Edward Hadas

“It has been computed by some political arithmetician that if every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful, that labour would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life … and the rest of the 24 hours might be leisure and happiness.”

When Benjamin Franklin wrote that in 1790, the American thinker was a few centuries ahead of his time. But the modern economy is so productive that everyone would have far more “comforts” than were available in Franklin’s day, even if the standard working week were shrunk from 40 to 20 hours. The four-hour day, though, isn’t on the horizon. Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, a professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Iowa, explains why not in a fascinating new book, “Free Time, The Forgotten American Dream”.

For more than a century, labour activists continually demanded – and were granted – shorter working hours. By the 1930s, futurologists were sure that the trend would continue. Workers wanted more leisure time, and, thanks to ever more efficient machines, they could have it, while still enjoying steady improvements in the material standard of living.

The experts were wrong. In 1935, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt moved from favouring to opposing the six-hour working day. That was the beginning of the end. For the past few decades, the standard working week in rich countries has remained constant, or even lengthened. Far more women are in the paid workforce than ever before. A recent attempt to introduce a 35-hour week in France was soon abandoned. It seems that people have had a change of heart regarding the relative value of consumption and leisure.

What changed? Certainly not productivity growth. Technological developments have continually saved more labour, much of it tedious or dangerous. The old historic pattern – more leisure time along with more goods and services – could have continued unabated.

Financial markets are unstable, unhelpful and often immoral. They should be kept under better control.

My disdain will be dismissed by free-market enthusiasts. For them, lively markets where equities, bonds and currencies are sold at publicly disclosed prices are clearly a good thing; they may even be capitalism at its best. Such open markets, they say, both improve economic efficiency and make society more free.

Not so; these markets are economically and morally harmful. Let me be clear. I am not discussing what non-economists usually mean by markets, the generally useful supermarkets and farmers’ markets. Nor am I debating the merits of what economists refer to as the “market” – the real or virtual place where buyers and sellers make transactions. Nor is this a screed against all of finance. Banks and insurers do not need financial markets to gather savings and make loans and investments.

Institutions need to evolve over time. Institutions must rely on their traditions. These two statements may sound irreconcilable, but institutions – companies, hospitals, government agencies, schools, political systems, churches – can only thrive if they manage both to change and to remain true to their principles. In his surprising resignation, Pope Benedict XVI has given an example of the right balance.

Of course, the Catholic Church is special. It is especially large, especially ancient and especially international, as well as theologically presumptuous about its relations with an unseen heavenly power. The Church on earth, however, faces the same challenges as any long-standing organisation. Others can learn from Benedict’s decision to break with a tradition of nearly 600 years.

By Catholic standards, the tradition that popes always die in office was relatively new. There were several resignations during the Church’s first 14 centuries, and long after the last pope stepped down, in 1415, papal non-retirement was not so much a hallowed tradition as a fact of life. Official retirements were rare in all occupations, and almost unheard of among kings, who were considered roughly the secular equivalents of the pope.

Why are so many poor countries stuck with huge economic problems? Why, for example, are there so many unemployed young people in Egypt – 41 percent of 19-24 year-olds? The poor state of British housing can help answer these questions. 

By developing world standards, the British housing system works quite well. In Egypt, it takes 77 bureaucratic procedures in 31 offices, and between six and 14 years, to get legal approval for construction of a new house, according to the 2012 doctoral dissertation of Abdel Hamid El Kafrawy of the University of Glasgow. The result: housing is in chronically short supply and 65 percent of the population live in unregistered and untaxed buildings. 

For a rich country, though, the UK does remarkably badly. Construction has been inadequate, at half the modest target rate set by the government in 2007. The relatively few new houses and apartments which are built are mostly relatively small – new American houses have almost three times as much floor space and new French houses have 45 percent more, according to a 2009 study by the British Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. And rental and mortgage payments for these under-sized living quarters take a higher share of income in the UK than almost other developed country.