The primary goal of technological advancement should be to increase people's efficiency so that they have more leisure time.Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for t

It is popularly believed that the major goal of technological advancement ought to be to enhance people's efficiency in order to give them more spare time. Although I completely concur with the first part of the claim, I disagree with the second part of the prompt because of the reasons which will be discussed in details below.

To begin with, many economists suggest that the main goal of contemporary society is to increase our efficiency and in today’s conditions it is possible only with technological advancement owing to the fact that cheap labor today is unavailable in many countries; and even China has shifted its attention to technological development. But why do we strive to increase productivity? The answer is simple than higher efficiency of employee is than more goods and services one may create. In other words, then higher productivity than more wealth is generated by workers, than more goods and services may be sold and bought and then higher GDP per capita, which has direct impact on level of life of people in the country, is. For instance, the most productive countries in the world are the United State of America, Japan, Germany all of those countries are reach because they have a serious technological advantage over their rivals.

However, it is mistaken to believe that this increase in employees' effectiveness will be inevitably used to give more free time to the workers. The reason is that the main result and goal of the increase in productivity is generating more wealth for the employer who often possesses the facilities, equipment and heavily invests money in buying new technologies which ought to create more wealth and earn more money to him or her. To illustrate an idea we may take a look at our recent past in the middle of the 1990s when efficiency of work of many workers have doubled because of introduction of computers which were connected to the internet. In fact, people's time at work slightly increase, at least statistically, because today they are sometimes may work at home as well. In other words, the increase in efficiency does not inevitably lead to improvement in lives of employees.

Of course, there is important to notice that the mankind has examples when increase in efficiency led to decrease in time spent at work. For instance, at the beginning of the XX century the length of working shits at manufacturing was from 12 to 14 hours per day. The length of shirts as well as working conditions were significantly improved in the 1920 and 1930s and amount of time spent at work has decrease to 9 or even 8 hours per day at least in the Soviet Union and Germany; however, it will be mistakenly believe that this improvement was automatically caused by the increase in people's productivity, in fact, it had increased twenty years ago, but because workers were united by those unacceptable conditions started to protest and boycott. Business underwent serious loses because of the stopped manufacturing and thus shortened the time at work.

In conclusion, although I heartedly agree with the stance that the primary goal of technological advancement is to increase people's productivity, I disagree with the second part due to the fact that enhance in efficiency leads to creation more wealth and thus money for owners; so, it is highly unlikely that businessmen will sacrifice their profit to give employees more time for leisure.