In the years before World War II, British economist John Maynard Keynes boldly predicted that by the time his grandchildren were grown, the average person would spend just 15 hours a week at work, thanks to technological innovations.
Fast-forward 85 years or so, and there’s at least one trend that’s moving in the direction that Keynes predicted. American men between the ages of 21 to 30 worked an average of 203 hours less in 2015 than they did in 2000, according to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. But it wasn’t because machines became man’s best coworker. Rather, the authors postulated, much of the decrease was due to young men carving out more time for one technology in particular: video games.
