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June 25, 2026 40 mins

Keynes predicted we'd be working 15-hour weeks by now. So what went wrong? Does it even matter?

In this episode, Ben sits down with Dan Hamermesh, one of the most prolific and wide-ranging labor economists of the past half century, to explore questions the field rarely asks: Why do Americans work more than anyone else in the rich world? What do we actually do with leisure when we get it?

Topics covered:

  • Why cutting work hours wouldn't make us poor, and why policy, not technology, might be the only realistic path to change
  • The "greedy jobs" debate, and what's driving long hours at the top
  • What people do with extra leisure time
  • The coordination failure at the heart of overwork

About Dan Hamermesh: Dan Hamermesh is an economist whose career has spanned more than five decades, with foundational contributions to labor economics, the study of time use, and the economics of beauty and discrimination. He is the author of Beauty Pays and Spending Time, among other books, and has been a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Barnard, and elsewhere.

Check out Dan's books Beauty Pays and Spending Time

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