In 1800, you had to work, on average, one hour to obtain ten minutes of artificial light. Today, this same hour allows you to buy 300 days of light. In 1900, one kilowatt-hour of electricity cost one hour of work. This costs five minutes of our time now. Buying one cheeseburger in McDonald’s required 30 minutes of hard labor in 1950. This same sandwich now costs about three minutes of your life.
According to British intellectual Matt Ridley, this evolution is the ultimate illustration of wealth in modern societies. In his book The Rational Optimist published in 2010, he evaluates our prosperity by outlining the goods and services we can purchase for the same amount of work. Thus, the main objective of economic development is to reduce the amount of time we have to work in order to produce what we need to live.
This discourse may sound surprising in a world where it is often said that ‘job creation’ is the most important goal of economic policy. But a job is not an end in itself. It is just a means to live better. As Milton Friedman reminds us in this conference dedicated to free trade, we don’t want jobs per se but productive jobs: jobs which enable us to consume goods and services we produce at a minimum expenditure of efforts.
In other words, if working is the price we pay to obtain things we want, then economic progress has always consisted of decreasing this price thanks to perpetual productivity growth. This explains our ability to create more wealth with less and less labor, in order to save time for more valuable activities.
This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on June 1, 2017.
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