¹ For a starting point on British living standards in the 1930s, see Broadberry, Stephen and Burhop, Carsten, “Real Wages and Labor Productivity in Britain and Germany, 1871–1938: A Unified Approach to the International Comparison of Living Standards,” Journal of Economic History 70, no. 2 (2010): 400–427CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² On the distinction between labor force responses at a point in time, and across long swathes of time, see Alesina, Alberto, Glaeser, Edward, and Sacerdote, Bruce, “Work and Leisure in the United States and Europe: Why So Different?” NBER Macroeconomics Annual 20 (2005): 1–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; I will return to this theme.

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⁵ Huberman and Minns, “The Times They Are Not Changin’,” 541.

⁶ See for instance Roser, Max, “Working Hours,” Published online at OurWorldInData.org, http://ourworldindata.org/data/economic-development-work-standard-of-living/working-hours/Google Scholar.

⁷ McGrattan, Ellen R. and Rogerson, Richard, “Changes in Hours Worked, 1950–2000,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (2004): 14Google Scholar, document these claims in detail. On some of the institutional factors behind the move to an eight-hour work day, see Whaples, Robert, “Winning the Eight-Hour Day, 1909–1919,” Journal of Economic History 50, no. 2 (1990): 393–406CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ McGrattan and Rogerson, “Changes in Hours Worked, 1950–2000,” 16. Note that I have not found a simple way to do a 2010 updated estimate with consistent methodology.

⁹ This is drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics data and Ramey, Valerie A. and Francis, Neville, “A Century of Work and Leisure,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 1, no. 3 (2009): 189–224Google Scholar. Slightly different numbers from different years, but with a similar overall trend, can be found in McGrattan and Rogerson, “Changes in Hours Worked, 1950–2000,” 16. It is worth noting that good estimates on how many hours of the workday employees actually work are hard to come by. Other scholars report an estimate of seven percent of the workday being spent not working. See Michael Burda, Katei R. Genadek, and Daniel S. Hamermesh, “Not Working at Work: Loafing, Unemployment and Labor Productivity,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 21923 (2016), 4. This is based on self-reports, however, and arguably the actual amount of shirking is higher. We also don’t know whether this shirking has gone up or down over time, which could affect our estimates of overall trend.

¹⁰ On relative female to male wages and labor supply response, see McGrattan and Rogerson, “Changes in Hours Worked, 1950–2000,” 15. For gender convergence by sector, see generally Goldin, Claudia, “A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter,” American Economic Review 104, no. 4 (2014): 1091–1119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹³ For an affirmation of the relevance of the substitution effect to Keynes’s argument, see Freeman, Richard B., “Why Do We Work More than Keynes Expected?” in Pecchi, Lorenzo and Piga, Gustavo, editors, Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 135–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²⁰ See Rachel Ngai, L. and Pissarides, Christopher A., “Trends in Hours and Economic Growth,” Review of Economic Dynamics 11, no. 2 (2008): 239–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on these points, and on the Middletown study see Greenwood and Vandenbroucke, “Hours Worked: Long-Run Trends,” 1.

²¹ See Ngai and Pissarides, “Trends in Hours and Economic Growth,” on Europe versus America; and on the import of labor taxation, see Prescott, Edward C., “Why Do Americans Work So Much More Than Europeans?” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (2004): 2–13Google Scholar. On Sweden and America, see Conny Olovsson, “Why Do Europeans Work So Little?” International Economic Review 50, no. 1 (2009): 39–61. If you are wondering, time spent with children has gone up by about two hours a week, for males and females each, when children are present; of course it can be debated how much of this is work and how much is leisure (Aguiar and Hurst, “American Time Allocation: 1965–2005,” 61).

²² Kopecky, Karen A., “The Trend in Retirement,” International Economic Review 52, no. 2 (2011): 287–316, at 287.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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²⁵ Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote, “Why So Different?” 3.

²⁶ Wolf, Martin, “America’s Labour Market Is Not Working,” The Financial Times, Nov. 3, 2015Google Scholar.

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²⁸ Wolf, “America’s Labour Market.”

²⁹ Schrager, Allison, “An Entire Generation of Young American Workers is Missing Crucial Skills,” Quartz, Aug. 31, 2015Google Scholar.

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³¹ Prescott, “Why Do Americans Work So Much More Than Europeans?” 2.

³² Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote, “Why So Different?” 29.

³³ For two versions of this hypothesis, see Frank, Robert H. “Context is More Important Than Keynes Realized,” in Pecchi, Lorenzo and Piga, Gustavo, editors, Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 143–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Chris Thron, “Lifestyle Tradeoffs and the Decline of Societal Well-Being: An Agent-based Model,” Physics and Society (2015), http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.03524.

³⁴ Alpizar, Francisco, Carlsson, Fredrik, and Johansson-Stenman, Olof, “How Much Do We Care About Absolute Versus Relative Income and Consumption?” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 56, no. 3 (2005): 405–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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³⁹ See Veblen, Thornstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Modern Library, 1934), 71.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Alpizar, Carlsson, and Johansson-Stenman, “Absolute Versus Relative Income and Consumption.”

⁴¹ For a version of this hypothesis, combined with some insights from the zero- or negative-sum status hypothesis, see Stiglitz, Joseph E., “Toward a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflections on Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Pecchi, Lorenzo and Piga, Gustavo, editors, Revisiting Keynes Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 41–85Google Scholar.

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