The sad truth about work (it doesn't need to be like this)

When I was 16 years old, I landed my first real job. It was a horrible telemarketing job where we sat in this building right here in windowless rooms and peddled lotteries and magazine subscriptions to mainly old people. Looking back, I’m not very proud of the work that I did there. But I did learn how to drink coffee while I worked there.

So I'm in the middle of transitioning from being a lawyer to becoming a filmmaker. This career transition has made me think a lot about jobs and the role work plays in our lives. And in thinking about that, I’ve kept coming back to the work I did in this building right here, and I will explain why I keep coming back to that horrible telemarketing job. But first, I want to show you something. If you get to live until you're 82 years old, then 984 is the number of months you will get in your life. And here to my left, you have a visual representation of that. These 984 dots, they represent your life. The red dots in the middle, they represent the months of your life when you will be working. 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, or even more. Certainly, it's not news to anyone that we spend huge parts of our lives working.

But what I find a little bit odd is that we almost never ask this question: Is it really necessary for us to let work take up such huge parts of our lives? In the 1950s, around 200,000 people worked in the Swedish forests, in forests like this. Sawing and cutting trees and doing all that stuff. But just 20 years later, the tractor and the chainsaw, and other innovations had reduced that number from 200,000 to just around 50,000. Then, 50 years after that, the single grip harvester and other innovations had reduced that number further to just around 15,000.

So what happened in the forest industry, i.e. reducing the workforce from around 200,000 to around 15,000 is nothing short of remarkable. But the same has happened across a multitude of industries during the 20th century. Thanks to new technologies, we're able to produce vast amounts of stuff with comparatively very little effort. In my country, Sweden, productivity has gone up around 20 times since the 19th century. Put differently, things that took 20 workers to produce in the beginning of the 19th century can today be produced by only one worker.

And this mind-blowing increase in productivity did make it possible for our parents' generations, our grandparents and grand grandparents, to radically improve their lives in two main ways. First of all, their incomes and materials standard of living increased. But second of all, these generations were also able to start working much less. During the 20’s here in Sweden, we went from working 12 hours a day to 8 hours a day. During the 30’s, we gave everyone the right to take a couple of weeks vacation. During the 60’s we stopped working on Saturdays. In the 70’s we expanded the right to take parental leave and we lowered the retirement age from 67 to 65 here in Sweden.

But then, in the 70’s, something happened. Productivity didn't stop increasing. It has actually doubled since then. But since then we've stopped using the increased productivity to improve our lives. Since the 70’s, wages haven't increased nearly as much as the productivity gains and in general, we don't work less today than we did during the 70’s. In Sweden, by some accounts, if we start raising the retirement age, we will actually work more today. So here's a huge conundrum, right? If we produce twice as much per person today compared to the 70’s, but we don't earn twice as much or work half as much, where has all the value of all that extra production gone?

Recently, an apartment in that building sold for around €6 million. So to the question where the value from all that additional productivity has gone, here's part of your answer. It has gone to the richest capital owners like the people who can afford apartments like that. Let's imagine that it's the 1980’s right now and that these 100 people represent the world's population. This man in the top, he represents the richest 1% of the world. These 50 people in the bottom, they represent the poorest half of the world. Let's then fast forward from the 80’s to today.

Since then, productivity has almost doubled, creating a lot of new wealth. But out of all of that new wealth, the richest 1% of the world has captured close to twice as much as the