environment. Constant downsizing and layoffs have put high earners in competition to prove themselves indispensable by outperforming one another. In 1979, long workweeks of fifty hours or more were more prevalent among the bottom two hourly earnings quintiles. By the 2000s, they were most common in the top quintile.

This “long hours premium” imposed on high earners “rose alongside inequality of earnings within high-paying occupations,” McCallum observes. “This inequality drives competition among employees who fear their own disposability during slumps as they see their peers moving ahead. This fear translates into working longer and longer.”

In Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, Barbara Ehrenreich identified another impetus to voluntary overwork, especially for the professional-managerial class positioned just below the rich — something “subtler and more psychological. And that’s a fear of going soft. Of losing it,” she said, meaning the “self-discipline and willpower that it takes to achieve in a professional career.”

One can never rest, for downward social mobility hangs over the heads of these professionals like the sword of Damocles. This pressure stems from the meritocratic belief that “the good life” is a testament to hard work and skill, and can be lost through negligence and the deterioration of talent. “Going soft” would be a humiliating exposure of the professional’s unworthiness all along.

In “Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren,” Keynes offered a more existential explanation for voluntary overwork, speaking derisively of the condition of being a pathological busybody obsessed with one’s own “purposiveness.” Such people are unable to live in the moment, always living for some future time, like a man who “does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens.” People rationalize their refusal to appreciate the present by appealing to the strong association between hard work and virtue.

Keynes anticipated that there would come a time when this justification would fall away, forcing people to relax. “We have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy,” he wrote, but we can become “delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things.”

Escaping the Rat Race

The bad news, as demonstrated by the American story, is that an age of leisure will not automatically flow from increased productivity. The good news is that political interventions can bring us closer to this vision.

“While Keynes’ predictions regarding productivity growth have actually been exceeded over the past nearly 100 years,” conclude Behringer, Gonzalez Granda, and van Treeck, “the obstacles to more leisure time are primarily socio-political in nature.”

The Scandinavian social democracies, even in their recently weakened states, offer the starkest counterexample. They are highly productive, but their workers put in six to ten fewer hours per week than their American counterparts do, a trend that holds for low and high earners alike.

Unions have proven essential in translating productivity gains into shorter working hours. American union membership has collapsed since the postwar period; Scandinavian union rates have fallen recently, but workers in the region still maintain a powerful, centralized collective bargaining system that secures shorter workweeks, generous paid leave, and predictable schedules.

The comprehensive welfare systems in these countries further reduce overwork. With universal health care, subsidized childcare, free education through university, and robust social safety nets, Scandinavians don’t face the same financial pressures that drive Americans to sacrifice their free time for a paycheck. Importantly, these welfare policies have also increased female workforce participation, reducing women’s spousal dependency and decreasing the pressure on men to work long hours to support their families.

Scandinavian societies have seen inequality expand and their welfare states erode in recent years, but these features are still significantly more pronounced than in the United States. And beyond direct material impacts, they also have positive social effects that are difficult to quantify. Scandinavian countries maintain what sociologists call “low power distance” cultures, where extreme wealth disparities and conspicuous consumption are regarded with suspicion rather than admiration. Status anxiety still exists, but the structural features of the economy take the edge off, making it easier for other prosocial values to emerge. It becomes possible to locate the value of solidarity over competition, social cohesion over social rank, efficiency over theatrical displays of work commitment, and leisure over performance.

By contrast, the United States has a culture of competitive individualism fostered by our winner-take-all economic system. Here, things that might otherwise be considered entitlements are almost always commodities instead. Every element of a decent life, from health care to shelter to education, is sold on the private market. The richer the person, the higher the bid, the better the living. Relaxation is a failure to grow wealth, which is in turn a failure to live well. It’s a remarkable perversion: capitalism has actually weaponized the concept of “the good life” against the notion of doing what we want with our time.

When essential components of a dignified life are collectively guaranteed rather than individually bought and sold, “the good life” ceases to be a function of wealth or a reward contingent upon endless work. Instead, it becomes a baseline expectation rooted in human dignity and social citizenship.

The Scandinavian countries got this way through sustained class struggle. Workers’ movements wrested control of productivity gains from capital, refusing to accept that increased efficiency should only benefit shareholders and executives. Ending unnecessary toil requires expanding economic democracy, not just relying on market rationality.

Something Worth Belonging To

In 1991, the New York Times ran an article about Workaholics Anonymous, a new twelve-step program whose participants tended to be high earners — yuppies whose descent into work madness had been concealed by ’80s office culture norms until the consequences became unignorable.

“No matter how much work I did,” said Matt, a middle manager at a large corporation, “it was never enough.” Matt “worked for a company that attracted workaholics, so I didn’t feel strange or out of place when I’d be working every night and part of most weekends.” Likewise, Dan, a cofounder of the program, reached his breaking point when he exploded in rage at his assistant over sluggish progress on a corporate assignment.

“Workaholics are the most antisocial people you can find,” said Dan, citing his own broken relationships, sacrificed at the altar of productivity. There’s truth there: every hour spent working is an hour not spent socializing with family, friends, and neighbors. But paradoxically, status anxiety itself is a deeply social impulse. We all want recognition and affirmation from the collective. We all want to belong.

Making it to the top rungs of a stratified class society is a pitiful substitute for true social belonging. Real belonging would be citizenship in a society that affirms the inherent worth of each person’s life, the value of our fleeting time, and our equal and shared claim to the fruits of human advancement.

Keynes was wrong to predict that the age of shared abundance would smoothly flow from productivity gains. But his vision of human liberation from needless work remains powerful — not as an inevitability but as a political horizon worth fighting for. This isn’t utopian fantasy but a concrete possibility, already partially realized in social democracies and more fully realizable in democratic socialist societies that don’t yet exist.

We can reclaim our time for pursuits that give life meaning: creativity, connection, contemplation, and labors of love. To do it, we’ll need to confront the economic elites who preside over the rat race.