Keyne's "15 hour workweek" projection cited within is an interesting thought experiment, but it ignores effects of necessary overhead.
For example, let's look at the cognitive overhead I face as a programmer. There's a certain amount of time I spend just spooling content into my brain's working store. I'm not contributing anything new; I'm just keeping the old in my brain and coordinating with the changes my coworkers are making. Let's pretend that forms a nice, round 10 hours of time a week. If I work another 5 hours, that time has a 2:1 overhead:production ratio. Since the productive time is what's being sold, it operates at a steep 300% cost inefficiency. The next 5 hours brings it down to 200%, the next 10 to 150%.
There's a lot that would change in our economies if we could eliminate transaction and overhead costs. But physical and temporal limitation utterly forbid that in practice. One should always take those highly abstracted economic projections and starting points of analysis: see what assumptions lead them to be skewed from reality. That post-analysis is, in my experience, often the truly enlightening part.
For example, let's look at the cognitive overhead I face as a programmer. There's a certain amount of time I spend just spooling content into my brain's working store. I'm not contributing anything new; I'm just keeping the old in my brain and coordinating with the changes my coworkers are making. Let's pretend that forms a nice, round 10 hours of time a week. If I work another 5 hours, that time has a 2:1 overhead:production ratio. Since the productive time is what's being sold, it operates at a steep 300% cost inefficiency. The next 5 hours brings it down to 200%, the next 10 to 150%.
There's a lot that would change in our economies if we could eliminate transaction and overhead costs. But physical and temporal limitation utterly forbid that in practice. One should always take those highly abstracted economic projections and starting points of analysis: see what assumptions lead them to be skewed from reality. That post-analysis is, in my experience, often the truly enlightening part.