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Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

167 points by rumcajz 9y ago

orionblastar 9y ago
It started in the 1990s when part-time people were downsized and replaced with full-time people. Then overtime was killing coroprations so they moved people to salary instead of hourly. No more overtime pay, one salary no more sick and vacation days but PTO or paid time off hours instead. You are expected to work 60 to 80 hours a week, or else you get bad performance reviews and fired. In most at will employment states the company can fire you for any reason not related to civil rights law. They don't like your tie, fired. They don't like the way you walk or smile, fired. Someone accuses you of something they have no evidence or proof of, like being rude, you are fired. This is done to avoid civil suits, fired for no reason, or fired for a petty reason not related to civil rights. Say you have 25 years in IT, you are African-American, but in your older age things change. You wear your tie differently because you found a new tie knot style. They can't fire you for your race or age, so they Instead fire you for not tying your tie the same way everyone else does. I wrote about this problem before and nobody took it seriously.
- dgellow 9y ago
  Your comment sounds like speculations and gross generalisation. Do you base your say on things that could be discussed(if yes, please share them)? Or is it a frustrated rant?
bandrami 9y ago
Because we are never satisfied with a stable standard of living; people want to live better than their parents did. Automation only decreases the need for labor if you hold standard of living constant.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  This comment ignores the fact that wages have stagnated while productivity has skyrocketed.
  - barry-cotter 9y ago
    Wages have stagnated but total compensation hasn’t. The cost of health insurance in the US has gone up a lot and most jobs have health insurance.
    - bluntfang 9y ago
      you know that you pay for health insurance that your job provides, right?
      - barry-cotter 9y ago
        Yes, just like the employer/employee legal split of social security is an accounting fiction, not a description of tax incidence. That does not change the fact that wages/salary have been relatively flat in the US for decades but wages/salary + health insurance has very much not been flat.
- jotm 9y ago
  It has been constant for almost half a century for the middle class, yet everyone is working more for the same not less. How exactly can you live better than your parents, assuming they had a house, a car or two, phones, TV, computers, access to supermarkets of all kinds, enough money for living expenses and a hobby or yearly vacation...
  - purple-again 9y ago
    Go watch a sitcom from the 50s and compare it your surroundings. Hopefully you come to the conclusion that your standard of living is immensely greater than theirs was. If you are thinking of things like the cost of college don’t forget to factor in how many people go to college today versus back then. If you are thinking about the cost of housing, we still have the same land and a growing population. I’m city centers the demand has multiplied significantly since then so we expect relative cost of the land to multiply.
    - rectang 9y ago
      In 50s sitcoms, you'll see people working union jobs with pensions. There are a lot fewer of those these days. Even if material wealth has improved, economic insecurity is worse. People feel worse off as a result.
      - dominotw 9y ago
        Yea especially since your skills are technologically obsolete in a less than decade. Software engineering careers for example are uphill battle post 50, you better have your nest egg and kids college funds ready by then.
    - consz 9y ago
      He was talking about his parent's quality of life -- go watch sitcoms from the 90s for that. I'm not sure how the 50s are relevant.
      - geezerjay 9y ago
- dalbasal 9y ago
  This has generally been the standard argument since Keynes (and others) first turned out to be spectacularly wrong. We just consume more. But, I see this argument differently these days. In tech stuff, we definitely have more stuff. A phone+plan for every person over 13. Laptops for most people. But, you can't function without these. It's not really a discretionary spending. A student (for example) is at a disadvantage without those things. In fact, the student is also consuming more education then in Keynes' day. That's also a competitive consumption, that you must buy in order to participate in the job market to a greater extent then before. Housing in a lot of urban or semi-urban areas is also competitive. Median house prices in these cities is a multiple of median salary, and prices don't scale well below the median. So... I think the statement is true in an almost tautological sense. But, very little is discretionary spending. Most of it is competitive and in a competition the median person is still the median person.
  - dustingetz 9y ago
    The key realization for me was that the phone-plan-at-13 isn't really optional, the kid needs it to stay competitive with the median kid
  - avar 9y ago
    > you can't function without [a phone > + plan once you're 13yo, and laptop]. > It's not really a discretionary > spending. Even if I give you that a network connected phone is something a teenager absolutely must have, that still leaves the fact that most people vastly overspend on these items. Yes you might need a smartphone and a laptop for school, but those are going to cost at most $200 used, but people conflate the need for these devices with the fashion statement of owning the latest iPhone or MacBook.
    - CamTin 9y ago
      The only reason you and I can buy $200 used Thinkpads is because everyone else is clamoring to overspend for shiny new ones. If more people were OK with keeping their computers longer or buying used, then the price of used computers would go up. This would obviously be good because we would be valuing things closer to the actual benefit that they bring, but its not the case that we can ALL just have dirt-cheap few-year-old laptops.
- nnq 9y ago
  > we are never satisfied with a stable standard of living ...yes we are. Thankfully, nowadays more and more people "drop out" of "traditional media exposed society" and the brainwashing is starting to wear off. Too bad we're at the end of Homo Sapiens' days and there will not be any benefit to anyone though anyway (or maybe too good, a species as miserable as ours deservs being accelerated into extinction anyway)
- collyw 9y ago
  As someone that isn't particularly materialistic, I can afford to buy most "things". I can barely afford to buy a house where I live and I have a feeling that my pension with be worth squat when I retire.
surfmike 9y ago
People's perceived needs grow but that is not the whole story. Many people now are spending almost 50% of their pre-tax income on housing, and most of that is the price of land and goes to landlords. It seems that landlords inevitably capture a big chunk of people's salary increases. Additionally in the US your health insurance is generally tied to your job; even after Obamacare you probably have to work to pay for your monthly insurance. If housing costs went way down and health insurance were universal, I suspect many people would feel much less need to work so many hours.
- zimablue 9y ago
  I think this is just a very visible specific case of assets becoming worth more relative to wages
- dominotw 9y ago
  Housing price increase just doesn't go to landlords. It goes to City and state coffers via tax. Chicago had two housing tax hikes in 2017, for example. Edit: Added links > For homeowners in Chicago, the average increase is 10 percent. https://rebootillinois.com/2017/06/13/big-property-tax-hike-chicago-homeowners/ https://rebootillinois.com/2017/06/13/big-property-tax-hike-... > Summary over past couple of decades https://d2dv7hze646xr.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Screen-Shot-2015-12-16-at-5.46.59-PM.png https://d2dv7hze646xr.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015...
  - purple-again 9y ago
    Confused by the downvotes here. In almost all of America (looking at you Cali) the property taxes are reassessed yearly to the value of the home. This is how we want it. The three blocks in every direction surrounding a middle school shouldn’t be populated by 80 year old retirees.
    - dominotw 9y ago
      Property taxes are used to fund all sorts of stuff, like a default cookie jar, so to speak. Chicago used hike this year to fund pensions This graph is a good summary https://d2dv7hze646xr.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Screen-Shot-2015-12-16-at-5.46.59-PM.png https://d2dv7hze646xr.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015... > Illinoisans’ residential property-tax burden – as a percentage of median household income – has risen 76 percent. https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/growing-out-of-control-property-taxes-put-increasing-burden-on-illinois-taxpayers/ https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/growing-out-of-contro...
