Scaramucci’s AI Workweek Promise Runs Into a 1930 Prediction That Fizzled

Anthony Scaramucci says artificial intelligence (AI) will hand American workers a three or four day workweek within their lifetimes, not the economic crisis critics keep predicting. The SkyBridge Capital founder and former White House communications director made the case in a post on X this month, dismissing talk of an AI driven collapse as overblown.

He is not the first person to promise that machines will buy back people’s time. A British economist made almost the identical bet ninety six years ago, and most of it still has not shown up.

The Three-Day Pitch

Anthony Scaramucci argued that AI could compress the standard workweek without hurting output. “If AI does everything we expect, we’re moving to a three or four day work week in our lifetimes,” he wrote, adding that people would gain “more time for recreation” and that society would place “more value on human interaction.”

It was not a new theme for him. In June, Scaramucci wrote that AI could enable a “four or even three day workweek,” with people working “20 to 40 percent less” while keeping similar living standards. Run the arithmetic on an eight hour day and it lines up almost exactly: a three day week is 24 hours, a four day week is 32, matching a 20 to 40 percent cut off a standard 40 hour week.

He was just as quick to wave off the doom side of the argument.

The apocalyptic framing is the wrong framing. Don’t buy the AI drama.

Scaramucci wrote that in the same post, then reached for two historical comparisons. He pointed to old predictions that the world would run out of oil, and to the food shortage that Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth century economist, warned would follow population growth. “We got big and fat thanks to food technology,” he said, arguing that innovation keeps solving crises that once looked inevitable. It is something of a habit for him. He has spent recent weeks making bold calls across markets, including defending Michael Saylor’s bitcoin strategy and predicting a rally on CNBC.

A British Economist Made the Same Bet in 1930

Scaramucci’s timeline is new. The argument underneath it is not.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, published an essay called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” He predicted that wealth in industrial countries would rise “between 4 and 8 times as high as it is today” within a hundred years, a claim laid out in a 1930 essay predicting a fifteen hour workweek. Once machines did the heavy lifting, Keynes figured, people would simply choose to work about 15 hours a week and spend the rest of their time on leisure.

The parallel is close to exact: a credentialed, comfortable voice points at compounding technological gains and predicts people will simply choose to work less. Keynes had a deadline too. His hundred years lands around 2030, four years from now, and nothing in the data suggests the average workweek is anywhere near falling from roughly 40 hours to 15.

Why the Extra Wealth Never Bought Free Time

Economists have spent years asking why Keynes got the money right and the hours wrong. A 2024 reappraisal of Keynes’ workweek theory, published in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Monthly Labor Review and built on research by economist Jörg Bibow, lays out several reasons the 15 hour week never landed. People kept choosing more spending over more downtime. Hobbies got pricier instead of cheaper, replacing the low cost conversation and contemplation Keynes had imagined filling all that free time.

The raw numbers back it up. Americans worked about 38 hours a week on average in 1950, according to figures cited by NPR, and hours have moved only modestly since, nowhere close to Keynes’ 15. The wealth showed up almost exactly as forecast. The spare time got spent on more stuff instead.

AI Layoffs Are Not Waiting for the Long Run

Whatever happens to the workweek by 2030, the layoff numbers for right now are already in. AI was the top cited reason for job cuts in the United States for the second straight month in April, according to a report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Employers announced 21,490 AI attributed cuts that month, about 26 percent of the 83,387 total job cuts logged in April.

AI has now been blamed for 49,135 cuts through April, roughly 16 percent of everything announced in 2026, up from 13 percent through March. That puts it behind only market and economic conditions and company closings as a stated cause. Hiring did not pick up any slack. Employers slashed hiring plans by 69 percent in April, to just 10,049 positions.

Technology absorbed the biggest share of the damage. CBS News reported the sector accounted for 33,361 of April’s job cuts, more than any other industry that month. Wall Street has not treated the wave as uniformly bad news, either. CBS also noted that shares of sneaker maker Allbirds jumped roughly 600 percent after the company announced plans to pivot away from footwear and toward AI, a reminder that the reward for leaning into automation can land on shareholders long before it reaches anyone’s calendar.

Walmart Inc. (NYSE:WMT) has taken a different public stance, telling its own staff that AI would improve jobs rather than eliminate them, even as Challenger’s tally puts AI atop the layoff list for a second month running.

Warren’s Push for Guardrails Before Any Payoff

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is not waiting to see how the Keynes rerun plays out. In May, she posed a blunt hypothetical in a post on X: “If you had a magic wand and could say, AI is coming, CEOs are predicting that mass layoffs are coming, what would you do?” A few weeks later she went further: “If AI could disrupt half the workforce, we can’t wait until people lose their jobs to act.”

Her answer comes in policy form. Warren has called for:

• Universal health care decoupled from employment, so losing a job does not mean losing coverage
• Post secondary education made “free or nearly free” so displaced workers can retrain without new debt
• Stronger unemployment insurance to carry laid off workers through the transition
• New taxes on the data centers powering AI, aimed at firms she says are profiting from the disruption

In March, Warren pressed eight major employers, including Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) and Target Corp. (NYSE:TGT), on layoffs announced despite strong earnings and fresh tax breaks, giving them until March 30 to explain the cuts. Meta, one of the eight, has since said its own AI infrastructure spending is part of what is squeezing staffing, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg citing the balance between computing investment and headcount.

Which Jobs Does Scaramucci Think Survive?

Scaramucci’s answer: jobs built on human presence and empathy hold up best, and some future roles may not resemble traditional jobs at all, built more around recreation and personal connection than routine output. He expects the labor market to sort people toward whatever machines still cannot fake.

“People migrating into jobs that require a human touch, a human presence,” he said in a video accompanying his post. “Some of those jobs won’t even look like jobs in the traditional sense.” In the same video, he suggested some future occupations could be recreational in nature as AI absorbs more routine tasks.

Other finance figures are pointing workers in a related direction. Mark Cuban has been advising new graduates to start their job hunt at small businesses rather than large corporations, a smaller scale version of the same bet that hands on, human centered work holds up best.

Keynes’ hundred year deadline still has four years left to run. Warren, for her part, has already called the current AI investment boom a bubble with echoes of the last one, telling a Senate Banking Committee event in April that the parallels to the 2008 financial crisis are striking. Whether Scaramucci’s version ends differently from Keynes’ will not be settled by another post on X. It gets tested one Challenger Gray report at a time.