8 ms·

While increasing productivity will definitely allow people to find work that allows them either less time or more flexibility, there is always that issue of wan

While increasing productivity will definitely allow people to find work that allows them either less time or more flexibility, there is always that issue of want. Ten years from now, let say you can find a job where you can work 32 hours a week (or 40, but 8 from home -- slacking a little on that), but let's say you don't earn enough to afford that new iPhone. You can only afford the previous years model. You can't quite have the new curved behemoth TVs that everybody has, nor can you take a vacation any time soon, but you can to take a mini one every weekend. Is this going to be okay for you? I would argue, many people might be able to do this now. I think that desire to consume is pretty strong. I definitely have it. These decisions all come with tradeoffs. If your neighbor decides to work 48 hours, taking the 8 your decided to forego, and he can afford these nice little things, are you then going to be calling it unfair that he he's paid more than you? Are you going to be calling for an weekly hour cap to prevent it?

RodericDay 10y ago
http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers. So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be). But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones. These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
- jnordwick 10y ago
  You can't debate nutters. "professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers" are clearly not bullshit jobs. They are precisely how products and resources are allocated, produced, and sold. That entire bottom paragraph from finance to health services are vastly important in an advanced economy. He seems to want us to go back to being farmers. What a quack.
  - eyelidlessness 10y ago
    > You can't debate nutters. But you sure can make snide remarks!
  - TaylorAlexander 10y ago
    Calling David Graeber a quack is to miss the mark entirely. He's an accomplished author and anthropologist with a critically acclaimed book on the history of debt and economic systems. He calls those jobs bullshit jobs because he has a (historically informed) vision of an economy that works better without them. He rags on people who write marketing copy, for example, because their job is basically to sell something you otherwise wouldn't buy. It could be argued that, in a more efficient economy, people wouldn't be selling things people don't want to buy. Similarly, he sees managers as a way to compel people to do work they wouldn't otherwise do, and thus sees those jobs as bullshit. It's true that he thinks very differently from you, but that doesn't make him a quack.
    - jnordwick 10y ago
      > Similarly, he sees managers as a way to compel people to do work they wouldn't otherwise do, and thus sees those jobs as bullshit. See a quack. Most of us in the real world know that managers, no matter how much we despise them or even if we are of the many that thing most manager suck, we know their job is to organize those underneath then. A number of these manager-less companies in the last year have had to introduce managers because they actually do server a purpose: managing! He was a prof of Antropology at Yale before leaving. He is most famous for being a Wobblie, anarchist activist, and one of the heads of the Occupy Wallstreet group (I still have memories of walking by them every day and had no problem having a slice while watching the entertainment). The irony of that statement is that Mr Graeber probably did many managerial types of jobs in his life (like being a manager over grad students, and managing part of OWS), without it strictly being called a manager. if it sounds like a duck...
prawn 10y ago
You can see proof of the endless drive in everyone. The cleaner, the CEO, the entrepreneur, the billionaire - all generally aspiring for more. There is always a TV or outfit or holiday or experience or car or watch that costs slightly more than the one you currently covet. So it would need to be a very strong societal norm otherwise people will naturally gravitate towards the option that makes them more. I think it should be government leading the way. Expand AmeriCorps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmeriCorps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmeriCorps) and equivalents around the world, but with more than cost-of-living allowance - both setting the agenda for society but also helping cover for jobs lost to automation. Modest pay for 3-4 days/week of work. The sort of jobs that can give people meaning to life, don't require 4+ years of tertiary-level education, etc.
InclinedPlane 10y ago
> "While increasing productivity will definitely allow people to find work that allows them either less time or more flexibility..." If only it worked that way. In practice, for the last 3+ decades most productivity gains have merely increased profit margins and the wealth of those in the top quintile, they haven't had a significant positive impact on most of those who have actually been more productive.
marklgr 10y ago
> are you then going to be calling it unfair that he he's paid more than you? Are you going to be calling for an weekly hour cap to prevent it? What a strawman--you make up jealousy and legal bans when no one has suggested any of those. Using that logic, are you going to call those who work less than you (because they value their quality time more than the shiny new toys) slackers? Are you going to prevent them from getting promoted because they don't work as much as you? This type of argumentation just does not lead to a constructive debate, imo.
- jnordwick 10y ago