samsonradu 9y ago
Among other good reasons mentioned here lets not forget inequality went up and a lot of the progress is materialized at the top.
- purple-again 9y ago
  In the US. Inequality has dropped significantly. A large portion of the gains to America were captured by its elite. The large portion of the gains in other parts of the world have lifted billions out of poverty. Turns out globalization is good or bad depending on who you are and where you are.
  - megalodon 9y ago
    > The large portion of the gains in other parts of the world have lifted billions out of poverty. You may be correct, but it's hard to trust this sentence without a proper source.
    - j9461701 9y ago
      Here is an economist article on the subject: https://www.economist.com/news/international/21719790-going-will-be-much-harder-now-world-has-made-great-progress https://www.economist.com/news/international/21719790-going-...
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    The US has greater income inequality than many third world countries.
- Sniffnoy 9y ago
  In what sense does it make sense to regard inequality as a causal factor here?
  - Daishiman 9y ago
    Because every serious study of the matter has shown that pretty much every metric of quality of life is negatively impacted by inequality.
a3n 9y ago
Most people don't get to choose how many hours they work. Employers, especially those that pay benefits, want you working as much as possible. Anything less is money on the table. (I'm not an employer.) It's good for an employer if you work overtime, all he has to pay is time, or time and a half, or nothing if you're salaried. He doesn't have to pay more benefits, as he would with an additional employee. Of course an employer wants to get as much work out of you as possible for benefits paid. As an employee, working overtime only gets you more cash (or even none). Working less makes your benefits more valuable. Even if employment is strictly for money, with no benefits at all, there's an administrative overhead to hiring and managing more employees. As long as we are employed by employers, and especially if we get health insurance through our employer, there will always be pressure to work more, not less.
- dgellow 9y ago
  So, I currently work in Germany, maybe that’s why, but in my personal experience employers are very strict with overtime and only allow it when there is a justification (e.g: big project to get done at the end of the month). I guess because of strict regulations, but you also have the fact that having tired employees results in more sick days used, a higher error rate and mood swings. To be fair, even knowing this people (including myself) do some overtime. Working more is a short term solution to increase the productivity of a team, but on the long term the benefits of doing so aren’t that obvious.
  - a3n 9y ago
    Ah, an enlightened society. As a US resident, I hope to live in one of those someday. Here I'm just a resource like any farm animal.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      Germany has maintained a strict no wage growth policy for decades now however to push exports, potentially contributing to the stagnation of the euro zone.
taneq 9y ago
It has. The low-work-hours future is here... It's just unevenly distributed.
megiddo 9y ago
Inflation, taxes, and regulatory burden. Savings have been systematically eroded for 50+ years. Total taxation is now 40+% of GDP. Private sector workforce participation is dropping. Regulatory burden dramatically increases health care, housing, and transportation costs. All of these policies have worked to keep you in the office.
- pjkundert 9y ago
  Absolutely true. As a small business owner, the amount of regulatory and accounting overhead beggars the imagination. I only hire consultants, due to the lower overhead and paperwork burden - I couldn’t even imagine hiring an employee.
- nabla9 9y ago
  Inflation is not the reason. Practically all savings give returns above the inflation. Interests respond to changes in inflation. If you look at the real returns, you can see that they are surprisingly stable. Fixation with nominal valuations is a sign of financial illiteracy.
- torstenvl 9y ago
  Total taxation is at 26% of GDP in the U.S., 34% in much of the rest of the developed world. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes-compare-internationally http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes...
  - walshemj 9y ago
    is that including health care costs? I don't think so from what my expat friends tell me
  - observation 9y ago
    Are you sure Tax Policy Center can be trusted? Those numbers seem very low for Ireland. I'm willing to be wrong but something seems very off here.
    - 9y ago
evolighting 9y ago
I think economic would eventually benefit economic itself first. BUT what I want to say about this problem is I don't think such number really means so much. Numbers tell you something of course, but they are just part of aspects after all. And I have always a prejudice that the whole economic system is some kind of lie about trust, which is useful in old days. but today that more likely we just have no courage and power to change it. However after watching I think is only a way of life vs way people view others.We would soon notice something we want to notice
adrianmonk 9y ago
Promotions within a company are based on ranking employees. Even if not done explicitly, you still promote your top people. Working more hours is a way to increase your rank. Thus it becomes an arms race between the employees. You work 40 hours, I increase to 45, then you increase to 50. So, to some extent, hours worked don't correspond to hours needed to be worked for productivity purposes.
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etr-strike 9y ago
The Federal Reaerve actually thinks productivity is too low: http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-fed-productivity-idUSL1N1AQ0WV http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-fed-productivity-idUSL1N1... Would be a dream to work just 40 hours per week.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  It's also worth noting that 2 of the Fed's main goals are 1. Achieve maximum employment 2. Maintain stable prices Both of which are counter productive to the goals of automation. This seems like the root of the problem to me, as the Fed is a "super admin" of the economy.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    not from a political point of view
Jach 9y ago
Competition.
sametmax 9y ago
It has. 80 years ago your worked more hours, and you could not slack at work. Today, you work not only less, but half of the people in the offices I go to don't work their full shift. They go to facebook, send text messages, take long breaks, do their shopping and watch porno (yep), etc. Also, an hour of work doesn't have the same value. When your work is moving boxes, an hour is an hour. But in an office work, there are plenty of opportunities to be busy without being productive. I'd say 30% of the work I see in offices is at best useless, at worst harmful. So we have more office jobs, which have less hours, during which we work less, said hours being worth less. And this is very uneven, because a nurse probably works more now than before. But all in all, office jobs are talking over in rich countries.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  If there is so much useless/wasted time at office jobs, what's the practical purpose of requiring them to be there for a fixed number of hours?
  - sametmax 9y ago
    There are several reasons for that. First, employee don't want less money and fake it. Employers want the employee to be on site because they paid for it. Second, society praises people for working. You will look better if say you are busy. Third, our systems would collapse if people were actually paid to their real value. You would see the total unfairness of it, and also how truly brilliant or useless people are. Fourth, laws, syndicates, medias and logistics come in the way. And with a big inertia. Fifth, humans are not rational and don't do "the right thing" according to the intellectual or displayed objectives. And they have all their own agenda.
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    It's very much easier to measure hours of physical presence than actual value of a worker's output. The other problem is that if you measured people purely by output, 10x developers (assuming you believe in such a concept) would be able to work 1/10th as much and would very visibly be missing much of the rest of the time. This would lead to a lot of resentment from people who are less productive and would be having it rubbed in their faces. To get to a place where people are judged purely on output we would need to change society such that the notion of equality was essentially never mentioned or thought about at all. Because people's productivity is wildly, wildly unequal.
