Bertrand Russell, in his essay “In Praise of Idleness”, argues that men needs more of free time than job time (to busy themselves with other activities like social life and politics, strenghtening their education, produce cultural and artistic works, and also just strolling a little) and propose to halve ordinary work hork hours per week to 20 ones. The issue he does not deal with is wage. Of course, a family cannot live earning the half: both partners should work, but many already do so and the same they cannot afford monthly budget needs. Letting apart the absurdity of that, the question should be pursued. After all everyone is looking for that, looking for getting a less defatiguating job, since, even, choosing a studying youth, as a status symbol, apart from that, more than of worth or mere expression of laziness or, actually, of appreciating social life and creative working. But, of course, at least with the same quantity of that form of social slaving called “wage”. Nonetheless, at this point, questions pose about macroeconomy, bound, in fact, more to mercantilistic cannibalism than than to other things. Because more money for employees means not just, of course, more money payed by ultra-super-rich (or less rich) employers (among the other things, wages represent a part more or less little for an enterprise managing): there are also little firms, and more wage means, by itself, a higher urge to increase prices, according to the new money availability, as considered by Milton Friedman reducing the formule
[Quantity of money] x [Velocity of money circulation]
=
[Price] x [Quantity of sold goods]
to M = P x Y (or, better, according to the formulation by the Economic School of Cambridge, k x M [ x V ] = P x Y, where k is a number not equal to zero but between zero and one that represents that the part of money wholly around must be considered). Then, if people earn the double in respect how much people work, prices tend, more or less giddily, to go doubling, after a more or less long time period of prices increase, letting apart the part of labour force that along the path is pulled to add itself to that one already present into the space left empty by the already employed labour force. Leaving the wages per work hour unchanged, instead, the employees are deprived of half their purchasing power straightly, instead to halve just the work hours. To make the macroeconomic frame step by step settled, so, with the same wage the work hours must be reduced gradually. Exactly along this perspective the proposals of reducing the work hours per week to 35 ones go. First step: 35 hours – exactly. Then 30 ones and then, step by step, less and even much less than 20 ones, by subsequent, gradual settlements. That is not the old story of the “another one more”: if the question would be well “lubricated”, we would ask suddenly 20 work hours per week, without leaving that languishing among future history labirinths. The point is, as written a little above, giving time to the system to settle and then procede to the susequent step, to directions even well beyond a cloudy change of macroeconomic framework.
