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While this story certainly isn't great for discussion (for the points you mentioned) I disagree with your last statement. Comparisons are useful, especially wh

by furyg3 16y ago

While this story certainly isn't great for discussion (for the points you mentioned) I disagree with your last statement. Comparisons are useful, especially when they're disentangled from the politics. I don't really care about how Swedes are ethically superior because they have more mandated vacation and a shorter workday. What I care about are the effects. Is there a lower occurrence of burnout? Are Swedes more productive during working hours? Are work-related injuries (and related costs to employers) lower? etc. These things are intertwined with other socio-policial factors, of course, so it can be difficult to divorce them... but not too difficult.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Two interesting points from your comments. First, Americans can work any kind of work week they want. There's a book -- 4-hour-work-week -- that a lot of folks are trying to make work. In technology teams especially. I tell my teams that I don't care how much you work or don't: what matters is productivity and predictability. Sure, lots of others don't feel that way, but it's up to each situation. If there were some good lessons to be learned from some example? Bring them on! I'm all for it. Second, complex systems of hundreds of millions of people do very poorly as an engineering experiment. Or -- you can't decide how you want things to turn out and then pull some magic lever and have it turn out that way. It's never that simple. So discussions about huge generalizations are premised on a really bad flaw: that somehow we can massively change everything at one time. [edit]As an example, you couldn't decide in 1970 that you wanted every person to have a notebook computer by 2020. You could decide to train more people in hard sciences. You could decide to make incentives for investing. But you can't take one complex system as an example and then tell another one to conform to it. That's just not the way complex systems work. And that's not meant as a political comment. That's just a rule of complex systems.[/edit] It's much better to take all the new information you can find and incorporate it from the ground-up. Want a society with 20-hour work weeks? Cool. Go build one. Nobody is stopping you, and if it's wildly successful then others will very quickly copy it. This is a very easy thing. Actually from this angle I don't even see the point of the article. The only other angle is that someone or somebody -- one presumes government -- should tell us how to do our work. From my own experience, technology is one of the few areas where we create our own reality. And time and time again, we make it sucky on ourselves. But it's our reality. I wouldn't want to take that ultimate ownership away from us, no matter how good the cause.
- davidw 16y ago
  > Americans can work any kind of work week they want My guess is that there are actually some herd effects at work there: it would be pretty difficult in many places to take a 1 month vacation if no one else does, even if the person in question negotiated away some of their pay for extra time off.
  - farmerbuzz 16y ago
    Herd effects, and company policies. Americans != programmers at startups.
- kragen 16y ago
  > Want a society with 20-hour work weeks? Cool. Go build one. Nobody is stopping you, and if it's wildly successful then others will very quickly copy it. This is a very easy thing. Actually from this angle I don't even see the point of the article. In reality, there have been many societies with 20-hour workweeks (many hunter-gatherer societies) and many of them were wildly successful, as measured by the health and self-reported happiness of their members. But someone did in fact stop them. If you try to set up a hunter-gatherer society with 20-hour workweeks in, say, Iowa, I guarantee you that someone will be stopping you in short order. There's plenty of grass seeds to gather and a certain amount of game to hunt, but you will inevitably come into land-use conflict with the other people nearby. Even if you are one of the tiny minority of people so rich as to be able to buy up a large chunk of central Iowa as a reserve for this purpose, you're likely to be prosecuted for permitting noxious weeds on your property, sued for allowing Roundup Ready soy to cross-pollinate onto your property, quite likely arrested for marrying your daughter off at 12, and perhaps committed to a mental institution. (And then there's the difficulty of changing the culture of a group of people. Most utopian communities fail, because inventing a culture is difficult. People start with an existing culture and judge everything according to it. We don't even know what beliefs you'd need to adopt to live successfully as a hunter-gatherer, to say nothing of the knowledge.) Wherever you go, you have to contend with the existing norms, laws, and resource allocations. You need a certain amount of natural resources to survive. The areas most richly endowed with natural resources are also richly endowed with groups of people who value their exclusive access to those resources and are willing to fight, or request others to fight, to preserve that exclusive access. So, you know, it only takes a few hectares of most islands in Micronesia to support a human life, and collecting the coconuts, breadfruit, papaya, and so on is really pretty easy; you don't even need 20 hours a week. As a result, there are already people living off those hectares. If you try to "go build one" there, they will fight you, and the US government will ultimately back them up.
elmindreda 16y ago
Sweden isn't the example it used to be, in this regard. We currently have a (relatively) right-wing government that's privatising services, cutting social safety nets and creating a low-wage job market. This is having the same effects it did in the US.

