PERSON
Juliet Schor
The economist who documented that the most productive society in history had also become the most overworked—and who provides the sharpest available account of why AI’s extraordinary productivity gains will not translate into leisure unless the institutional architecture that has prevented every previous such translation is deliberately redesigned.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that productivity growth would deliver a fifteen-hour workweek to his grandchildren. The productivity arrived on schedule; the leisure did not. When Juliet Schor published
The Overworked American in 1991, she documented the mechanism of this failure with empirical precision: Americans were working a full month more per year than they had in 1969, despite the most sustained productivity expansion the world had seen. The explanation was not psychological but institutional—the machinery that governed the allocation of productivity gains in the American economy was structurally biased toward more output rather than more time, and no individual decision could break it because the machinery operated at the level of institutions, not individuals. The four-stage mechanism she called the
work-spend cycle—productivity increases, gains captured as income rather than time, income spent on goods that become necessities, necessities requiring more income requiring more work—has been