All what you say is true, if the wage share stays constant.

The "working poor" phenomenon where you can't pay for necessities like rent, healthcare etc. while working full time is the result of declining wage share.

Wage share has steadily declined in OECD countries since early 1970s. In the US since 1960s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS84006173 Wages make smaller and smaller portion of national income while capital share increases.

FWIW, the wage share declining is a result of many other factors. See here:

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2008/where-has-all-th...

Health insurance and other benefits, household composition have hurt wage share. Not that it didn't decline in real terms for the lower skilled workers, just less than the naive chart you put.

Here is good reading on the topic (maybe my favorite paper of the last decade):

https://www.nber.org/papers/w25588

Your first link points out that income inequality is still growing, however. Which unambiguously means that those at the top are increasingly taking larger and larger slice of the pie.

How detached from reality are you that you think people can make ends meet while working 15 hours a week?

Some people do do that. Try stepping outside of your bubble.

The average hourly wage in the United States is $30, so 15 hours a week is $450 pre-tax. Live on that with a family.

If you don't think that there aren't people doing that already in this country, get out of your bubble. How much do you think farmers are making?

Farmers (i.e., Farmers, Ranchers, and Other Agricultural Managers) make a lot more than $450 a week. Average salary for these folks is $70k/yr.

A farm hand only makes like $15/hr on average, which puts it on par with a job at McDonalds or such.

I think people are doing it and I think it sucks. If you are making $10 an hour in the US you aren't really making ends meet.

I concur. They're not looking in the right places. Musicians and artists would know about these sorts of hustles, but not your typical HN bubble dweller.

I know at least a dozen artists, and not one of them has found a side hustle that lucrative.

Instead, they get a Master's degree, and use it teach at 2 universities, and work a third job part time so they can afford rent.

There's a youtuber I've seen who I think is mostly legit who spent not much money on land in the middle of nowhere and built himself a one-room cabin and an outhouse on it. He's up-front that he isn't actually living off the grid or even in the cabin full-time, but his point is that if you live a very modest life and are handy, you can live on just a side hustle. Like you said, you're unlikely to meet people like this in the (sub) urban tech bubble.

What if you bring the ideas of measuring productivity and wage growth of employees? How have productivity, wage growth, and corporate profit changed over the decades since Keynes? What was that 15 hour work week, how "productive" and paying is it supposed to be?

Or maybe it's the security net that comes with it.

> There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one right now!

Not without a 90% pay cut (i.e. as opposed to the ~60% pay cut you'd expect for working 40% of the hours), I've checked.

Agreed. I think this is clearest when you look at benefits, e.g., the many American companies that only offer health insurance benefits to their full-time workers, but you see it in terms of pay, too. Most middle and high-paying jobs are exclusively full-time (and some expect 50, 60, or even more hours a week).

I live in a country where health insurance is individual, not employment based, so maybe that's part of why we offer 80% (most common) but also 60 and 40% positions?

> There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one right now!

What 15 hour/week job pays enough to afford rent, food, medicine?

That was the prediction at the start of the 20th century as thinkers considered the consequences of increased automation and therefore productivity.

> The thing is, people don't actually want to tradeoff their labor time for leisure time all that well. They value consumption too much.

Or simply they want to live. The amount of money we gotta spend on rent is insane.

> people don't actually want to tradeoff their labor time for leisure time all that well. They value consumption too much.

We don't actually know that. Most people don't have the option.

For all but a select few industries, there is no such thing as "work a part time job, and trade the rest for extra leisure" since almost no part-time job can sustainably cover cost of living. (Heck, most full time jobs don't really cover basic cost of living today).

> There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. But you'd need to have a smaller apartment, an older car, and eat more lentils.

The average wage in Michigan is currently $21/hr. ($36k/yr after federal, city, and state taxes). The average basic 1-bed apartment here is about $1300/month or $15k/yr. Minimum income requirement to qualify for an apartment is usually 2.5x to 3x times monthly rent.

Math that out and you can quickly see that the vast majority of people simply aren't going to ever afford basic housing on 15hours a week. Or even 30hours a week.

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And on the flip side, when it was actually possible to pull this trick off, more people used to use it. In the 60s and 70s, when you could actually live off a part time 20hr a week job, people routinely did so (and then used their free time to do things like enroll in college and pay for it on the side).

You don't see that anymore, because wages have fallen so drastically, and costs risen so drastically. It simply doesn't math out for the vast majority of folks.

> There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one right now!

Try talking to recruiters and tell them you want to work 2 days a week as a software developer and see how far you get.

I work full time, make triple the minimum wage, and can barely afford to live in a 256 square foot micro studio apartment.

You're dreams are not my reality.