  Not quite a strawman. It was a rhetorical question in an attempt to make people think about how they would respond to the costs and benefits of voluntary work reduction if only they did it and not other peers. Also, I have seen this line of argumentation. In a thread less than a week ago, somebody said how he found it unfair that I or others might work 60+ hours and he only work 40 and that pay scales should and job promotion abilities should be equal so he didn't have to give up his life to compete against those of use that had a different set of priorities (my terminology -- his was a little less forgiving). People choosing 32 hours a week would be upset to get passed up by those choosing 48+ hours. It's natural.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Well, yes, that's how we got the Working Time Directive and the 40-hour work week. He's right in that economic fortunes are lumped together. Imagine a guy on a motorbike chained to a guy on foot: the biker complains about his speed being restricted, but speeding up is going to be very bad for the health of the pedestrian.
  - sooheon 10y ago
    This reminds me of the old line about peacocks. In every way other than sexual attraction, those enormous and garish tail feathers are detrimental to survival (energy, concealment, agility...). If every peacock agreed to simply scale down their tails, so that the pecking order remained unchanged, the results would benefit everyone.
belorn 10y ago
Following this line of thought, why aren't people currently working 7 days a week? People who work 56hrs will earn more than those working 48, and even more than those that just work 40hrs. One answer might just be norms. If only 10% of people work 56hrs, then you don't earn so little that you can't afford "that expensive thing that everybody has". What everybody has is based on norms and averages. A question is then how we went from working 7 days a week, to 6 days a week and Sundays in church, to 5 days a week. How did people start to work less and live with the reality of earning less in comparison to those staying with the old working hours.
- denzil_correa 10y ago
  > One answer might just be norms. Or, it might be the perceived norms - 70% workdays, 30% personal days.
- creshal 10y ago
  > A question is then how we went from working 7 days a week, to 6 days a week and Sundays in church, to 5 days a week. How did people start to work less and live with the reality of earning less in comparison to those staying with the old working hours. Unions.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > A question is then how we went from working 7 days a week, to 6 days a week and Sundays in church, to 5 days a week. How did people start to work less and live with the reality of earning less in comparison to those staying with the old working hours. With blood. The socialist revolutions were in big part based on fighting for the workers abused in the freshly industrialized world. It's ironic if you see how fast people today want to get rid of all the safeguards that got us the quality of life we enjoy today, all in the name of cheaper products and "I will be an entrepreneur too!" mindset.
  - conanbatt 10y ago
    Source? First, i think you mean unions, not socialism. Non-socialist countries also have had 5 day weeks. Also even though unions have increased worker rights in history, pure capitalism has also been doing that as well. Look at silicon valley, where empoyee perks, extra PTO and such have not been fought for but are provided.
holri 10y ago
I see more and more people around me recognizing that time is more valuable than money. Private consumption in Europe is more or less stagnating [1]. [1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/File:Consumption_expenditure_and_gross_capital_formation_at_constant_prices,_EU-28,_2004%E2%80%9314_%282005_%3D_100%29_YB15-de.png http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
- Inthenameofmine 10y ago
  I would argue that is mostly because on the macro level the private sector is paying off their accumulated debt, hence less spending. That's pretty much the definition of a deflationary spiral. I don't think this shows any sort of cultural shift.
  - holri 10y ago
    The private debt in Germany for example today is lower then 1995. [1] The accumulation of debt stopped already in 2000. [1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-datasets/-/tipspd20 http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-datasets/-/tipspd2...
    - forgetsusername 10y ago
      >The accumulation of debt stopped already in 2000. Because Germany ran massive trade surpluses, while other Euro states took on debt to buy German goods. I don't see a cultural shift, either.
- segmondy 10y ago
  Is private consumption stagnating due to less people wanting to consume or due to less income? Another way to say that consumption is stagnating is to say that savings is going up. Is savings going up in Europe? From what I read a while back, this is not the case.
  - r_smart 10y ago
ehnto 10y ago
I think the key is that if you worked more, you would be less productive. So if it turns out that your employer feels the same way, they wouldn't hire you for 40 hours anyway as they would be getting less value for their money. My hope is that wages stay the same even though you work less, because your value input into the company is the same or better. That would be the dream at least. I am not accounting for moonlighting or side gigs at all though.
majortennis 10y ago
don't reduce the annual salary just complete the work within the 4 days
lmm 10y ago
> Are you going to be calling for an weekly hour cap to prevent it? Yes - if only because I believe most people can't operate well for more than ~28 hours/week. I don't want to be diagnosed by a doctor who has to work more than that. I wouldn't want my case argued by a lawyer who has to work more than that. I wouldn't want my food prepared by a cook who has to work more than that. Etc. Laws and caps are how we got to 40 hours/week (35 in France). Let's keep them going.
perseusprime11 10y ago
I think the general automation over time will help improve our overall productivity which may help us spend more time with our families and kids. I would not be surprised if Tim Ferris's 4 hour work week becomes a reality.
nathan_f77 10y ago
Being a freelancer makes it a very conscious choice. Right now I'm only working 20 hours per week, and I'm about to go full-time on a project for the next few months. Well, it's very different, because I like to take a lot of long breaks, and have a lot of free time for side projects. For me it's less about TVs and vacations, and more about being able to retire early. Hopefully from an exit, or passive income.

