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  • It looks like the answer is, "It depends".
    • In some industries people really only work about 20 hours out of their 40-hour-workweek, but they need to be there the full 40-hours in case something comes up. So depending on your definition of a "20 hour workweek", this may or may not qualify.
      People work for companies or customers (if they're self-employed), and the needs of those companies / customers can restrict the lifestyle of the worker.
      • For example, if someone works for a company which is in a battle-to-the-death with another company for a particular market, the survival of the company may depend on how quickly it can get certain things done; this will in turn depend on how many hours its employees work. So the employees may be compelled to work longer hours by the unavoidable competition that the company they work for faces. When I say "unavoidable competition", I mean that it seems that as long as competition exists between companies, this problem will remain.
      • As another example, if someone is self-employed and has customers, they may be competing with other self-employed people for the customer's business (like on Amazon's marketplace for used goods). Those self-employed people can "bid" for the customer's business by promising to do a better job (ie invest more time into the work) or by promising to get the work done faster (ie work a longer workweek).
    • Another thing to consider is that some people are able to work for a year or two in some lucrative job and then not work for a year or more afterwards. Similarly, some people are able to work in a lucrative job and then retire relatively early (in their 30s or 40s). So that's another sense in which the total number of hours worked by a person over their lifetime may go down without necessarily decreasing the person's workweek while they're working (ie they may work 80 hours / week while they're working, but over the total span of the "normal" working years (22-65) the total hours worked divided by the total weeks lived may lead to an average of lower than 40 hours, since the person was able to retire early).
  • Sites with good information:

How much have people worked at different points in the past?

  • 1968 - Man's Rise to Civilization As Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State (via Wikipedia)
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time
      • Most people assume that the members of the Shoshone band worked ceaselessly in an unremitting search for sustenance. Such a dramatic picture might appear confirmed by an erroneous theory almost everyone recalls from schooldays: A high culture emerges only when the people have the leisure to build pyramids or to create art. The fact is that high civilization is hectic, and

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      • that primitive hunters and collectors of wild food, like the Shoshone, are among the most leisured people on earth. [Nathan - This matches up with what I remember reading in that book about life on some remote Pacific island.]
  • 1974 - Man in Adaptation: the cultural present (via Wikipedia)

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        • In all, the adults of the Dobe camp worked about two and a half days a week. Because the average working day was about six hours long, the fact emerges that !Kung Bushmen of Dobe, despite their harsh environment, devote from twelve to nineteen hours a week to getting food. Even the hardest working individual in the camp, a man named =oma who went out hunting on sixteen of the 28 days, spent a maximum of 32 hours a week in the food quest.

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      • In the 1800s, many Americans worked seventy hours or more per week and the length of the workweek became an important political issue. Since then the workweek's length has decreased considerably. This article presents estimates of the length of the historical workweek in the U.S., describes the history of the shorter-hours "movement," and examines the forces that drove the workweek's decline over time.
        [...]
        It seems reasonable to accept two important conclusions based on these data [NW - see below] -- the length of the typical manufacturing workweek in the 1800s was very long by modern standards and it declined significantly between 1830 and 1890.

        Table 1
        Estimated Average Weekly Hours Worked in Manufacturing, 1830-1890

        Year - Weeks Report - Aldrich Report
        1830 - 69.1 - X
        1840 - 67.1 - 68.4
        1850 - 65.5 - 69.0
        1860 - 62.0 - 66.0
        1870 - 61.1 - 63.0
        1880 - 60.7 - 61.8
        1890 - X - 60.0

        [...]
        Hours of Work during the Twentieth Century
        [T]here is a fairly consistent pattern, with weekly hours falling considerably during the first third of the century and much more slowly thereafter. In particular, hours fell strongly during the years surrounding World War I, so that by 1919 the eight-hour day (with six workdays per week) had been won. Hours fell sharply at the beginning of the Great Depression, especially in manufacturing, then rebounded somewhat and peaked during World War II. After World War II, the length of the workweek stabilized around forty hours. Owen's nonstudent-male series shows little trend after World War II, but the other series show a slow, but steady, decline in the length of the average workweek.
        [...]
        Broader Trends in Time Use, 1880 to 2040
        In 1880 a typical male household head had very little leisure time -- only about 1.8 hours per day over the course of a year. However, as Fogel's (2000) estimates in Table 5 show, between 1880 and 1995 the amount of work per day fell nearly in half, allowing leisure time to more than triple. Because of the decline in the length of the workweek and the declining portion of a lifetime that is spent in paid work (due largely to lengthening periods of education and retirement) the fraction of the typical American's lifetime devoted to work has become remarkably small. Based on these trends Fogel estimates that four decades from now less than one-fourth of our discretionary time (time not needed for sleep, meals, and hygiene) will be devoted to paid work -- over three-fourths will be available for doing what we wish.
        [...]
        Causes of the Decline in the Length of the Workweek
        Supply, Demand and Hours of Work
        The length of the workweek, like other labor market outcomes, is determined by the interaction of the supply and demand for labor. Employers are torn by conflicting pressures. Holding everything else constant, they would like employees to work long hours because this means that they can utilize their equipment more fully and offset any fixed costs from hiring each worker (such as the cost of health insurance -- common today, but not a consideration a century ago). On the other hand, longer hours can bring reduced productivity due to worker fatigue and can bring worker demands for higher hourly wages to compensate for putting in long hours. If they set the workweek too high, workers may quit and few workers will be willing to work for them at a competitive wage rate. Thus, workers implicitly choose among a variety of jobs -- some offering shorter hours and lower earnings, others offering longer hours and higher earnings.

