This Fast Company article makes a case for shorter work weeks as a sensible, even inevitable solution to economic contraction. This echoes a thought that’s been circling my mind during the political debate over the last year or two. Every candidate goes on and on about their plan for “creating jobs”, and every tax issue is debated in terms of its impact on “job creators”. Economic growth seems to be defined in terms of the number of 40-hour full-time jobs available. Everyone seems to ignore the fact that there’s no fundamental reason the amount of work available should correlate neatly to the number of people who need to support themselves. Economies do not scale in a linear fashion.

The computer industry, in particular, is all about sub-linear scaling. This is particularly important as the big story of the last 30 years has been the spread of computing into all other industries, and into practically all areas of life. This spread will continue for the forseeable future; it’s not going to be possible to talk about a “computer industry” for much longer, because it will be nothing more than the economy itself. How do we keep on “creating jobs” in a world where the dominant technological trend derives its value from automating away any trace of manual, repetitive work?

It seems clear to me that we as a society are either going to have find some way to invent meaningless work for people to do, so that we can justify giving them enough money to live on, or we are going to have to increase the number of people who can have a share of the remaining work by reducing the amount of work each person does. Redefining the standard full-time work week downward sounds like a reasonable way to accomplish the latter.

I’d be delighted to have a shorter work week, actually. I love the work I do, and intend to keep on doing it for years or decades to come, but there are quite a lot of other things I’d also like to do. I’d happily accept a reduced salary if it freed up a corresponding amount of time to pursue reading, making, adventuring, and socializing.