This is it—this is the twenty-first century future about which we have read amazing predictions all of our lives. Our present is characterized by something none of us would have predicted: we are working more not less. Juliet Schor recognized the trend in her 1991 book The Overworked American; Janet C. Gornick discussed its effects on families in the Summer 2005 issue of Dissent. But the best minds of the mid-twentieth century had predicted that technological change would free us from work.

John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century, published his forecast, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in 1930, when the world was in the grip of the Great Depression. He posited that the depression would not signal the end of the industrial revolution as some feared at the time, but would prove to be a minor dip in the trend of gradual but substantial increases in productivity, wealth, and average living standards. He guessed th...

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