"By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S.
will, in effect, be independently wealthy. With government benefits, even
nonworking families will have, by one estimate, an annual income of
$30,000-$40,000 (in 1966 dollars). How to use leisure meaningfully will be
a major problem." -- TIME magazine, February 25, 1966.
"By the year 2000, people will work no more than four days a week and less
than eight hours a day. With legal holidays and long vacations, this could
result in an annual working period of 147 days [on] and 218 days off." --
New York TIMES, Oct. 19, 1967.
In 1999 dollars, TIME was predicting incomes of about $150,000-$200,000,
whereas in reality, the 1999 median family income was about $46,000
($29,000 for Blacks).
The NYT's prediction about days of work per year is totally off, though I
don't have the needed data available. (I'd make a conservative guess that
on average, people work about 240 days per year.) They're closer when it
comes to paid hours per day, which is about 7 hours per week in the private
sector. However, that statistic ignores moonlighting, unpaid labor hours,
commuting hours, work-preparation and calm-down hours, etc. Even so, they
asserted that people would work for pay for 4 days a week. If we distribute
the approximately 34.5 hours per week over 4 days, then that's a 8.6-hour
day (to which we'd have to add in moonlighting, etc.) To come up with these
predictions, they must have thought that we live in France.
I'm afraid that U.S. capitalism wouldn't run very well if everyone in the
U.S. were independently wealthy, since almost no-one _wants_ to work for
GM, WalMart, or Microsoft (at least given the way they're currently
organized). An independently wealthy individual would choose a completely
different type of job. Or rather, almost all of our labor would have to be
done by non-U.S. citizens.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
