Living to Work or Working to Live? Why We Should Not Worry About the Decrease of the Individual Annual Working Hours in the Past 125 Years

In a recent paper, Gerhard Schildt has argued that we suffer from mass unemployment today because technical progress has caused structural change that has led to a long-term decrease of working opportunities. By showing the secular decline of hours worked per year, Schildt concludes that this trend is irreversible and causes increasing unemployment. We argue that this conclusion is based on the confusion of a statistical observation with a causal explanation. Schildt's thesis is not compatible with the empirical fact that every advanced country has experienced the same decline of hours worked whereas many do not suffer from unemployment today. Moreover, Schildt focuses only on the labour demand of firms without taking into account the labour supply of households. It is not that technological progress has rendered human work obsolete, but rather the other way round: it allows us a life that is not fully devoted to work in order to survive and even comes along with a much higher standard of living.