6 Days a Week

My father, a Harvard trained astrophysicist who died in 1983 had many brilliant ideas. One of them was the six day week. The six day week is one of those simple, brilliant changes that we could institute in society in order to gain four extra days of rest per month without causing any changes in GDP. How? By saving fixed assets namely schools, roads, offices, factories, clinics, etc.

The originality of his idea was to think about why is it that not only do we rest on Saturday and Sunday but that we allow fixed assets to rest as well. His solution was simple, if we randomly divided the population of a country into three groups and had these group rotate so that at each moment in time two groups are working and one is resting while fixed assets are being used all the time ALL OF US COULD WORK 4 DAYS A WEEK AND REST TWO, while GDP would stay the same. People like the French for example who are constantly thinking of ways of working less could adopt this.