Throughout the past year, we have heard paid leave debated in state houses and on the campaign trail. I am all in favor of paid leave. As I have argued elsewhere, it would enable more people, especially those in lower-paid jobs, to take time off to deal with a serious illness or the care of another family member, including a newborn child. But we shouldn’t stop with paid leave. We should also consider shortening the standard work week. Such a step would be gender neutral and would not discriminate between the very different kinds of time pressures faced by adults. It might even help to create more jobs.

The standard work week is 40 hours -- 8 hours a day for five days a week. It’s been that way for a long time. Back in 1900, the typical factory worker spent 53 hours on the job, more than a third more hours than we spend today. The Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938, and set maximum hours at 40 per week. Amazingly, more than three quarters of a century after passage of the FLSA, there has been no further decline in the standard work week. Not only has the legal standard remained unchanged, but 40 hours has become the social and cultural norm.

What’s going on here? Economists predicted that as we became more prosperous we would choose to work fewer hours. That hasn’t happened. Instead we have kept on working at about the same pace as we did earlier in our history, but have poured all of the gains from productivity growth into ever-higher levels of consumption – bigger houses, more electronic gadgets, fancier cars. With increased prosperity, people are buying more and more stuff, but they don’t have any more time to enjoy it. A reduction in the standard work week would improve the quality of life, especially for those in hourly jobs who have benefitted hardly at all from economic growth in recent decades.

Two-earner couples would also benefit. Among couples between the ages of 25 and 54, the number of hours worked increased by 20 percent between 1969 and 2000, from 56 hours to 67 hours (for both husband and wife combined). As Heather Boushey notes in her new book, Finding Time, we no longer live in a world where there is a “the silent partner” in every business enterprise, the iconic “American Wife,” who takes care of the children and the millions of details of daily living. With a shorter work week, both men and women would have more time for everything from cutting the grass to cooking dinner with no presumption about who does what. Although much of the debate this year has been about work-family balance, empty nesters or singles without young children might also welcome a shorter work week. For them it would provide the chance to follow their dream of becoming an artist, a boat builder, or the creator of their own small business.

Shorter hours could have another benefit and that is more jobs for workers who would otherwise be left behind by technological change. Many economists believe that as existing jobs are replaced by machines and artificial intelligence, new jobs will be created in technical, management, and service fields. But will this happen fast enough or at sufficient scale to reemploy all those who now find themselves without decent-paying work? I doubt it. A shorter work week might help to spread the available jobs around. Germany and other European countries, along with a few U.S. states used this strategy during the Great Recession. It kept more people on the job but at shorter hours and reduced unemployment. Using a similar strategy to deal with automation and long-term joblessness, although controversial, should not be dismissed out of hand.

Of course, shorter hours can mean lower total pay. But in one typical survey published in the Monthly Labor Review, 28 percent of the respondents said they would give up a day’s pay for one fewer day of work per week. Any new movement to reduce the work week would need to be phased in slowly, with flexibility for both employers and employees to negotiate adjustments around the standard. Yet if done correctly, the transition could be accomplished with little or no reduction in wages, just smaller raises as a bigger slice of any productivity improvement was invested in more free time. When Henry Ford reduced the work week from 6 to 5 days in 1926, he did not cut wages; he assumed that both productivity and consumption would rise, and his example encouraged other employers to follow suit.

I am not talking about reducing hours for those of us who want to spend long hours at work because we enjoy it. We would still be free to work 24/7, tied to our electronic devices, and no longer knowing exactly when work begins and ends. A new hours standard would primarily affect hourly (nonexempt) employees. These are the people in the less glamourous jobs at the bottom of the ladder, many of them single parents. Right now they finish work exhausted only to come home to a “second shift” that may be equally exhausting. A reduction in the standard workweek would almost certainly improve the quality of life for these hard-pressed and overworked Americans.

By all means, let’s enact a paid leave policy, but let’s also debate some even bigger ideas – ones that could lead to greater work-life balance now, and more job opportunities in the longer run.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared on The Washington Post's In Theory Blog.

April 15 is tax day, but not many Americans will be lining up at the post office or logging onto TurboTax as midnight approaches. Taxpayers who receive refunds often file well ahead of the April 15 deadline. And according to new research, many of those refund dollars are already spent or spoken for.

Early filing is particularly common among taxpayers who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which supplements earnings for low-income workers and their families. EITC recipients often receive substantial refunds, especially in relation to their income. According to new data available through our EITC Interactive, nationwide 26.8 million taxpayers benefited from the EITC for the 2013 tax year, and they claimed a total of $64.7 billion from the credit. Combined with other credits and over-withholding these families received, the average refund for EITC filers topped $4,100 that year. As the accompanying map shows, that amount approached $4,500 or more in many southern states.

I thought of those large refunds while reading a fascinating new book by sociologist Kathryn Edin and her colleagues, titled, It’s Not Like I’m Poor: How Working Families Make Ends Meet in a Post-Welfare World. The book provides insights from in-depth interviews with 115 families with children in the Boston area who claimed the EITC. It examines their household budgets and how the families view and use the credit. The authors find that these families rely greatly on their tax refunds to close the gap between the wages they earn and the daily costs of living in an expensive region like Greater Boston. For some, a large tax refund also enabled them to purchase something normally confined to middle-class families, such as a special birthday present for a child or dinner out at a restaurant.

One of the authors’ central findings, however, was that EITC recipients bear a considerable amount of debt—95 percent of the families studied had debt of some kind. The most common (66%) was credit card debt, with the typical family owing nearly $2,000. Considerable shares of families also had utility, car, or student loan debt.