dustingetz 9y ago
Competition—A system designed around competition rewards those who compete. Surprise!
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  There is such a thing as working too hard, to one's own detriment.
  - dustingetz 9y ago
    "Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast." —Paul Graham
    - watwut 9y ago
      That kind of ignores how human bodies work when tired and sleep deprived.
      - dustingetz 9y ago
        I am definitely not celebrating it. It seems obvious to me that the human with the most stamina will have an edge in any sort of competition that involves hard work, from marathons to startups.
        wu-ikkyu 9y ago
        Startups are not marathons. Working smart is better than working hard
        watwut 9y ago
        Marathon ends in 6 hours, if you are very slow. And pacing is considered very important. Pacing does not mean "running as fast as possible from the start".
tajen 9y ago
Or even if people had more leisure time, they’d spend it on working on a bigger project because it’s our driver. I’ve noticed when I made thousands a month, I spent much more time in charities, but I was still just as stressed ;) Ok that only works for people who are not struggling around the minimum wage.
louithethrid 9y ago
Because powerthirsty psychopaths have social needs too. What is it worth to rule a small kingdom, if nobody lives, suffers and does your bidding in this kingdom. Being the CEO in a lightsout factory, is beeing the janitor. So why do all these shitty jobs and hamster wheels exist? To give all those "great-men" the ilusion of importance.
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chewz 9y ago
That was famous Keynes prediction [1][2] that due to increased productivity people will work 15 hours weeks. Consumer capitalism however not only created productivity gains and satisfied all demands (for which should be rightly praised) but also created new demands (like better healthcare, education, technology items, vanity items etc.). It is however characteristic of money economy (urban economy) that there is nothing limiting human need to accumulate capital and consume. In subsistence economy (non-monetary) whenever there is a surplus people rather stop working then trying to accumulate more and they tend to focus on accumulating social capital. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequality-work-hours/422775/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequal... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/sep/01/economics https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/sep/01/economics
EGreg 9y ago
May I suggest that it may be the Hobbsian Trap? The more resources we have - especially necessities such as food and water - the more children can be born. And eventually the population is large enough that the amount per person goes back to what it was before. That doesn't necessarily mean everyone has to work. But in the current economy, where you have to work to afford the rent, many people work long hours. However, once you factor in the growing unemployment, you can see that, in fact, there is less work to go around. But people still need to pay the rent, eat and drink water!
neilwilson 9y ago
Because there are fewer jobs than people that want them. For every twenty dogs there are only 19 bones. That's how economic theory is designed to work. If there is a risk of too many jobs, policy is altered to restore 'order'. Do that and competition inevitably creates what we have - long hours miles from home for a pittance.
unitboolean 9y ago
Guys, what do you think about universal basic income?
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  There's no point trying to explicitly introduce it now. I watch these experiments with befuddlement - it's like watching a small baby try to run before it can walk. UBI will arrive slowly, incrementally and by the time it or an equivalent is finally here nobody will celebrate because it won't seem like a big deal. It'll just be the result of welfare and other services getting better and better over time, with more and more lightweight "bullshit" jobs that require essentially no exertion or risk and lower and lower hours until one day people find that the benefits system is so generous that having a job has become a lifestyle choice. But we have a long way to go to get there. It won't happen in our lifetimes. Almost all increases in wealth at the moment seem to be absorbed by healthcare and social care costs. UBI makes no sense whilst people are being bankrupted by health costs. Priorities people!
nnq 9y ago
What we desperately need is a way to reverse-brainwash the workaholics that spoil the labor market by willing to work more than 6 hrs a day. If we could figure out a clever way to penalize them for working more we could damn enjoy the heaven-on-earth that current technology should afford us all (now that we seem to have figured out how to stop population growth too)...
- kiliantics 9y ago
  The scabs of our times. They need to be socially ostracised for their complicity with the ruling class. But instead we congratulate them on their good work ethic...
- yks 9y ago
  Pretty relevant short fiction story: http://blog.ncase.me/take-your-time/ http://blog.ncase.me/take-your-time/
- beager 9y ago
  Not sure if sarcasm, but salaried employees are indeed penalized for working more hours with a lower hourly wage.
acchow 9y ago
It has dramatically. I have plenty of friends working full-time desk jobs that actually "work from home" 3-4 days a week and do maybe 1 or 2 hours of work over the whole day. Everyone else is browsing reddit or instagram all day in the office. Just ask any redditor.
badpun 9y ago
Given that you hear a lot about engineers (not to say managers) retiring in their fifties or even earlier, I’d say that people, over their lifetimes, do work fewer hours.
Geee 9y ago
We would work less if we didn't spend and produce so much junk.
Sevii 9y ago
People want limited goods like houses with nice schools, but there are only so many of them. And the price is only bounded by how much people can pay.
konschubert 9y ago
It turns out that working hours are determined by politics, not economics.
- neilwilson 9y ago
  It turns out that economics is just politics. The greatest political move was to rebrand political economy as economics and try and pretend it is a science.
darawk 9y ago
Because capitalism optimizes for production and consumption - not welfare. Often welfare and production/consumption are aligned (e.g. producing enough food for everyone). But in the case of labor/life balance, they are not aligned. It's actually kind of odd to me that serious people (e.g. John Maynard Keynes) would ever have thought that work hours would decrease. There is no term in the economic fitness function for 'work-life balance'.
- Shivetya 9y ago
  well a capitalist society is also a society bombarded by marketing experts who are in every part of a person's daily life working to convince them to spend more which in turn drives them to work more or go into debt pushing retirement further off. consumption is high because marketing is that good. go read any of the popular brand subs on reddit and you will see people making stupid purchasing decisions daily and many seek justification. Its really scary when people are trying to save fifty or less on a one to two thousand dollar purchase because it then costs too much; the clue that indicates the purchase at the lower amount is too much escapes them
  - closeparen 9y ago
    Consumer goods are practically free next to housing. I don’t buy this argument at all. I could completely slash or double marketing-driven spending tomorrow and be in substantially the same financial position. Maybe that’s just a Bay Area distortion. Consider also that a large portion of consumer goods spending is on cars, which are basically just a substitute for living on more central/expensive land. In the end it all comes down to real estate.
    - jernfrost 9y ago
      The real cost of housing is distorted though when house prices keep going up. In many cases, if you take into account the value increase of housing, it is actually opposite of what you claim. People don't spend anything on housing, because they get back whatever they put pay for the house in terms of value increase of the property. I think it would be more fair to look at, how much does it cost to build a house, and divide that cost on the time it may be used. We should not really add the price of property to the equation. If one does this I will bet that consumer goods make up a much bigger part of the economy than you think.