        Economic Growth and the Long-Term Reduction of Work Hours
        Historically employers and employees often agreed on very long workweeks because the economy was not very productive (by today's standards) and people had to work long hours to earn enough money to feed, clothe and house their families. The long-term decline in the length of the workweek, in this view, has primarily been due to increased economic productivity, which has yielded higher wages for workers. Workers responded to this rise in potential income by "buying" more leisure time, as well as by buying more goods and services. In a recent survey, a sizeable majority of economic historians agreed with this view. Over eighty percent accepted the proposition that "the reduction in the length of the workweek in American manufacturing before the Great Depression was primarily due to economic growth and the increased wages it brought" (Whaples, 1995). Other broad forces probably played only a secondary role. For example, roughly two-thirds of economic historians surveyed rejected the proposition that the efforts of labor unions were the primary cause of the drop in work hours before the Great Depression.
        [...]
        Cross-sectional Patterns from 1919
        In 1919 the average workweek varied tremendously, emphasizing the point that not all workers desired the same workweek. The workweek exceeded 69 hours in the iron blast furnace, cottonseed oil, and sugar beet industries, but fell below 45 hours in industries such as hats and caps, fur goods, and women's clothing. Cities' averages also differed dramatically. In a few Midwestern steel mill towns average workweeks exceeded 60 hours. In a wide range of low-wage Southern cities they reached the high 50s, but in high-wage Western ports, like Seattle, the workweek fell below 45 hours.

        Whaples (1990a) finds that among the most important city-level determinants of the workweek during this period were the availability of a pool of agricultural workers, the capital-labor ratio, horsepower per worker, and the amount of employment in large establishments. Hours rose as each of these increased. Eastern European immigrants worked significantly longer than others, as did people in industries whose output varied considerably from season to season. 
        [...]
        Economists have given surprisingly little attention to the determinants of the workweek. The most comprehensive treatment is Robert Whaples' "The Shortening of the American Work Week" (1990), which surveys estimates of the length of the workweek, the shorter hours movement, and economic theories about the length of the workweek.

    • 1999 - The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

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        Misc Articles

        • 1999.05.01 - The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
          • Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" [NW - but how many hours do they spend doing chores other than looking for food?]
            [...]
            The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. [NW - So the same pressure might be increasing the number of hours people need to work nowadays.]

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        • 2013.05.19 - WonkBlog (Ezra Klein) - Keynes was, incredibly, right about the future. He was wrong about how we’d be spending it.
        • 2013.06.13 - How Much Is Enough? Why Do We Work So Much and Enjoy So Little Leisure? ← really good article
          • As the Skidelskys note, we are pretty nearly on target for the standard of living that Keynes forecast, yet, they say, he was mistaken about the amount of work. “The central puzzle remains: we in the rich world are four or five times better off on average than we were in 1930, but our average hours of work have fallen only a fifth since then.” They supported this passage with a chart showing that weekly hours worked, which, by Keynes’ estimate, should have fallen from fifty to about eighteen by now, are still stuck at forty.
            The Skidelskys review three possible explanations:
            First, that people take joy in their work. They find that plausible for artists, skilled artisans, and authors but not for most people.
            Second, that the capitalist system forces people to work because employers, not workers, get to call the tune. They approvingly quote sociological theories supporting that view, but in the end, they do not find it entirely persuasive.
            Third, that wants are insatiable. Although that sometimes seems to be the case, they think that insatiability is not a fixed feature of human nature, but a flaw of our economic system. Keynes, they say, “did not understand that capitalism would set up a new dynamic of want creation that would overwhelm traditional restraints of custom and good sense. . . . Capitalism has achieved incomparable progress in the creation of wealth , but has left us incapable of putting that wealth to civilized use.”

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