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The twenty hour workweek
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| Vector A |
| quote: | In 1965, a U.S. Senate subcommittee predicted that as a result of increasing labor productivity from automation and “cybernation” -- in other words, the computer revolution -- Americans would be working only about 20 hours a week by the year 2000, while taking seven weeks or more of vacation a year.
But in 1991, the average American worker put in 163 more hours on the job than in 1973, according to the sociologist Juliet Schor, the author of “The Overworked American.” Since many more families had two parents working, the increase in annual working hours per family was much higher -- 500 to 700 hours more than in the ‘70s. |
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Seven week vacation sounds pretty good to me. |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| If I had 20 extra hours of free time each week, I'd spend it all spending money. Think about it, fat cats! |
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| Banora |
| Americans getting a single day of mandatory vacation? BALDERDASH!! |
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| Quazar |
| And yet people in retail and food service would still have to work all of those days, and holidays, because people NEED TO BE ABLE TO BUY EVERY DAY. ESPECIALLY STARBUCKS AND IPHONE ACCESSORIES! |
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| Ygrene |
| 20 hrs of meetings. |
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| tubularbills |
| quote: | Originally posted by Ygrene
20 hrs of meetings. |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| Cybernation would be a great title for a techno album. |
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| Vector A |
| That term seems to have dropped out of currency. Saw it recently in another '60s context, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| That's what's so fantastically retro-futurist about it, this quaint idea that more computers would actually make our lives tangibly easier or better. Someone's got to make a melodic analogue techno record laced with 1950s documentary samples about computers and technology. I'm disappointed it hasn't happened already. |
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| Vector A |
I sort of thought about doing a retro future thing along those lines, when I saw Orson Welles's film version of Toffler's Future Shock. Got a couple vocal samples of him talking about technology and the pace of modern life and such, anyway. But that was '70s rather than '50s.
And I have a couple of analog synths. |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| This will be dead easy. Just hammer out a few Detroit-y chord progressions, use nothing but classic gear sounds and make sure you play up your prescriptive album concept. RA Albums Of 2012 list, here we come. |
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