To stop climate change, we need to get poorer, and the safest way to do that is to work less
This promise would be premised on two sad facts. Firstly, most people dislike their jobs. A global study by Gallup estimated that only one in five full-time workers feels engaged at work. Many workers also feel time-poor, in part because of increasing child-care duties.
The second sad fact is that when societies grow richer, they don’t necessarily grow happier. Equal societies tend to, but unequal ones don’t. In other words, the extra output often serves chiefly to trash the planet. Imagine the speech at your retirement party that listed your career achievements and concluded, “so your total carbon footprint is . . . .” Picture that number on your tombstone.
So to stop climate change, we need to get poorer, and the safest way to do that is to work less. This would continue a long trend of improving life by cutting working hours. In 1870, the average worker in industrialized countries put in more than 3,000 hours a year, or 60 to 70 hours a week for 50 weeks, calculate economic historians Michael Huberman and Chris Minns. By 2019, that total had dropped to 1,383 hours in Germany, and 1,777 in the U.S., before slumping during lockdowns.
In 1956, Richard Nixon predicted a four-day work week in the “not-too-distant future.” That future might finally be arriving. The four-day week is being piloted in various countries, discussed even in Japan, and is already common in Iceland. In fact, cutting a day’s work wouldn’t do nearly enough to reduce emissions, because rested workers are so productive that their output remains dangerously high.
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