Jeb Bush and longer working hours: gaffesplainer 2016

Jeb Bush’s stated goal of 4 percent annual GDP growth, though unrealistic, in general sounds nice. But during a New Hampshire Union Leader interview live-streamed on Periscope, Bush got granular about his plan, revealing that part of the dream is for Americans to work longer hours. The Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign have both smelled gaffe and responded with mocking counter press releases, depicting Jeb as smug and out of touch.

When viewed in full context, it’s pretty clear that Bush really was saying that in his administration the typical employed person will have a longer workweek. He sees this as part of a larger strategy of raising the labor supply:

My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this rut that we’re in.

One odd aspect of Bush’s remarks is that average weekly hours on the job is one of the few labor market indicators that has fully recovered from the disastrous recession the economy fell into during George W. Bush’s final year in office.

A longer-running though less up-to-date time series shows average annual hours worked and offers additional historical perspective:

Here we see that in the old days of rapid productivity and wage growth, average annual hours worked tended to fall steadily, as a more prosperous America chose to take some of its additional prosperity in the form of leisure time. Jeb Bush, for example, pulls in about $50,000 per speech, at which rate a person could live comfortably working less than 100 hours per year.

An international perspective tells a similar tale. Countries with longer average annual hours worked than America’s tend to be considerably poorer, with populations compensating for a lack of wages by piling on long hours:

According to the DNC he sure did, offering “easily one of the most out-of-touch comments we’ve heard so far this cycle.”

Hillary Clinton rebutted Bush with this not-exactly-on-point chart:

In Bush’s defense, the last time the United States regularly saw episodes of 4 percent growth was back when Bill Clinton was president, and part of the story then was an increase in average annual hours worked. The more time people put in on the job, the higher GDP gets.

At the time this was typically offered as a critique of the 1990s economy (see Juliet Schor’s books The Overworked American and The Overspent American) on the theory that economic growth obtained through more toil rather than higher hourly pay is illusory.

No. So far Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign has not released any policy proposals whatsoever, whether on this or any other subject.

He does have an infographic showing that the Florida economy grew rapidly when he was governor, though this was largely because he perfectly timed an epic housing bubble.