The various reasons why serious people™ might not want to support this idea of working less to fix unemployment:
- they are staying in the 'safe zone' of arguing for maximum GDP, and while working less might lead to higher GDP at the margin we could easily end up with most people working and therefore spending less, which means lower GDP.
- it is not coming from someone with the proper credentials.
- the US would stop getting free wealth from printing money.
- fear and uncertainty towards change.
- they are bad at economics and assume that if "skilled" people work less, we will end up with less money in circulation, fewer jobs, and a lower standard of living for those who are working. The 'lack of wealth' idea.
This last should be explained in more detail. People are used to the idea of "roles" that people have, which has only gotten worse with the greater diversity of jobs and increase in knowledge in society which means more specialization. As a result, they tend to think of other people in a specific role, and see their relationship with other people as that of customer and seller.
In this view, if other people work harder, this helps customers.
This is a little bit right but mostly wrong, and reflects poor people's thinking. Employees may work long hours, but there is absolutely no need for this to be reflected as lower prices for customers. Just look at Apple.
So in concentrating on this relationship, people disregard a different one which at many times, including now, has a more important effect on society: that of competitors for a limited amount of paid work. The lower share of national income going to wages is a symptom, not the cause, of this insufficient amount of work.
Some people say that if we just give people money, we will have plenty of work to do even with the available diversity of products. This is of course what some countries do, but many of them still have high unemployment because while it means more poor people buying whatever, the higher taxes that are usually required also mean fewer rich people buying yachts and financial market advice from thousands of analysts. Since there is no strong support in the US for more welfare, we have to admit that there are not enough things being invented that rich people want to buy.
Since many rich people don't want to spend their money, and some live famously frugal lifestyles, this failure in the creative capabilities of entrepreneurs is expected.
Discussions like the recent one about "having it all" show that there are many serious people who would like to work less, they just can't imagine how to get society to reach that state. The type of publications that such people read use reputation in their selection criteria for guest posts though and no one with a reputation seems willing to support this idea, so those people will just have to accept that their prejudices are causing them to harm society by working too much and not questioning their assumptions ("lack of wealth") about why they should do so, and that this contributes to higher crime rates, a decline in human intelligence from downward evolutionary pressure, unnecessary poverty, high financial sector profits, etc.
So finally, what we can do in this situation.
First, the idea of reputation is one reason this problem continues to persist despite the solution having been found. The potential for it to cause problems is not exactly a new discovery but this point must be mentioned.
The actions we can take consist of avoiding wasteful spending that just goes to corporate profits, while still earning as much as you can except if you choose to work less. This applies to all types of spending, including health care and education.
More important though is promoting these values of working and spending less, as the understanding that this is the "right thing to do" is essential for anyone on a career track to be able to work less without sacrificing anything. Since this is not fundamentally very different from other flexible work policies, it shouldn't be too hard to get business leaders to accept the idea but it won't happen effortlessly either.
The younger generations have already been establishing ways of judging success that don't involve money. We just need to counter the wave of stupidity that results from people thinking that economic problems, or the US national debt, are due to a lack of wealth.
Condensing the important points into a sharable form will take work and depends on how people think about things and so on, maybe someone can do this later. Something similar for business leaders to refer to might also help, but I have even less of an idea of what form this would take for them. Marketing organizations find that social contacts are a trusted source of information compared to, say, advertisements or discussion forums but resources still need to be available in case of gaps in knowledge or questions about why it works.
Oh, and this: people think that by working harder, it gives them resources to help anyone they know who needs help. Or alternately, it causes people to have a good impression of anyone with similar characteristics. In both cases, the specific benefit is seen as more important than giving a random person the opportunity to do paid work, and people see this as justified since they think that the average competence or moral virtue of people they know is higher than for the entire population—the "we are awesome" effect, which I guess should exist no matter what the cultural bias is for one's self-perception of performance compared to the average. But this probably isn't as important as the "lack of wealth" idea.
Stating the obvious, problems exist in the world and these contribute to people feeling that the world is unfair or that people cannot be trusted. Many of these problems have an economic origin; many others are the result of inaccurate metrics or signals. In this environment, outcomes are uncertain and it can sometimes be difficult to judge someone's intentions when they do not act as we expect.
I was going to link to the song "Barbie Girl" by Aqua but decided not to before posting this. As an edit, instead I will link to/mention the song Nessaja by Scooter, and the anime Mahoromatic which I never watched but did read the description of.
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