Herman Kahn Saw the Future Coming — He Just Didn't See the Bill

There is a particular kind of prophet who gets everything right except the part that actually affects your daily life. Herman Kahn was that prophet. He was the Babe Ruth of futurism — pointed at the bleachers, swung, connected — and then somehow concluded that the ball would land in a hammock where a well-rested American worker was sipping lemonade at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.

He was so close, Herman. So agonizingly, cosmically close.

The Man Who Basically Had a Crystal Ball (With One Fatal Crack)

Kahn was no crackpot. He was a genuine heavyweight intellect at the RAND Corporation, the Santa Monica think-tank where very serious people got paid very serious money to think very seriously about the future. In 1967, he and co-author Anthony Wiener published The Year 2000, a sprawling forecast of what American life would look like at the turn of the millennium. It was ambitious. It was rigorous. It was, in significant stretches, almost spookily correct.

Laser surgery? Kahn flagged it. Satellite television beaming hundreds of channels into suburban living rooms? Flagged. The ability to order goods remotely via a networked computer terminal — what we might casually call online shopping? Flagged, described, practically gift-wrapped. The man was sitting in a room in 1967, surrounded by rotary phones and cigarette smoke, and he essentially sketched out the Amazon checkout page.

For this, Herman Kahn deserves a monument. A tasteful one. Maybe outside a Best Buy.

Now, About That 26-Hour Workweek...

Here is where our story takes a sharp left into the ditch.

Kahn was equally confident — equally confident, mind you, with the same authoritative tone he'd used to describe satellite TV — that all this magnificent technology would liberate the American worker from the grinding tyranny of the time clock. By the year 2000, he projected, the average American would be clocking roughly 26 hours a week. Not 40. Not 50. Twenty-six. As in, less than four days' worth of what most Americans were already working in 1967.

The logic was not entirely unreasonable, in a charmingly naive way. Automation would handle the drudgery. Computers would eliminate inefficiency. Productivity gains would be passed along to workers in the form of — and here Kahn's pen practically skips across the page with delight — leisure. Americans, freed from the yoke of overwork, would pursue hobbies, spend time with their families, and generally flourish in a golden age of civilized idleness.

Reader, they did not flourish in a golden age of civilized idleness.

What the Computers Actually Did to Our Schedules

By the year 2000, the average American was working more hours than in 1967, not fewer. The laptop, that beautiful nightmare, had dissolved the wall between office and home entirely. Email meant your boss could reach you at 11 p.m. on a Sunday. The very networked computer terminal Kahn had correctly predicted would let you shop from your kitchen also let your kitchen become your office, your second office, and your third office simultaneously.

The productivity gains arrived right on schedule. The leisure did not come with them. Instead, the gains were quietly pocketed elsewhere while the American worker got a slightly faster internet connection and the privilege of answering Slack messages during dinner.

Kahn had essentially predicted that someone would invent a faster horse and that everyone would therefore choose to ride less. What actually happened is that everyone got a faster horse and their employer immediately scheduled more riding.

The Tragicomedy of Being 80% Right

What makes Kahn's miscalculation so magnificently, almost artistically wrong is that it wasn't a fringe belief. The leisure society thesis was the conventional wisdom among forward-thinkers of the 1960s. President Nixon's own advisors were wrestling with what Americans would do with all their surplus free time. Senate subcommittees held hearings on the looming crisis of leisure. Scholars fretted that a 20-hour workweek would leave the national character adrift.

They were solving the wrong problem with tremendous intellectual energy. It's the policy equivalent of spending years engineering an umbrella that deflects meteors.

To be fair to Kahn — and we at The Prophets Were Wrong (Mostly) do try to be fair, even when it's funnier not to be — he was extrapolating from real trends. Hours worked had been declining through much of the early 20th century. The eight-hour day was a relatively recent hard-won achievement. There was genuine reason to believe the curve would keep bending toward rest.

What Kahn didn't fully model was the capacity of American economic culture to treat productivity as a floor rather than a ceiling, and to greet every labor-saving technology not as a gift of time but as an invitation to produce more with the same hours — or more hours still.

The Prophet's Ledger

So where does that leave Herman Kahn in the annals of forecasting?

The technology column is genuinely stunning. Laser eye surgery has corrected the vision of tens of millions of Americans. Satellite and cable television reshaped entertainment entirely. Online retail has hollowed out Main Streets from Bangor to Bakersfield. He saw those coming from 33 years out, which is the kind of forecasting that would get you a Netflix documentary today.

The labor column is a different story. The 26-hour workweek remains, as of this writing, a fantasy — the kind of thing people mention wistfully at parties before someone checks their work email under the table.

Kahn got the what right and the so what completely backwards. The machines arrived. The hours didn't shrink. And the laser that was supposed to represent mankind's mastery over drudgery is now mostly used to fix the vision of people who've strained their eyes staring at screens during their 50-hour weeks.

Genius, Herman. Absolute genius. Mostly.