@flabdablet said:
It's a huge problem. If everybody were content with the living standards of the 60s or 70s then economic growth would stall, unemployment would skyrocket and all the industrialized countries would suffer a massive depression.
Unemployment would skyrocket only if every employed person worked the same weekly hours as now. See, technology makes every worker more productive. So, we can either produce more, or work less. Currently we produce more. If we worked less, we could do so either by having each person work less, or by having only some people work. The latter option is called "high unemployment", and we don't like it. The former option, with shorter working hours, is less efficient, because every employee has to be trained, so employers don't like it.
However, it should be possible to prohibit employers from hiring the same employee for more than, say, 25 hours a week, instead of 45 or 37.5. In that case, everybody's living standard would instantly drop, but unemployment would not skyrocket. Economic growth would not stall, as it is a result of the development of technology. Scientists can keep developing technologies even for 25 hours a week.
The problem would be that people would be bored.