jernfrost 9y ago
Anthropologists David Graeber, has addressed this and offered the explanation with the observation that we as a society produce what he calls bullshit jobs. Almost 40% of Brits in a surveyed acknowledged that their job wasn't needed. People believing in effective markets would of course protest and claim such enormous inefficiency can't possibly exist. Somebody will simply start a company without bullshit jobs. However I think there is a good explanation why this doesn't happen: https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/why-do-bullshit-jobs-exist-4f579eaa5964 https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/why-do-bullshit-jobs-exist-4f5... In short, in any complex organization bullshit work will start accruing and there is no good mechanism to week out such jobs, because the people doing those jobs will have zero incentive to tell their managers that their job in pointless and not needed. I've tried researching this on reddit and seen that a lot of work people do could have been automated. The people doing those jobs also frequently see this. However they have no economic incentive to do so. This has lead me to contemplate that guaranteed minimum income has merits, because it would remove the disincentive to make yourself redundant, to some extent. Of course not in the case where your bullshit jobs is very highly paid, which is frequently the case.
- pdfernhout 9y ago
  You might find this essay by Bob Black of interest on "The Aboltiion of Work": https://web.archive.org/web/20161031034600/http://whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html https://web.archive.org/web/20161031034600/http://whywork.or... "... It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other. I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..." We might ask ourselves what "leading economic indicators" might look like when this was happening...
gerbilly 9y ago
For some reason most of us are too afraid of just going home at 5:00 much less asking for reduced hours. My whole working life, I've never used an alarm clock, and I never stayed late unless I was late on a commitment that I made. (This is not the same as some artificial deadline dreamed up by someone else.) I come in late, go home early, sometimes I don't even show up—whatever. If you do this consistently, and deliver in your role of course, people will get used to it and they'll stop bothering you about it.
- ukulele 9y ago
  You can't really generalize this to everyone. It's dependent on your managers, and there are definitely people in the world who will fire an otherwise good employee for showing bad "optics" to other employees. You may not want to work in such an environment, but that is of course a luxury to be able to choose.
  - mooreds 9y ago
    It also depends on your role and who depends on your work and/or expertise. For some folks this kind of flexibility is eminently attainable, for others it juts isn't possible.
- volgo 9y ago
  Speak for yourself. I go home everyday at 3pm. I'm a productive worker and I know how much I contribute. I never miss a project deadline, always finish what I'm assigned to in a sprint, and don't chitchat with people throughout the day. I get in at 11 am and leave 3pm. I don't care what anyone thinks because at the end of every sprint, I know that my boss and other leaders get together and look at productivity and place me at the top of the chart. When things get busy, I don't hestitate to pull some weekends for my boss because we have a mutual understanding. I get paid almost twice as the going salary for Silicon Valley and I happily work my ass off for the company. It's win win for everyone
- burkaman 9y ago
  Most people would get fired if they did this consistently, whether or not they were performing well. And in the vast majority of jobs, it's not possible to perform well if you don't show up on time.
dredmorbius 9y ago
The negotiating leverage of capital vs. labour. You'll find this in Adam Smith: [I]n every part of Europe, twenty workmen serve under a master for one that is independent; and the wages of labour are everywhere understood to be, what they usually are, when the labourer is one person, and the owner of the stock which employs him another. What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour. It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen.... https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_8 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/... Ricardo, rent vs. wages, as well.
dingo_bat 9y ago
In my case, even if you bump up my salary by 10x suddenly, I probably will work the same hours I do now. Why are lower work hours assumed to arise from increased economic status?
guy98238710 9y ago
Saying that people just like working is ridiculous. It's either author's social bubble or it's straight propaganda. I cannot imagine people in factories or construction saying they like to go to work. The reasons behind the 40-hour week are way more brutal: - Contemporary economy has surprising amount of internal inefficiency causing most of the value to be wasted. - Value that is not squandered is distributed unevenly, so most people aren't that much better off. - Status spending doesn't deliver more value with higher economic output. Status is always scarce. The same goes for several other "resources". - Mate competition, gender roles, and divorces create separate earners and spenders. Earners have little control over spending and they are thus unable to cut back on work. They are often legally required to work under threat of imprisonment. - Widespread debt means most people cannot stop working without risking default. Credit availability further encourages irrational spending. - Most people don't get to choose their working hours. Businesses have the leverage and they choose to max out hours to the legal limit. Governments have little incentive to shorten the work week, because small change won't matter and big change would kill the economy. - People can retire early or they can take breaks between jobs, but this doesn't work for two reasons: people dislike large swings in their lifestyle and people grow dependent on their income through irrational spending. Author is right about one thing: the elderly are the winners here. That's where governments can focus their effort. Earlier retirement can be introduced incrementally and it has the smallest impact on economy, because on average older people are less productive anyway.
- neilwilson 9y ago
  It's entirely reasonable because the literature shows that it is true. Work is leisure you get paid to do and leisure is work you pay to do. If your society doesn't allow that state to come about then it is because it has been deliberately designed to have fewer work opportunities than there are people that want them. If you construct society so that there are always more work opportunities than people who want work then competition and automation automatically gets rid of the crap jobs. And yes there are people in factories that love their jobs. It takes all sorts to make a world.
  - guy98238710 9y ago
erik14th 9y ago
Money is similar to the peacock's tail, the main difference being inheritance, social stratification make it so it matters very little to the individual how much money he starts with due to the fact that you'll be immersed in a social circle with people from the same economic strata, thus to differentiate yourself you need to make more money, otherwise you're a loser. Wealthier males work more because they have access to better paid, more fulfilling and more prestigious kind of work. Poor males work less due to the fact that they have access only to shitty jobs with shitty pays and no prestige, so, for a lot of poor people, working may actually degrade your quality of life, since you won't be able to match or improve upon the lifestyle your parents provided you. Women work more because they need to, either because they have children to take care off by themselves or because they've grown up watching the suffering of their mothers due to the oppression on females in society, and they sure as hell don't want that for themselves. People mostly buy stuff to show off, and then lie to themselves that it is because they like the stuff they bought, illusion of power. Being well off doesn't really matter socially if people don't know about it, bragging is seen as offensive so people do it in an indirect way, by purchasing expensive stupid shit, so that they can feel they're not just bragging, they have "good taste". People don't want to be well, they want to be better than others, and they'll seek to achieve that in the way that is easier and more convenient, which is vulgar display of power, since hitting people in the face usually leads to problems, that is now achieved through the purchase of excessively expensive items just to show you they can.

