Mike Bird is always providing great information. This time it’s a paper written by Nicholas Crafts, Professor of Economics and Economic History at the University of Warwick.
Quite neat – not just measured relative to 1931 life expectancy either, but to what demographers might reasonably have expected C21st life expectancy to be. So we have the same sort of balance of work/life that a 15hr week would have achieved, it's just very unevenly distributed
Originally tweeted by Mike Bird (@Birdyword) on May 14, 2021.
Craft does something cool. He adjusts the framing of what Keynes was after by taking into consideration how the understanding of the components has changed over time. When Keynes made his prediction about work hours, they were compensation in exchange for labor. There was no consideration for the work we do to maintain or improve our health, for example, which prolongs life expectancies.
By taking a new view on labor and stretching it out over a lifetime, Craft shows how Keynes wasn’t far off in his prediction. There is also an acknowledgement of work outside of paid work. (Although calling it non-market will result in the same confusion as use of irrational for choices made outside the traditional economy.)
Establishing something called ‘non-market’ work means that we can talk about what that is, and how it works. If it is done outside the paid-for work, shouldn’t we know where it lives? In a different sphere perhaps. It is not leisure, but if cash does not change hands where is the value in it? What are the tradeoffs individual make within their own choice matrix to perform such work and how can it be cashed out?
Maybe there are more lessons to learn from the NFT’s whose value only exists within their crypto space.
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