Japan is thinking about a ‘four-day workweek’

Japan, the country that gave us
the word “karoshi” for “death from overwork,” is thinking about introducing an optional four-day workweek. The idea has also come up in Iceland, New Zealand, Spain and other places. It’s in fact so obvious, some wise people in the past would be gobsmacked to learn that we’re only just starting to talk about it now.
One such sage was the economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1930, just as the Great Depression was threatening his and the world’s prosperity, he penned a classic essay on the “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” The longer-term economic and technological trends, he argued counterintuitively, in fact suggested that within a century — that is, right about now — we could meet all our needs so efficiently, we’d only work out of habit or for fun, and even then probably no more than 15 hours a week.
A cursory glance around will convince you how right he was in some ways, and how perplexingly wrong in others. Yes, Homo sapiens has, despite persistent pockets of poverty, largely overcome the traditional problem of economics, which was scarcity.
Most people in rich countries today can easily feed, clothe and house themselves and their families. And yet the average number of hours worked per person has only decreased slightly in recent decades, and is still much higher than Keynes foresaw. In most countries, the standard workweek is defined at 40 hours or so, but the reality is usually that people slog much longer in formal or informal overtime.
Most surprisingly, it’s often those with the highest incomes — and therefore the fewest unmet physical needs — who toil the hardest. Up-and-coming types in China brag about working “996” — 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. Investment bankers clocked 100-hour weeks. That’s the sort of life that leads to karoshi, which the Chinese call “guolaosi” and the South Koreans “gwarosa.”
Besides Keynes, others who would find this phenomenon puzzling include our hunter-gatherer ancestors. For most of the time our species has existed, humans did in fact work Keynesian — meaning few — hours and were nonetheless healthy and even content, as the anthropologist James Suzman concludes in his recent book, “Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots.” Part of the reason was their sense of time and their egalitarianism, as Suzman told the podcaster Ezra Klein.
Because they trusted in nature’s ability to feed them every day, hunter gatherers rarely planned ahead, living mainly in the here
and now.

—Bloomberg