Special Issue on Keyne's Prediction

Just a quick note to signal a topical special issue in Industrial and Organizational Psychology, on Keyne’s famous prediction in 1930 that technology would drastically reduce the need to work, to 15 hours per week.

The focal article by Seth Kaplan and colleagues is followed by 14 sharp commentaries focusing on key aspects of work in our age of rapid technology change. Here’s the lead article’s abstract:

Nearly 100 years ago, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by today, technological advancements would allow the workweek to dwindle to just 15 hours, or 3 hours per day, and that the real problem of humanity would be filling their time with leisure. Although much has changed in the world of work since this prediction, such a drastic change has not taken place. In this article, several industrial-organizational psychology scholars discuss why this is the case. Why do we continue to work as much as we do, and how might that change? More fundamentally, what do these trends, contra Keynes’ prediction, tell us about the nature of work itself? We use this discussion to propose several research directions regarding the nature of work and how it might change in the future. We depict the phenomenon of working hours as multilevel in nature, and we consider both the positive and negative possible implications of working less than we do now.