167 points by rumcajz 9y ago

It started in the 1990s when part-time people were downsized and replaced with full-time people. Then overtime was killing coroprations so they moved people to salary instead of hourly. No more overtime pay, one salary no more sick and vacation days but PTO or paid time off hours instead. You are expected to work 60 to 80 hours a week, or else you get bad performance reviews and fired. In most at will employment states the company can fire you for any reason not related to civil rights law. They don't like your tie, fired. They don't like the way you walk or smile, fired. Someone accuses you of something they have no evidence or proof of, like being rude, you are fired. This is done to avoid civil suits, fired for no reason, or fired for a petty reason not related to civil rights. Say you have 25 years in IT, you are African-American, but in your older age things change. You wear your tie differently because you found a new tie knot style. They can't fire you for your race or age, so they Instead fire you for not tying your tie the same way everyone else does. I wrote about this problem before and nobody took it seriously.

dgellow 9y ago
Your comment sounds like speculations and gross generalisation. Do you base your say on things that could be discussed(if yes, please share them)? Or is it a frustrated rant?

bandrami 9y ago

Because we are never satisfied with a stable standard of living; people want to live better than their parents did. Automation only decreases the need for labor if you hold standard of living constant.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
This comment ignores the fact that wages have stagnated while productivity has skyrocketed.
- barry-cotter 9y ago
  Wages have stagnated but total compensation hasn’t. The cost of health insurance in the US has gone up a lot and most jobs have health insurance.
  - bluntfang 9y ago
    you know that you pay for health insurance that your job provides, right?
    - barry-cotter 9y ago
      Yes, just like the employer/employee legal split of social security is an accounting fiction, not a description of tax incidence. That does not change the fact that wages/salary have been relatively flat in the US for decades but wages/salary + health insurance has very much not been flat.
jotm 9y ago
It has been constant for almost half a century for the middle class, yet everyone is working more for the same not less. How exactly can you live better than your parents, assuming they had a house, a car or two, phones, TV, computers, access to supermarkets of all kinds, enough money for living expenses and a hobby or yearly vacation...
- purple-again 9y ago
  Go watch a sitcom from the 50s and compare it your surroundings. Hopefully you come to the conclusion that your standard of living is immensely greater than theirs was. If you are thinking of things like the cost of college don’t forget to factor in how many people go to college today versus back then. If you are thinking about the cost of housing, we still have the same land and a growing population. I’m city centers the demand has multiplied significantly since then so we expect relative cost of the land to multiply.
  - rectang 9y ago
    In 50s sitcoms, you'll see people working union jobs with pensions. There are a lot fewer of those these days. Even if material wealth has improved, economic insecurity is worse. People feel worse off as a result.
    - dominotw 9y ago
      Yea especially since your skills are technologically obsolete in a less than decade. Software engineering careers for example are uphill battle post 50, you better have your nest egg and kids college funds ready by then.
  - consz 9y ago
    He was talking about his parent's quality of life -- go watch sitcoms from the 90s for that. I'm not sure how the 50s are relevant.
    - geezerjay 9y ago
dalbasal 9y ago
This has generally been the standard argument since Keynes (and others) first turned out to be spectacularly wrong. We just consume more. But, I see this argument differently these days. In tech stuff, we definitely have more stuff. A phone+plan for every person over 13. Laptops for most people. But, you can't function without these. It's not really a discretionary spending. A student (for example) is at a disadvantage without those things. In fact, the student is also consuming more education then in Keynes' day. That's also a competitive consumption, that you must buy in order to participate in the job market to a greater extent then before. Housing in a lot of urban or semi-urban areas is also competitive. Median house prices in these cities is a multiple of median salary, and prices don't scale well below the median. So... I think the statement is true in an almost tautological sense. But, very little is discretionary spending. Most of it is competitive and in a competition the median person is still the median person.
- dustingetz 9y ago
  The key realization for me was that the phone-plan-at-13 isn't really optional, the kid needs it to stay competitive with the median kid
- avar 9y ago
  > you can't function without [a phone > + plan once you're 13yo, and laptop]. > It's not really a discretionary > spending. Even if I give you that a network connected phone is something a teenager absolutely must have, that still leaves the fact that most people vastly overspend on these items. Yes you might need a smartphone and a laptop for school, but those are going to cost at most $200 used, but people conflate the need for these devices with the fashion statement of owning the latest iPhone or MacBook.
  - CamTin 9y ago
    The only reason you and I can buy $200 used Thinkpads is because everyone else is clamoring to overspend for shiny new ones. If more people were OK with keeping their computers longer or buying used, then the price of used computers would go up. This would obviously be good because we would be valuing things closer to the actual benefit that they bring, but its not the case that we can ALL just have dirt-cheap few-year-old laptops.
nnq 9y ago
> we are never satisfied with a stable standard of living ...yes we are. Thankfully, nowadays more and more people "drop out" of "traditional media exposed society" and the brainwashing is starting to wear off. Too bad we're at the end of Homo Sapiens' days and there will not be any benefit to anyone though anyway (or maybe too good, a species as miserable as ours deservs being accelerated into extinction anyway)
collyw 9y ago
As someone that isn't particularly materialistic, I can afford to buy most "things". I can barely afford to buy a house where I live and I have a feeling that my pension with be worth squat when I retire.

surfmike 9y ago

People's perceived needs grow but that is not the whole story. Many people now are spending almost 50% of their pre-tax income on housing, and most of that is the price of land and goes to landlords. It seems that landlords inevitably capture a big chunk of people's salary increases. Additionally in the US your health insurance is generally tied to your job; even after Obamacare you probably have to work to pay for your monthly insurance. If housing costs went way down and health insurance were universal, I suspect many people would feel much less need to work so many hours.

zimablue 9y ago
I think this is just a very visible specific case of assets becoming worth more relative to wages
dominotw 9y ago
Housing price increase just doesn't go to landlords. It goes to City and state coffers via tax. Chicago had two housing tax hikes in 2017, for example. Edit: Added links > For homeowners in Chicago, the average increase is 10 percent. https://rebootillinois.com/2017/06/13/big-property-tax-hike-chicago-homeowners/ https://rebootillinois.com/2017/06/13/big-property-tax-hike-... > Summary over past couple of decades https://d2dv7hze646xr.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Screen-Shot-2015-12-16-at-5.46.59-PM.png https://d2dv7hze646xr.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015...
- purple-again 9y ago
  Confused by the downvotes here. In almost all of America (looking at you Cali) the property taxes are reassessed yearly to the value of the home. This is how we want it. The three blocks in every direction surrounding a middle school shouldn’t be populated by 80 year old retirees.
  - dominotw 9y ago
    Property taxes are used to fund all sorts of stuff, like a default cookie jar, so to speak. Chicago used hike this year to fund pensions This graph is a good summary https://d2dv7hze646xr.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Screen-Shot-2015-12-16-at-5.46.59-PM.png https://d2dv7hze646xr.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015... > Illinoisans’ residential property-tax burden – as a percentage of median household income – has risen 76 percent. https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/growing-out-of-control-property-taxes-put-increasing-burden-on-illinois-taxpayers/ https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/growing-out-of-contro...