RodericDay 10y ago

http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers. So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be). But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones. These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

jnordwick 10y ago
You can't debate nutters. "professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers" are clearly not bullshit jobs. They are precisely how products and resources are allocated, produced, and sold. That entire bottom paragraph from finance to health services are vastly important in an advanced economy. He seems to want us to go back to being farmers. What a quack.
- eyelidlessness 10y ago
  > You can't debate nutters. But you sure can make snide remarks!
- TaylorAlexander 10y ago
  Calling David Graeber a quack is to miss the mark entirely. He's an accomplished author and anthropologist with a critically acclaimed book on the history of debt and economic systems. He calls those jobs bullshit jobs because he has a (historically informed) vision of an economy that works better without them. He rags on people who write marketing copy, for example, because their job is basically to sell something you otherwise wouldn't buy. It could be argued that, in a more efficient economy, people wouldn't be selling things people don't want to buy. Similarly, he sees managers as a way to compel people to do work they wouldn't otherwise do, and thus sees those jobs as bullshit. It's true that he thinks very differently from you, but that doesn't make him a quack.
  - jnordwick 10y ago
    > Similarly, he sees managers as a way to compel people to do work they wouldn't otherwise do, and thus sees those jobs as bullshit. See a quack. Most of us in the real world know that managers, no matter how much we despise them or even if we are of the many that thing most manager suck, we know their job is to organize those underneath then. A number of these manager-less companies in the last year have had to introduce managers because they actually do server a purpose: managing! He was a prof of Antropology at Yale before leaving. He is most famous for being a Wobblie, anarchist activist, and one of the heads of the Occupy Wallstreet group (I still have memories of walking by them every day and had no problem having a slice while watching the entertainment). The irony of that statement is that Mr Graeber probably did many managerial types of jobs in his life (like being a manager over grad students, and managing part of OWS), without it strictly being called a manager. if it sounds like a duck...

prawn 10y ago

You can see proof of the endless drive in everyone. The cleaner, the CEO, the entrepreneur, the billionaire - all generally aspiring for more. There is always a TV or outfit or holiday or experience or car or watch that costs slightly more than the one you currently covet. So it would need to be a very strong societal norm otherwise people will naturally gravitate towards the option that makes them more. I think it should be government leading the way. Expand AmeriCorps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmeriCorps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmeriCorps) and equivalents around the world, but with more than cost-of-living allowance - both setting the agenda for society but also helping cover for jobs lost to automation. Modest pay for 3-4 days/week of work. The sort of jobs that can give people meaning to life, don't require 4+ years of tertiary-level education, etc.

InclinedPlane 10y ago

> "While increasing productivity will definitely allow people to find work that allows them either less time or more flexibility..." If only it worked that way. In practice, for the last 3+ decades most productivity gains have merely increased profit margins and the wealth of those in the top quintile, they haven't had a significant positive impact on most of those who have actually been more productive.

marklgr 10y ago

> are you then going to be calling it unfair that he he's paid more than you? Are you going to be calling for an weekly hour cap to prevent it? What a strawman--you make up jealousy and legal bans when no one has suggested any of those. Using that logic, are you going to call those who work less than you (because they value their quality time more than the shiny new toys) slackers? Are you going to prevent them from getting promoted because they don't work as much as you? This type of argumentation just does not lead to a constructive debate, imo.

jnordwick 10y ago
Not quite a strawman. It was a rhetorical question in an attempt to make people think about how they would respond to the costs and benefits of voluntary work reduction if only they did it and not other peers. Also, I have seen this line of argumentation. In a thread less than a week ago, somebody said how he found it unfair that I or others might work 60+ hours and he only work 40 and that pay scales should and job promotion abilities should be equal so he didn't have to give up his life to compete against those of use that had a different set of priorities (my terminology -- his was a little less forgiving). People choosing 32 hours a week would be upset to get passed up by those choosing 48+ hours. It's natural.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Well, yes, that's how we got the Working Time Directive and the 40-hour work week. He's right in that economic fortunes are lumped together. Imagine a guy on a motorbike chained to a guy on foot: the biker complains about his speed being restricted, but speeding up is going to be very bad for the health of the pedestrian.
- sooheon 10y ago
  This reminds me of the old line about peacocks. In every way other than sexual attraction, those enormous and garish tail feathers are detrimental to survival (energy, concealment, agility...). If every peacock agreed to simply scale down their tails, so that the pecking order remained unchanged, the results would benefit everyone.

