Adding to the good news is that working hours are shrinking, as they have done for nearly two centuries. The next chart shows the recent fall in working hours per week over the past several decades, yet with rising real wages.
It is little known or appreciated, however, that the total hours of work per lifetime has never changed, as the final chart confirms.
We do, nevertheless, work for twice as many years these days (about 50 years) at half as many hours per year as our forebears in the early 1800s, who worked for 25 years on average, with twice the work-hour load per annum.
Living for more than twice as long has had other benefits too, it would seem: we spread the work out over this longer lifetime. But the total hours of work take up about 12% of our life compared with nearly one-quarter two centuries ago.
Better to be alive in this century than any other.
Phil Ruthven is chairman of IBISWorld. For more information on this, or any of Australia’s 500 industries, visit IBISWorld.
This article first appeared on StartupSmart.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