samsonradu 9y ago

Among other good reasons mentioned here lets not forget inequality went up and a lot of the progress is materialized at the top.

purple-again 9y ago
In the US. Inequality has dropped significantly. A large portion of the gains to America were captured by its elite. The large portion of the gains in other parts of the world have lifted billions out of poverty. Turns out globalization is good or bad depending on who you are and where you are.
- megalodon 9y ago
  > The large portion of the gains in other parts of the world have lifted billions out of poverty. You may be correct, but it's hard to trust this sentence without a proper source.
  - j9461701 9y ago
    Here is an economist article on the subject: https://www.economist.com/news/international/21719790-going-will-be-much-harder-now-world-has-made-great-progress https://www.economist.com/news/international/21719790-going-...
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  The US has greater income inequality than many third world countries.
Sniffnoy 9y ago
In what sense does it make sense to regard inequality as a causal factor here?
- Daishiman 9y ago
  Because every serious study of the matter has shown that pretty much every metric of quality of life is negatively impacted by inequality.

a3n 9y ago

Most people don't get to choose how many hours they work. Employers, especially those that pay benefits, want you working as much as possible. Anything less is money on the table. (I'm not an employer.) It's good for an employer if you work overtime, all he has to pay is time, or time and a half, or nothing if you're salaried. He doesn't have to pay more benefits, as he would with an additional employee. Of course an employer wants to get as much work out of you as possible for benefits paid. As an employee, working overtime only gets you more cash (or even none). Working less makes your benefits more valuable. Even if employment is strictly for money, with no benefits at all, there's an administrative overhead to hiring and managing more employees. As long as we are employed by employers, and especially if we get health insurance through our employer, there will always be pressure to work more, not less.

dgellow 9y ago
So, I currently work in Germany, maybe that’s why, but in my personal experience employers are very strict with overtime and only allow it when there is a justification (e.g: big project to get done at the end of the month). I guess because of strict regulations, but you also have the fact that having tired employees results in more sick days used, a higher error rate and mood swings. To be fair, even knowing this people (including myself) do some overtime. Working more is a short term solution to increase the productivity of a team, but on the long term the benefits of doing so aren’t that obvious.
- a3n 9y ago
  Ah, an enlightened society. As a US resident, I hope to live in one of those someday. Here I'm just a resource like any farm animal.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Germany has maintained a strict no wage growth policy for decades now however to push exports, potentially contributing to the stagnation of the euro zone.

taneq 9y ago

It has. The low-work-hours future is here... It's just unevenly distributed.

megiddo 9y ago

Inflation, taxes, and regulatory burden. Savings have been systematically eroded for 50+ years. Total taxation is now 40+% of GDP. Private sector workforce participation is dropping. Regulatory burden dramatically increases health care, housing, and transportation costs. All of these policies have worked to keep you in the office.

pjkundert 9y ago
Absolutely true. As a small business owner, the amount of regulatory and accounting overhead beggars the imagination. I only hire consultants, due to the lower overhead and paperwork burden - I couldn’t even imagine hiring an employee.
nabla9 9y ago
Inflation is not the reason. Practically all savings give returns above the inflation. Interests respond to changes in inflation. If you look at the real returns, you can see that they are surprisingly stable. Fixation with nominal valuations is a sign of financial illiteracy.
torstenvl 9y ago
Total taxation is at 26% of GDP in the U.S., 34% in much of the rest of the developed world. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes-compare-internationally http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes...
- walshemj 9y ago
  is that including health care costs? I don't think so from what my expat friends tell me
- observation 9y ago
  Are you sure Tax Policy Center can be trusted? Those numbers seem very low for Ireland. I'm willing to be wrong but something seems very off here.
  - 9y ago

evolighting 9y ago

I think economic would eventually benefit economic itself first. BUT what I want to say about this problem is I don't think such number really means so much. Numbers tell you something of course, but they are just part of aspects after all. And I have always a prejudice that the whole economic system is some kind of lie about trust, which is useful in old days. but today that more likely we just have no courage and power to change it. However after watching I think is only a way of life vs way people view others.We would soon notice something we want to notice

adrianmonk 9y ago

Promotions within a company are based on ranking employees. Even if not done explicitly, you still promote your top people. Working more hours is a way to increase your rank. Thus it becomes an arms race between the employees. You work 40 hours, I increase to 45, then you increase to 50. So, to some extent, hours worked don't correspond to hours needed to be worked for productivity purposes.

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etr-strike 9y ago

The Federal Reaerve actually thinks productivity is too low: http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-fed-productivity-idUSL1N1AQ0WV http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-fed-productivity-idUSL1N1... Would be a dream to work just 40 hours per week.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
It's also worth noting that 2 of the Fed's main goals are 1. Achieve maximum employment 2. Maintain stable prices Both of which are counter productive to the goals of automation. This seems like the root of the problem to me, as the Fed is a "super admin" of the economy.
- walshemj 9y ago
  not from a political point of view

Jach 9y ago

Competition.

sametmax 9y ago

It has. 80 years ago your worked more hours, and you could not slack at work. Today, you work not only less, but half of the people in the offices I go to don't work their full shift. They go to facebook, send text messages, take long breaks, do their shopping and watch porno (yep), etc. Also, an hour of work doesn't have the same value. When your work is moving boxes, an hour is an hour. But in an office work, there are plenty of opportunities to be busy without being productive. I'd say 30% of the work I see in offices is at best useless, at worst harmful. So we have more office jobs, which have less hours, during which we work less, said hours being worth less. And this is very uneven, because a nurse probably works more now than before. But all in all, office jobs are talking over in rich countries.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
If there is so much useless/wasted time at office jobs, what's the practical purpose of requiring them to be there for a fixed number of hours?
- sametmax 9y ago
  There are several reasons for that. First, employee don't want less money and fake it. Employers want the employee to be on site because they paid for it. Second, society praises people for working. You will look better if say you are busy. Third, our systems would collapse if people were actually paid to their real value. You would see the total unfairness of it, and also how truly brilliant or useless people are. Fourth, laws, syndicates, medias and logistics come in the way. And with a big inertia. Fifth, humans are not rational and don't do "the right thing" according to the intellectual or displayed objectives. And they have all their own agenda.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  It's very much easier to measure hours of physical presence than actual value of a worker's output. The other problem is that if you measured people purely by output, 10x developers (assuming you believe in such a concept) would be able to work 1/10th as much and would very visibly be missing much of the rest of the time. This would lead to a lot of resentment from people who are less productive and would be having it rubbed in their faces. To get to a place where people are judged purely on output we would need to change society such that the notion of equality was essentially never mentioned or thought about at all. Because people's productivity is wildly, wildly unequal.

dustingetz 9y ago

Competition—A system designed around competition rewards those who compete. Surprise!