belorn 10y ago

Following this line of thought, why aren't people currently working 7 days a week? People who work 56hrs will earn more than those working 48, and even more than those that just work 40hrs. One answer might just be norms. If only 10% of people work 56hrs, then you don't earn so little that you can't afford "that expensive thing that everybody has". What everybody has is based on norms and averages. A question is then how we went from working 7 days a week, to 6 days a week and Sundays in church, to 5 days a week. How did people start to work less and live with the reality of earning less in comparison to those staying with the old working hours.

denzil_correa 10y ago
> One answer might just be norms. Or, it might be the perceived norms - 70% workdays, 30% personal days.
creshal 10y ago
> A question is then how we went from working 7 days a week, to 6 days a week and Sundays in church, to 5 days a week. How did people start to work less and live with the reality of earning less in comparison to those staying with the old working hours. Unions.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> A question is then how we went from working 7 days a week, to 6 days a week and Sundays in church, to 5 days a week. How did people start to work less and live with the reality of earning less in comparison to those staying with the old working hours. With blood. The socialist revolutions were in big part based on fighting for the workers abused in the freshly industrialized world. It's ironic if you see how fast people today want to get rid of all the safeguards that got us the quality of life we enjoy today, all in the name of cheaper products and "I will be an entrepreneur too!" mindset.
- conanbatt 10y ago
  Source? First, i think you mean unions, not socialism. Non-socialist countries also have had 5 day weeks. Also even though unions have increased worker rights in history, pure capitalism has also been doing that as well. Look at silicon valley, where empoyee perks, extra PTO and such have not been fought for but are provided.

holri 10y ago

I see more and more people around me recognizing that time is more valuable than money. Private consumption in Europe is more or less stagnating [1]. [1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/File:Consumption_expenditure_and_gross_capital_formation_at_constant_prices,_EU-28,_2004%E2%80%9314_%282005_%3D_100%29_YB15-de.png http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...

Inthenameofmine 10y ago
I would argue that is mostly because on the macro level the private sector is paying off their accumulated debt, hence less spending. That's pretty much the definition of a deflationary spiral. I don't think this shows any sort of cultural shift.
- holri 10y ago
  The private debt in Germany for example today is lower then 1995. [1] The accumulation of debt stopped already in 2000. [1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-datasets/-/tipspd20 http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-datasets/-/tipspd2...
  - forgetsusername 10y ago
    >The accumulation of debt stopped already in 2000. Because Germany ran massive trade surpluses, while other Euro states took on debt to buy German goods. I don't see a cultural shift, either.
segmondy 10y ago
Is private consumption stagnating due to less people wanting to consume or due to less income? Another way to say that consumption is stagnating is to say that savings is going up. Is savings going up in Europe? From what I read a while back, this is not the case.
- r_smart 10y ago

ehnto 10y ago

I think the key is that if you worked more, you would be less productive. So if it turns out that your employer feels the same way, they wouldn't hire you for 40 hours anyway as they would be getting less value for their money. My hope is that wages stay the same even though you work less, because your value input into the company is the same or better. That would be the dream at least. I am not accounting for moonlighting or side gigs at all though.

majortennis 10y ago

don't reduce the annual salary just complete the work within the 4 days

lmm 10y ago

> Are you going to be calling for an weekly hour cap to prevent it? Yes - if only because I believe most people can't operate well for more than ~28 hours/week. I don't want to be diagnosed by a doctor who has to work more than that. I wouldn't want my case argued by a lawyer who has to work more than that. I wouldn't want my food prepared by a cook who has to work more than that. Etc. Laws and caps are how we got to 40 hours/week (35 in France). Let's keep them going.

perseusprime11 10y ago

I think the general automation over time will help improve our overall productivity which may help us spend more time with our families and kids. I would not be surprised if Tim Ferris's 4 hour work week becomes a reality.

nathan_f77 10y ago

Being a freelancer makes it a very conscious choice. Right now I'm only working 20 hours per week, and I'm about to go full-time on a project for the next few months. Well, it's very different, because I like to take a lot of long breaks, and have a lot of free time for side projects. For me it's less about TVs and vacations, and more about being able to retire early. Hopefully from an exit, or passive income.