Socialist darling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s latest little blooper was to cite the famed economist Milton Keynes. You know, that one who doesn’t exist.
Milton Keynes is actually the name of a town in Britain. That Milton Keynes is a government-designed town and famously known as the place where individuality and civilization go to die, well, I do suppose that makes Ocasio-Cortez’s interest in it at least suiting, if not accurate.
However, there’s also a larger error here.
What the congresswoman meant to talk about was John Maynard Keynes and his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” In this essay, Keynes muses that by about 2030, we’d all be so rich that we’d only work 15 hours a week, which is what Ocasio-Cortez tries to cite to argue that this hasn’t happened because of economic inequality, i.e., the rich idle while the rest of us labor on, or something.
This is not correct. In fact, much of that reduction in labor has happened, but it is so-called women’s work that has vanished.
This only makes sense if one understands that there are two types of labor, paid market hours and unpaid household labor. In the official studies, we also add in personal time, aka the things that cannot be done for us, such as sleeping, showering, eating, and so on, and the remaining time, leisure. The Ocasio-Cortez and “Milton Keynes” contention is that leisure this past century should have increased massively. In fact, it has. But what has diminished correspondingly is unpaid household labor hours.
While the largest change has been the reduction in female household labor hours, males have seen a reduction, too. And women’s paid market hours have risen, while male paid market hours have actually fallen.
The net effect has been a substantial increase in leisure for all, as personal hours have hardly changed. This can be seen in this paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
In fact, this is the cause of the economic liberation of women over this past century. Effectively, we’ve partially automated the home, greatly reducing the number of hours necessary to run a household, so that women can both work and also manage a home. That is Keynes and his prediction right there, at least in part.
This is what the economists Ha-Joon Chang and Hans Rosling both refer to as the washing machine phenomenon. Convenience technologies, such as the microwave, prepared meals, vacuum cleaners, the washing machine, and so on, have greatly reduced the human labor needed to run a home.
As a result, everyone standing around wondering why the work hasn’t disappeared is missing the point that it actually has, just not in the way they expected. Modern career women, gloriously, are off working on interesting things because they don’t have to stay home to boil the washing then run it through a mangle like their grandmothers did.
This also gives away the lie of the supposed inequality of it all.
Almost every household, not just the rich, has enjoyed these technological innovations and the increase in leisure they’ve brought. Back then, the rich had servants to do this hard labor, and the poor had to do it themselves. Now all have washing machines. The replacement of that human work with machines has been one of the great reducers of inequality this past century.
It’s fine that Ocasio-Cortez and the like have a different vision of how our society should be. But it’s imperative the congresswoman, if she can’t make the correct reference, at least make one somewhat close to describing reality.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