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
There is such a thing as working too hard, to one's own detriment.
- dustingetz 9y ago
  "Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast." —Paul Graham
  - watwut 9y ago
    That kind of ignores how human bodies work when tired and sleep deprived.
    - dustingetz 9y ago
      I am definitely not celebrating it. It seems obvious to me that the human with the most stamina will have an edge in any sort of competition that involves hard work, from marathons to startups.
      - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
        Startups are not marathons. Working smart is better than working hard
      - watwut 9y ago
        Marathon ends in 6 hours, if you are very slow. And pacing is considered very important. Pacing does not mean "running as fast as possible from the start".

tajen 9y ago

Or even if people had more leisure time, they’d spend it on working on a bigger project because it’s our driver. I’ve noticed when I made thousands a month, I spent much more time in charities, but I was still just as stressed ;) Ok that only works for people who are not struggling around the minimum wage.

louithethrid 9y ago

Because powerthirsty psychopaths have social needs too. What is it worth to rule a small kingdom, if nobody lives, suffers and does your bidding in this kingdom. Being the CEO in a lightsout factory, is beeing the janitor. So why do all these shitty jobs and hamster wheels exist? To give all those "great-men" the ilusion of importance.

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chewz 9y ago

That was famous Keynes prediction [1][2] that due to increased productivity people will work 15 hours weeks. Consumer capitalism however not only created productivity gains and satisfied all demands (for which should be rightly praised) but also created new demands (like better healthcare, education, technology items, vanity items etc.). It is however characteristic of money economy (urban economy) that there is nothing limiting human need to accumulate capital and consume. In subsistence economy (non-monetary) whenever there is a surplus people rather stop working then trying to accumulate more and they tend to focus on accumulating social capital. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequality-work-hours/422775/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequal... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/sep/01/economics https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/sep/01/economics

EGreg 9y ago

May I suggest that it may be the Hobbsian Trap? The more resources we have - especially necessities such as food and water - the more children can be born. And eventually the population is large enough that the amount per person goes back to what it was before. That doesn't necessarily mean everyone has to work. But in the current economy, where you have to work to afford the rent, many people work long hours. However, once you factor in the growing unemployment, you can see that, in fact, there is less work to go around. But people still need to pay the rent, eat and drink water!

neilwilson 9y ago

Because there are fewer jobs than people that want them. For every twenty dogs there are only 19 bones. That's how economic theory is designed to work. If there is a risk of too many jobs, policy is altered to restore 'order'. Do that and competition inevitably creates what we have - long hours miles from home for a pittance.

unitboolean 9y ago

Guys, what do you think about universal basic income?

peoplewindow 9y ago
There's no point trying to explicitly introduce it now. I watch these experiments with befuddlement - it's like watching a small baby try to run before it can walk. UBI will arrive slowly, incrementally and by the time it or an equivalent is finally here nobody will celebrate because it won't seem like a big deal. It'll just be the result of welfare and other services getting better and better over time, with more and more lightweight "bullshit" jobs that require essentially no exertion or risk and lower and lower hours until one day people find that the benefits system is so generous that having a job has become a lifestyle choice. But we have a long way to go to get there. It won't happen in our lifetimes. Almost all increases in wealth at the moment seem to be absorbed by healthcare and social care costs. UBI makes no sense whilst people are being bankrupted by health costs. Priorities people!

nnq 9y ago

What we desperately need is a way to reverse-brainwash the workaholics that spoil the labor market by willing to work more than 6 hrs a day. If we could figure out a clever way to penalize them for working more we could damn enjoy the heaven-on-earth that current technology should afford us all (now that we seem to have figured out how to stop population growth too)...

kiliantics 9y ago
The scabs of our times. They need to be socially ostracised for their complicity with the ruling class. But instead we congratulate them on their good work ethic...
yks 9y ago
Pretty relevant short fiction story: http://blog.ncase.me/take-your-time/ http://blog.ncase.me/take-your-time/
beager 9y ago
Not sure if sarcasm, but salaried employees are indeed penalized for working more hours with a lower hourly wage.

acchow 9y ago

It has dramatically. I have plenty of friends working full-time desk jobs that actually "work from home" 3-4 days a week and do maybe 1 or 2 hours of work over the whole day. Everyone else is browsing reddit or instagram all day in the office. Just ask any redditor.

badpun 9y ago

Given that you hear a lot about engineers (not to say managers) retiring in their fifties or even earlier, I’d say that people, over their lifetimes, do work fewer hours.

Geee 9y ago

We would work less if we didn't spend and produce so much junk.

Sevii 9y ago

People want limited goods like houses with nice schools, but there are only so many of them. And the price is only bounded by how much people can pay.

konschubert 9y ago

It turns out that working hours are determined by politics, not economics.

neilwilson 9y ago
It turns out that economics is just politics. The greatest political move was to rebrand political economy as economics and try and pretend it is a science.

darawk 9y ago

Because capitalism optimizes for production and consumption - not welfare. Often welfare and production/consumption are aligned (e.g. producing enough food for everyone). But in the case of labor/life balance, they are not aligned. It's actually kind of odd to me that serious people (e.g. John Maynard Keynes) would ever have thought that work hours would decrease. There is no term in the economic fitness function for 'work-life balance'.

Shivetya 9y ago
well a capitalist society is also a society bombarded by marketing experts who are in every part of a person's daily life working to convince them to spend more which in turn drives them to work more or go into debt pushing retirement further off. consumption is high because marketing is that good. go read any of the popular brand subs on reddit and you will see people making stupid purchasing decisions daily and many seek justification. Its really scary when people are trying to save fifty or less on a one to two thousand dollar purchase because it then costs too much; the clue that indicates the purchase at the lower amount is too much escapes them
- closeparen 9y ago
  Consumer goods are practically free next to housing. I don’t buy this argument at all. I could completely slash or double marketing-driven spending tomorrow and be in substantially the same financial position. Maybe that’s just a Bay Area distortion. Consider also that a large portion of consumer goods spending is on cars, which are basically just a substitute for living on more central/expensive land. In the end it all comes down to real estate.
  - jernfrost 9y ago
    The real cost of housing is distorted though when house prices keep going up. In many cases, if you take into account the value increase of housing, it is actually opposite of what you claim. People don't spend anything on housing, because they get back whatever they put pay for the house in terms of value increase of the property. I think it would be more fair to look at, how much does it cost to build a house, and divide that cost on the time it may be used. We should not really add the price of property to the equation. If one does this I will bet that consumer goods make up a much bigger part of the economy than you think.

