Prediction:
1. 30 countries will move toward this within the next 5 years.
2. It won’t even enter American political discourse for 5, 10 or 15 years from now.
3. If it’s proposed it will incite a moral panic, as the usual suspects raise the alarm about the specter of communism, a lazy labor force, etc.
4. Measures of lifespan, health-span and well-being will increase in the countries that adopt it. These same measures will fall in the U.S. and virtually no one will notice.
5. The usual rhetoric about American exceptionalism and USA #1 will carry on as usual.
I would say your prediction is dead-on.
Yup
People were pushing for this IN THE 1930s let’s get on with ‘the future’ of work
A new American dream has gradually replaced the old one. Instead of leisure, or thrift, consumption has become a patriotic duty. Corporations can justify anything—from environmental destruction to prison construction—for the sake of inventing more work to do. A liberal arts education, originally meant to prepare people to use their free time wisely, has been repackaged as an expensive and inefficient job-training program. We have stopped imagining, as Keynes thought it so reasonable to do, that our grandchildren might have it easier than ourselves. We hope that they’ll have jobs, maybe even jobs that they like.
The new dream of overwork has taken hold with remarkable tenacity. Hardly anyone talks about expecting or even deserving shorter workdays anymore; the best we can hope for is the perfect job, one that also happens to be our passion. In the dogged, lonely pursuit of it, we don’t bother organizing with our co-workers. We’re made to think so badly of ourselves as to assume that if we had more free time, we’d squander it.
