"In thirty years America will be a post-industrial society with a per capita income of $ 7,500. There will be only four work days a week of seven hours per day. The year will be comprised of 39 work weeks and 13 weeks of vacation. With weekends and holidays this makes 147 work days a year and 218 free days. All this within a single generation."
From The American Challenge by Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber published in 1967. Too bad this will never happen since most managers are workaholics.
The most famous prediction along those lines surely is Keynes' essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren from 1930 [1], in which he entertained the notion that "a hundred years hence" "the economic problem may be solved", "the standard of life in progressive countries [...] will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day", and would work "Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week", but mainly to stave off boredom.
This inspired the book How Much Is Enough? by Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky and his brother [2].
Keynes' essay had some non-PC parts: he feared
> a nervous breakdown of the sort which is already common enough in England and the United States amongst the wives of the well-to-do classes, unfortunate women, many of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations — who cannot find it sufficiently amusing, when deprived of the spur of economic necessity, to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing.
It also had some utopian dreams:
> The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
)
I'm my estimation - you can almost live this way if you limit your expectations to someone from 1967 - limited food choices, single car, small home, frugal car-based vacations and heathy living.
From The American Challenge by Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber published in 1967. Too bad this will never happen since most managers are workaholics.