by furyg3 16y ago

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

Two interesting points from your comments. First, Americans can work any kind of work week they want. There's a book -- 4-hour-work-week -- that a lot of folks are trying to make work. In technology teams especially. I tell my teams that I don't care how much you work or don't: what matters is productivity and predictability. Sure, lots of others don't feel that way, but it's up to each situation. If there were some good lessons to be learned from some example? Bring them on! I'm all for it. Second, complex systems of hundreds of millions of people do very poorly as an engineering experiment. Or -- you can't decide how you want things to turn out and then pull some magic lever and have it turn out that way. It's never that simple. So discussions about huge generalizations are premised on a really bad flaw: that somehow we can massively change everything at one time. [edit]As an example, you couldn't decide in 1970 that you wanted every person to have a notebook computer by 2020. You could decide to train more people in hard sciences. You could decide to make incentives for investing. But you can't take one complex system as an example and then tell another one to conform to it. That's just not the way complex systems work. And that's not meant as a political comment. That's just a rule of complex systems.[/edit] It's much better to take all the new information you can find and incorporate it from the ground-up. Want a society with 20-hour work weeks? Cool. Go build one. Nobody is stopping you, and if it's wildly successful then others will very quickly copy it. This is a very easy thing. Actually from this angle I don't even see the point of the article. The only other angle is that someone or somebody -- one presumes government -- should tell us how to do our work. From my own experience, technology is one of the few areas where we create our own reality. And time and time again, we make it sucky on ourselves. But it's our reality. I wouldn't want to take that ultimate ownership away from us, no matter how good the cause.

davidw 16y ago
> Americans can work any kind of work week they want My guess is that there are actually some herd effects at work there: it would be pretty difficult in many places to take a 1 month vacation if no one else does, even if the person in question negotiated away some of their pay for extra time off.
- farmerbuzz 16y ago
  Herd effects, and company policies. Americans != programmers at startups.
kragen 16y ago
> Want a society with 20-hour work weeks? Cool. Go build one. Nobody is stopping you, and if it's wildly successful then others will very quickly copy it. This is a very easy thing. Actually from this angle I don't even see the point of the article. In reality, there have been many societies with 20-hour workweeks (many hunter-gatherer societies) and many of them were wildly successful, as measured by the health and self-reported happiness of their members. But someone did in fact stop them. If you try to set up a hunter-gatherer society with 20-hour workweeks in, say, Iowa, I guarantee you that someone will be stopping you in short order. There's plenty of grass seeds to gather and a certain amount of game to hunt, but you will inevitably come into land-use conflict with the other people nearby. Even if you are one of the tiny minority of people so rich as to be able to buy up a large chunk of central Iowa as a reserve for this purpose, you're likely to be prosecuted for permitting noxious weeds on your property, sued for allowing Roundup Ready soy to cross-pollinate onto your property, quite likely arrested for marrying your daughter off at 12, and perhaps committed to a mental institution. (And then there's the difficulty of changing the culture of a group of people. Most utopian communities fail, because inventing a culture is difficult. People start with an existing culture and judge everything according to it. We don't even know what beliefs you'd need to adopt to live successfully as a hunter-gatherer, to say nothing of the knowledge.) Wherever you go, you have to contend with the existing norms, laws, and resource allocations. You need a certain amount of natural resources to survive. The areas most richly endowed with natural resources are also richly endowed with groups of people who value their exclusive access to those resources and are willing to fight, or request others to fight, to preserve that exclusive access. So, you know, it only takes a few hectares of most islands in Micronesia to support a human life, and collecting the coconuts, breadfruit, papaya, and so on is really pretty easy; you don't even need 20 hours a week. As a result, there are already people living off those hectares. If you try to "go build one" there, they will fight you, and the US government will ultimately back them up.

elmindreda 16y ago

Sweden isn't the example it used to be, in this regard. We currently have a (relatively) right-wing government that's privatising services, cutting social safety nets and creating a low-wage job market. This is having the same effects it did in the US.