CONCEPT
The Overworked American Thesis
Schor's 1991 empirical demonstration that the most productive society in history had become, simultaneously, the most overworked — 163 additional hours per year grafted onto the American calendar despite sustained productivity growth.
The Overworked American thesis is the empirical foundation of Schor's subsequent career: a quantitative demonstration, drawn from time-use surveys and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, that between 1969 and 1989 Americans increased their annual hours of paid work by the equivalent of a full month, even as productivity per worker-hour rose dramatically. The thesis contradicted the dominant narrative of technological progress producing increasing leisure, and it reframed American overwork from an individual lifestyle choice into a structural outcome of institutional design. Its publication in 1991 reshaped the scholarly conversation about work, time, and productivity, and its framework remains the most rigorously documented account of why the Keynesian promise of reduced work has not been kept.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The thesis rests on careful reconstruction of time-use data, comparative analysis of working hours across developed economies, and documentation of specific institutional mechanisms — compensation structures, benefits tied to full-time employment, cultural norms — that systematically