>I do not think that you can explain the shift away... looking at the statistics, I find this not to be the case, at least not in the long term. The real movement in working >hours is that there was a sharp turn upwards from the mid eighties, but that the longer term trend (say from 1947 onwards) is downwards. In Britain and the US, the >upward shift in the eighties has been reversed. Most people are remembering the eighties increase, and projecting it backwards, without really taking on board how >much longer people used to work.
Flabbergasted. All I can say to this rather glib framework shifting is that 1947 is not 1960. If you change the time frame, of course the numbers are different. That doesn't support your original argument, it advances a new case that is irrelevant to the original context. My reading of the statistics, by the way, is not from secondary literature. It's from Statscan, BLS, OECD, ILO, etc.
The Sandwichman