Their indebtedness was not surprising given that wages covered on average only about two-thirds of monthly expenditures. The authors classified one-quarter of families’ refund spending as dedicated to debt/bills, but other ways families  spend the money—such as repairing a car or paying ahead on bills—point to the lack of financial cushion EITC recipients endure throughout the year.

For the families Edin and colleagues studied, the average tax refund represented a staggering three months of earnings. Despite that, the authors report that many families expressed that they preferred the "windfall" versus receipt of payments over several months, partly because the lump sum held out the prospect of helping them save. But one has to wonder if the EITC, now routinely referred to as the nation's most effective anti-poverty policy, best supports families' financial security in this form, as its recipients fall further behind each month.

We should experiment with new ways of delivering EITC recipients' tax refunds that preserve some of its windfall aspect while also periodically delivering portions of the credit throughout the year. A small periodic payment pilot is underway in Chicago, and early findings suggest that advance payments of taxpayers' anticipated EITC helped them meet basic needs, pay off debt, and reduce financial stress relative to similar families not receiving such payments. It’s time to try making the EITC more than an annual boom in a bust-filled financial cycle for low-income families. 

"Out of ammo?" The Economist recently asked of monetary policymakers. Stephen Roach has called the move by major central banks – including the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of Sweden – to negative real (and, in some cases, even nominal) interest rates a “futile” effort that merely sets “the stage for the next crisis.” And, at the February G-20 finance ministers meeting, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney reportedly called these policies “ultimately a zero-sum game.” Have the major advanced economies’ central banks – which have borne the burden of sustaining anemic post-2008 recoveries – really run out of options?

It certainly seems so. Central-bank balance sheets have swelled, and policy rates have reached their “near zero” lower bounds. There is plenty of cheap water, it seems, but the horse refuses to drink. With no signs of inflation, and growth still tepid and fragile, many anticipate chronic slow growth, with some even fearing another global recession.

But policymakers have one more option: a shift to “purer” fiscal policy, in which they directly finance government spending by printing money – a so-called “helicopter drop.” The new money would bypass the financial and corporate sectors and go straight to the thirstiest horses: middle- and lower-income consumers. The money could go to them directly, and through investment in job-creating, productivity-increasing infrastructure. By placing purchasing power in the hands of those who need it most, direct monetary financing of public spending would also help to improve inclusiveness in economies where inequality is rising fast.

Helicopter drops are currently proposed by both leftist and centrist economists. In a sense, even some “conservatives” – who support more public infrastructure spending, but also want tax cuts and oppose more borrowing – de facto support helicopter drops.

Recently, more radical proposals have surfaced, reflecting a sense of urgency and widespread disappointment with the impact of current monetary policy. Beyond advocating higher minimum wages, some are calling for “reverse income policies,” with governments imposing across-the-board wage increases on private employers – a move that would drive up prices and defeat deflationary expectations. The fact that economists whose views typically fall nowhere near those of the far left are even thinking about such interventionism shows just how extreme circumstances have become.

I favor all of these proposals, in some form. The details of their implementation would obviously have to vary, depending on each economy’s circumstances. Germany, for example, is in a strong position to implement a reverse income policy, given its huge current-account surplus, though there would undoubtedly be major political barriers. More spending on education, skills upgrading, and infrastructure, however, is a no-brainer almost everywhere, and is politically more feasible.

But there is another dimension of the challenge that has so far not been emphasized nearly enough, despite the warnings of Carney, Roach, and others. Zero or negative real interest rates, when they become quasi-permanent, undermine the efficient allocation of capital and set the stage for bubbles, busts, and crises. They also contribute to further income concentration at the top by hurting small savers, while creating opportunities for large financial players to benefit from access to savings at negative real cost. As unorthodox as it may sound, it is likely that the world economy would benefit from somewhat higher interest rates.

Raising interest rates cannot, however, be a stand-alone policy. Instead, small policy-rate increases must be incorporated into a broader fiscal and distributional strategy, implemented alongside more public spending on infrastructure and skills upgrading, as well as some gentle forms of income policies, employing, for example, “moral suasion.”

Even with such an approach, however, major central banks would have to coordinate their policies. If a single major central bank attempted to introduce higher interest rates, its economy would immediately be “punished” through currency appreciation, declining competitiveness, and falling exports, all of which would undermine aggregate demand and employment.

If the major central banks decided to increase their policy rates simultaneously, these spillover effects would cancel one another out. A coordinated move, perhaps raising rates in two modest 25 or 30 basis-point increments, would be neutral in terms of exchange rates and short-term competitiveness, even as it moved real interest rates back into positive territory. If successful, this effort could eventually be followed by further small increases, creating space for more traditional monetary-policy “ammunition” to be deployed in the future.

Success also hinges on the simultaneous pursuit of fiscal expansion worldwide, with each country’s efforts calibrated according to its fiscal space and current-account position. The expansion should finance a global program of investment in physical and human infrastructure, focusing on the two key challenges of our time: cleaner energy and skills for the digital age.

A coordinated and well-timed policy package could boost global growth, improve capital allocation, support a more equitable income distribution, and reduce the danger of speculative bubbles. The various meetings in the run-up to the G-20 summit in China, including the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, would be ideal forums for designing such a package, and advancing its implementation.

Economic orthodoxy and independent actions have clearly failed. It is time for policymakers to recognize that innovative international policy cooperation is not a luxury; sometimes – like today – it is a necessity.