Labor and value
By The new party of the working class everybody:
It’s invariably people who don’t have real jobs who talk about how important it is for people to work.
We’re nearly to the 100th anniversary of Keynes’s famous essay that predicted that, a century hence, people in rich countries would work 15 hours per week, because in what we now call the developed world the amount of wealth would be so fantastical that that labor effect — the declining marginal utility of income — would overwhelm the substitution effect (the more valuable labor becomes, the more cost to the worker in substituting leisure for labor).
Keynes’s predictions about the wealth of world in 100 years were uncannily accurate, but he was completely wrong, of course, about what we would do with that wealth. Comments like Scott’s help explain why.