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Free market advocates laugh at the 35 hour work week in the same manner they laugh at the 40 hour work week. These are arbitrary designations that literally set the working hours of government and union employees and impact the decisions of most other employers and employees. (Do you allow overtime, should you work overtime, does this mean I need to get a second job, ect.?) For anyone who's ever been self-employed or worked more than one job at time, the notion of any X-hour work week is far removed from reality. I'm a young attorney and I can say personally that for myself, happiness is working for myself and having the time to spend with my family. For other attorneys, happiness is that big paycheck down the road when they make partner.
Second, I think you make an incorrect assumption about free market advocates. I don't know of anyone who says the market will leave no one behind- rather, the free market produces the most prosperity for the greatest number of people. The question of just what to do about those at the bottom should be a separate question from how and why the government interferes in the market. There's no free market utopia waiting over the rainbow, only the real world where every regulation the government puts in place impacts the market.
That seems to me like the essential tension between liberal and conservative thought. Markets, which almost seem like they should be orthogonal to that question, have started to be seen more clearly as operating best in Mill's world. Obviously your appreciation of the market is not a conservative one, and how could it be? Adding "but here, but here, but here" to the market is conservative, but not free.
I just don't agree that an unfettered free market will someday produce abundance for all people. I respect that you really, really think that. But too often with libertarians, I find, the way to demonstrate their belief in the superiority of unfettered markets is to act as though the things that markets bestow are inherently what we should pursue. So free market advocates laugh at the French for having a 35 hour work week, and point to their lower productivity. But this assumes that productivity is the most desirable outcome of all work, and ignores the notion that perhaps the French merely value additional time over productivity. This is the question begging that I object to.
I don't think humans create perfect systems, and while I will listen to arguments that the free market produces more abundance than poverty, I find the idea that no one will be left behind if we just let the market do what it will contrary to reality.
But that's an empirical question. The problem is, it can't be solved, so long as some can say a) "the markets are not free, and that is why there are still suffering"; which insists that in order to know the value of a truly free market, we've got to adopt it. And b), "See-- suffering." "Wait, we're not there yet...." As long as the free market utopian can push the time boundary farther and farther into the distance, theres no way for his vision to be disproven. This is, after all, the failure of all teleology. The referent to reality can stay safely locked away in the future as long as you want it to.
I'm cool with being a bit of an asshole but I think these questions have relavence.
Not to speak for Will or anything, but I imagine that's why he's so interested in happiness research: productivity is NOT a realistic way to measure the success of a society, but happiness is. If lower GDP & productivity and 35 hour work weeks and nationalized health care and all of that lead to more happiness, you're on to something. But if not, then...
Are 'traditionalists' really committed to any such claim? The strongest form of conservatism, to my mind, is G.A. Cohen's claim that we shouldn't assess outcomes simply according to net value. What matters, to the Cohen-conservative, is to preserve the valuable things that already exist. They might thus grant that radical change could bring about a better world; they just don't consider this desirable. (No more than a parent would desire to have their actual children replaced by superior alternatives.)
That's what I'm saying. I just think that there is a powerful meme that this is the case, among a certain kind of libertarian teleologist, and I don't agree. I don't mean to tar Will with a brush that I shouldn't.