CONCEPT
The Time Dividend
Schor's term for the phantom leisure that productivity gains make arithmetically possible but institutions fail to deliver — the hours that could have been freed and were absorbed instead.
The time dividend is the gap between the leisure that productivity makes possible and the leisure that institutions actually deliver. Schor's four decades of empirical research demonstrate that this gap has been systematically large across every major technological transition of the twentieth century, and that its size is determined not by technology but by the institutional architecture that governs the allocation of productivity gains. In the postwar period, American productivity roughly doubled while working hours for full-time employees declined by approximately four percent — capturing less than a tenth of the potential dividend. European economies operating under different institutional arrangements captured substantially more. The AI productivity gain produces the largest potential time dividend in the history of wage labor, and the question of who captures it is the defining political question of the transition.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The arithmetic of the time dividend is straightforward and rarely disputed. If a worker's productivity increases by a factor of twenty, the