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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 cons

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
  What literature shows that? The linked presentation contains only inference instead of direct evidence. You seem to be imagining distant future when people just work on things they enjoy. Even if such utopia can be built, it doesn't change anything about the present situation. The vast majority of people would quit their jobs if they didn't need the money.
erikpukinskis 9y ago
> Contemporary economy has surprising amount of internal inefficiency causing most of the value to be wasted. This is the point “Efficiency Cult Capitalists” seem to miss. They think market forces will drive conpanies to be more efficient, but they don’t reliably do so except in the very long term (larger timescales than a typical human career length.) As a startup your costs are high relative to your income and so you have an incentive to use labor efficiently (VC incentive warping aside.) The only way you can grow profits is by using labor to grow production or marketing. But one you have an established share of the market, the equation reversed and you have lots of revenues and relatively smaller costs. In addition you have a new production-neutral way to create value: you can use labor to build a moat that will prevent competitors from springing up in your wake. This decreases labor efficiency, because you’re doing more labor and not increasing production at all. But it creates value by stalling depreciation on your previous capital expensitures. It’s not clear to me what incentives decide how much companies invest in production vs moat building. In the case of software companies I’ve seen it seems to be that moat maintenance is typically at least half of the labor. I have no idea how that gets established. I would be interested if anyone has ideas on how that balance gets struck. Of course inefficiency is opportunity. And so high rollers can use a bunch of cash to crash over someone’s moat, and then compete with them on efficiency. However, the market incentive here is that once you are over the moat you just split the market. Both companies save the cost of actually investing resources in efficiency, the moat buster gets a return for their effort. However, I do think there is another opportunity: if you can get over the moat, and then instead of trying to own the market yourself (at which point you are competing on level terms with the incumbent) if you can create a private market (like Lyft, AdWords, etc) then you invite a thousand smaller companies to compete on efficiency... this allows you to marshal a larger volume of management resources than a CEO could direct, which gives you an advantage against the incumbent. You will shrink the overall profit pool (due to increased efficiency) and you have to share that pool with your contractors, BUT you have a shot at taking the entire market, so that could be worth more than the cabal spoils you’d get coordinating with the incumbent.

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
What literature shows that? The linked presentation contains only inference instead of direct evidence. You seem to be imagining distant future when people just work on things they enjoy. Even if such utopia can be built, it doesn't change anything about the present situation. The vast majority of people would quit their jobs if they didn't need the money.

erikpukinskis 9y ago

> Contemporary economy has surprising amount of internal inefficiency causing most of the value to be wasted. This is the point “Efficiency Cult Capitalists” seem to miss. They think market forces will drive conpanies to be more efficient, but they don’t reliably do so except in the very long term (larger timescales than a typical human career length.) As a startup your costs are high relative to your income and so you have an incentive to use labor efficiently (VC incentive warping aside.) The only way you can grow profits is by using labor to grow production or marketing. But one you have an established share of the market, the equation reversed and you have lots of revenues and relatively smaller costs. In addition you have a new production-neutral way to create value: you can use labor to build a moat that will prevent competitors from springing up in your wake. This decreases labor efficiency, because you’re doing more labor and not increasing production at all. But it creates value by stalling depreciation on your previous capital expensitures. It’s not clear to me what incentives decide how much companies invest in production vs moat building. In the case of software companies I’ve seen it seems to be that moat maintenance is typically at least half of the labor. I have no idea how that gets established. I would be interested if anyone has ideas on how that balance gets struck. Of course inefficiency is opportunity. And so high rollers can use a bunch of cash to crash over someone’s moat, and then compete with them on efficiency. However, the market incentive here is that once you are over the moat you just split the market. Both companies save the cost of actually investing resources in efficiency, the moat buster gets a return for their effort. However, I do think there is another opportunity: if you can get over the moat, and then instead of trying to own the market yourself (at which point you are competing on level terms with the incumbent) if you can create a private market (like Lyft, AdWords, etc) then you invite a thousand smaller companies to compete on efficiency... this allows you to marshal a larger volume of management resources than a CEO could direct, which gives you an advantage against the incumbent. You will shrink the overall profit pool (due to increased efficiency) and you have to share that pool with your contractors, BUT you have a shot at taking the entire market, so that could be worth more than the cabal spoils you’d get coordinating with the incumbent.