All Work and no Play

Abstract

Annotation. The study analyzes the role of working hours in economic development and the formation of income and quality of life through investigation of the relationship between the length of working time and the complexity of the applied labor, on the one hand, and the standard of living in individual countries, on the other. It is shown that with a comparable degree of complexity and productivity of social labor, the countries with the smallest population have the advantage in maintaining a high standard of living. Countries with a large population with equal labor productivity use longer working time as a compensation for the demographic burden. The Russian economy is under the load of three negative factors: large population, low labor productivity, and insufficient complexity of social labor. Under these conditions, a reduction of working time will lead to a loss of general economic potential and a decrease in the level of income of the population. The task of the Russian economy and, accordingly, the government is not the organization of discussions about the compliance with the recommendations of international organizations, which were designed for the economies that are in different conditions and have a different structure, but a real restructuring in order to increase the degree of complexity of social work and its productivity. We can confidently claim that until the labor productivity increases multiple times, the critical dependency of the economy and budget is overcome, and a significant part of the Russian economy becomes the knowledge-based economy, the disparity in labor complexity and productivity can only be compensated by the quantity of labor.