In sum, the contrast between leisured Europeans and workaholic Americans, to the extent that it has any empirical basis, is essentially a feature of the last quarter of the twentieth century and the years since the turn of the twentyfirst century. Moreover, the glaring disparity during the twentieth century between growth in productivity on the one hand and the rate of reduction of work time on the other holds in Europe as well as in the United States, albeit to a slightly lesser extent in the years toward the end of the twentieth century.57 More striking than any diference in work time between the United States and Western Europe is the failure of work time in both places to fall to a greater extent than it did over the course of the twentieth century. Keynes’s 1930 prediction, that the industrial world would witness a radical contraction of labor time, is not much closer to being realized in Europe than it is in the United States.58 It would seem that there is a quite general bias in capitalism toward turning improved productivity into more output rather than more free time.
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Time for Things