jernfrost 9y ago

Anthropologists David Graeber, has addressed this and offered the explanation with the observation that we as a society produce what he calls bullshit jobs. Almost 40% of Brits in a surveyed acknowledged that their job wasn't needed. People believing in effective markets would of course protest and claim such enormous inefficiency can't possibly exist. Somebody will simply start a company without bullshit jobs. However I think there is a good explanation why this doesn't happen: https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/why-do-bullshit-jobs-exist-4f579eaa5964 https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/why-do-bullshit-jobs-exist-4f5... In short, in any complex organization bullshit work will start accruing and there is no good mechanism to week out such jobs, because the people doing those jobs will have zero incentive to tell their managers that their job in pointless and not needed. I've tried researching this on reddit and seen that a lot of work people do could have been automated. The people doing those jobs also frequently see this. However they have no economic incentive to do so. This has lead me to contemplate that guaranteed minimum income has merits, because it would remove the disincentive to make yourself redundant, to some extent. Of course not in the case where your bullshit jobs is very highly paid, which is frequently the case.

pdfernhout 9y ago
You might find this essay by Bob Black of interest on "The Aboltiion of Work": https://web.archive.org/web/20161031034600/http://whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html https://web.archive.org/web/20161031034600/http://whywork.or... "... It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other. I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..." We might ask ourselves what "leading economic indicators" might look like when this was happening...

gerbilly 9y ago

For some reason most of us are too afraid of just going home at 5:00 much less asking for reduced hours. My whole working life, I've never used an alarm clock, and I never stayed late unless I was late on a commitment that I made. (This is not the same as some artificial deadline dreamed up by someone else.) I come in late, go home early, sometimes I don't even show up—whatever. If you do this consistently, and deliver in your role of course, people will get used to it and they'll stop bothering you about it.

ukulele 9y ago
You can't really generalize this to everyone. It's dependent on your managers, and there are definitely people in the world who will fire an otherwise good employee for showing bad "optics" to other employees. You may not want to work in such an environment, but that is of course a luxury to be able to choose.
- mooreds 9y ago
  It also depends on your role and who depends on your work and/or expertise. For some folks this kind of flexibility is eminently attainable, for others it juts isn't possible.
volgo 9y ago
Speak for yourself. I go home everyday at 3pm. I'm a productive worker and I know how much I contribute. I never miss a project deadline, always finish what I'm assigned to in a sprint, and don't chitchat with people throughout the day. I get in at 11 am and leave 3pm. I don't care what anyone thinks because at the end of every sprint, I know that my boss and other leaders get together and look at productivity and place me at the top of the chart. When things get busy, I don't hestitate to pull some weekends for my boss because we have a mutual understanding. I get paid almost twice as the going salary for Silicon Valley and I happily work my ass off for the company. It's win win for everyone
burkaman 9y ago
Most people would get fired if they did this consistently, whether or not they were performing well. And in the vast majority of jobs, it's not possible to perform well if you don't show up on time.

dredmorbius 9y ago

The negotiating leverage of capital vs. labour. You'll find this in Adam Smith: [I]n every part of Europe, twenty workmen serve under a master for one that is independent; and the wages of labour are everywhere understood to be, what they usually are, when the labourer is one person, and the owner of the stock which employs him another. What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour. It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen.... https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_8 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/... Ricardo, rent vs. wages, as well.

dingo_bat 9y ago

In my case, even if you bump up my salary by 10x suddenly, I probably will work the same hours I do now. Why are lower work hours assumed to arise from increased economic status?

guy98238710 9y ago

Saying that people just like working is ridiculous. It's either author's social bubble or it's straight propaganda. I cannot imagine people in factories or construction saying they like to go to work. The reasons behind the 40-hour week are way more brutal: - Contemporary economy has surprising amount of internal inefficiency causing most of the value to be wasted. - Value that is not squandered is distributed unevenly, so most people aren't that much better off. - Status spending doesn't deliver more value with higher economic output. Status is always scarce. The same goes for several other "resources". - Mate competition, gender roles, and divorces create separate earners and spenders. Earners have little control over spending and they are thus unable to cut back on work. They are often legally required to work under threat of imprisonment. - Widespread debt means most people cannot stop working without risking default. Credit availability further encourages irrational spending. - Most people don't get to choose their working hours. Businesses have the leverage and they choose to max out hours to the legal limit. Governments have little incentive to shorten the work week, because small change won't matter and big change would kill the economy. - People can retire early or they can take breaks between jobs, but this doesn't work for two reasons: people dislike large swings in their lifestyle and people grow dependent on their income through irrational spending. Author is right about one thing: the elderly are the winners here. That's where governments can focus their effort. Earlier retirement can be introduced incrementally and it has the smallest impact on economy, because on average older people are less productive anyway.

neilwilson 9y ago
It's entirely reasonable because the literature shows that it is true. Work is leisure you get paid to do and leisure is work you pay to do. If your society doesn't allow that state to come about then it is because it has been deliberately designed to have fewer work opportunities than there are people that want them. If you construct society so that there are always more work opportunities than people who want work then competition and automation automatically gets rid of the crap jobs. And yes there are people in factories that love their jobs. It takes all sorts to make a world.
- guy98238710 9y ago

erik14th 9y ago

Money is similar to the peacock's tail, the main difference being inheritance, social stratification make it so it matters very little to the individual how much money he starts with due to the fact that you'll be immersed in a social circle with people from the same economic strata, thus to differentiate yourself you need to make more money, otherwise you're a loser. Wealthier males work more because they have access to better paid, more fulfilling and more prestigious kind of work. Poor males work less due to the fact that they have access only to shitty jobs with shitty pays and no prestige, so, for a lot of poor people, working may actually degrade your quality of life, since you won't be able to match or improve upon the lifestyle your parents provided you. Women work more because they need to, either because they have children to take care off by themselves or because they've grown up watching the suffering of their mothers due to the oppression on females in society, and they sure as hell don't want that for themselves. People mostly buy stuff to show off, and then lie to themselves that it is because they like the stuff they bought, illusion of power. Being well off doesn't really matter socially if people don't know about it, bragging is seen as offensive so people do it in an indirect way, by purchasing expensive stupid shit, so that they can feel they're not just bragging, they have "good taste". People don't want to be well, they want to be better than others, and they'll seek to achieve that in the way that is easier and more convenient, which is vulgar display of power, since hitting people in the face usually leads to problems, that is now achieved through the purchase of excessively expensive items just to show you they can.