It's very telling that the US is losing technology leadership in so many areas, and instead of opening our eyes as a group and trying to improve, we're just going down the same road of putting in long hours.
I guess when you're raised in a culture that rate the number of hours you put in ahead of how much you get done and how high the quality of your work is, you end up being a butt-in-seat staffer rather than someone who just gets things done.
As far as I can tell, we aren't losing technology leadership to countries that have shorter workweeks than ours. If anything, the opposite appears to be true to me (India, China, nations from the former USSR).
it creates the culture as seen in the office space movie "in a given week, I do about 15 minutes worth of work".
Take a simple form, and a programmer in a corporate environment will tell you that it'll take them a week to finish. That same programmer, working for themselves would finish that same form in a couple of hours.
There's some evidence Americans are working fewer hours; for example figure 1 on p. 9 of this survey shows a slight decline in hours worked from 1975-2003:
Still, do you want people to be forced to work fewer hours (as in some other countries), or simply to have the option?
Because if you want to maximize your leisure time, you can make certain career and consumption choices to do so. For example, if you wanted to live with only the amenities people had in the 1970s or 1950s, you could choose to work significantly less than 40 hours a week.
