Larry Page has been talking about the 40 hour work week and how it might be about time that we abandoned it as the standard that we live by. His co-founder at Google, Sergey Brin, doesn’t think we’re quite there yet. And it’s certainly an attractive vision that we shouldn’t need to labour so many hours in order to make ends meet. But there’s a little secret about this that economists, with their secret decoder rings, already know and that they rarely tell the rest of us. Which is that working hours have been reducing for near two centuries now and it’s extremely likely that this is going to continue. Simply because as we get richer we generally decide to take some of that extra wealth as more leisure rather than the consumption of more goods or services.
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