Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)(evonomics.com)

Cut my queue in half with a Zendesk macro bot and the reward was a bigger queue, not shorter shifts.

Every productivity tool I have shipped since 2019 quietly got reabsorbed into longer hours, not shorter ones.

Agreed, the obsession with headcount masks what tools can actually absorb. My team of four ships what used to take twelve, and the right answer was a four-day week, not hiring eight more people to fill the calendar.

What productivity threshold would your exec team need to hit before seriously considering a 32-hour week pilot?

When was the 40-hour week last meaningfully shortened, and what made that political fight winnable then but not now?

If a feature ships and nobody notices the work it removed, does your team track time-not-spent anywhere, or only features added?

Velocity metrics caught this in my own team: we shipped an agent that cut a workflow from 40 minutes to 4, and the reward was three more workflows to automate, not an afternoon off. The productivity dividend keeps getting reinvested into more scope, never into less work, because nobody measures the absence of a task.