In ancient Greece, Aristotle was big on “noble leisure”, but modern Greece might need a refresher, having just introduced a six-day, 48-hour working week. Opponents have described the measure as “barbaric”, an erosion of workers’ rights in a country that already works the longest hours in Europe.

I have been thinking a lot about work recently. OK, I am not exactly formulating an incisive critique of the labour market (most of my thoughts are of dinner or pigeons), but I have been wondering why we still do so much of it.

I studied economics for a brief, inglorious time 30 years ago – with about as much understanding as a pigeon, actually – but the one bit that stuck was John Maynard Keynes’s assertion that, in future, we would work 15-hour weeks. In 1930, in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, he argued (not entirely seriously; it was originally an after-dinner speech) that income from capital and technological progress would, within two generations, make work optional. Most people would do a bit (“Three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy........

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