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The problem is that as a society we believe that people need to work 40 hours a week to survive. We replace people with robots and retain the same output. We a

The problem is that as a society we believe that people need to work 40 hours a week to survive. We replace people with robots and retain the same output. We are more productive than ever before, yet work the same amount. Physical and uneducated work is being replaced by automation, yet we expect these people replaced by robots to find jobs to survive where there are now none. I don't believe in Universal Basic Income though, we live in a society and it is our duty to contribute to that society. I think the answer is that we need to move towards a shorter workday. Raise wages and shorten work hours. People used to work 12 hours a day, now we work 8, why not move to a 6 hour workday? Eventually we may move into a post-scarcity society where all our basic needs are automated and work becomes an optional extra, but we're not at that point yet.

dnbgfher 8y ago
I don't see how this tracks. Particularly in relation to many of the jobs going away, productivity isn't inversely related to hours worked. People working 6 hours instead of 8 will get three quarters as much done. How would their wages go up? If you are proposing the government cover the difference, then you're effectively proposing a bastardized version of UBI with an employment requirement, and payout that is proportional to current economic advantage. I'm not even sure it wouldn't cost more than current UBI proposals given that proportionality. I don't understand why you would be in favor of this, but think UBI was bad. Or how it could possibly work, if it wasn't the government paying for it.
- jlgosse 8y ago
  I think the argument is that most people are truly only attaining maximum productivity for 5-6 hours in a day, so why are they even there for the extra 2-3? If you make $100/hr for 8 hours but are only productive for 5 of those hours, your employer is really paying you $160/hr. Why are we wasting employees time and employers money?
  - saiya-jin 8y ago
    This is very IT-centric point of view, where mostly creative work can be done in various speeds, depending on effectivity and motivation in given time. I know its definitely valid for me and colleagues. Imagine tons of other jobs where this simply doesn't apply - doctors, teachers, bureaucrats, farmers, drivers, shop/restaurant crew, people working in tourism, many factory jobs and probably tons of other types of jobs. Yes, I just mentioned more than 90% of the world population. We can gradually improve efficiency of probably every single job out there, but simply slashing 30% will have very direct negative consequences on output for most people, in many cases directly proportional. Now who wants to take 30% pay cut?
- zeckalpha 8y ago
  People working 6 hours will get slightly more than three quarters done. People lose steam through the day.
seem_2211 8y ago
It's not that simple though - if you read the article it talks about how 1: High paying jobs aren't really increasing in number but are becoming ever better paid and 2: Low paying jobs are exploding in number but not in wages paid. So part of the problem is that there aren't many mid level jobs that get people in and help them then increase. Tech doesn't really automate the stuff that's not super low level (like cleaning toilets, or mopping floors), and it doesn't do stuff at the high end (M&A banking, negotiating policy, writing code). But it eats a ton of stuff in the middle.
- zeckalpha 8y ago
  How do we incentivize atuomation at the extreme ends?
refurb 8y ago
What about people who want to work? Their productivity increases even further, they make more money and inequity increases. Or are you suggesting we ban working?
- nicklaf 8y ago
  Or are you suggesting we ban working? Well, with a sufficiently progressive tax, you might choose to stop volunteering your time for what will be diminishing returns in income.
  - twblalock 8y ago
    > Well, with a sufficiently progressive tax, you might choose to stop volunteering your time for what will be diminishing returns in income. A solution that incentivizes successful people to hold themselves back from fulfilling their potential is going to make society poorer overall. If you want to redistribute wealth, you should incentivize the creation of wealth so you have enough to move around.
    - nicklaf 8y ago
      Possibly! I don't know enough about economics to say one way or another.
    - pnutjam 8y ago
      You are assuming all work is paid work. The majority of people would find very productive things to do, and yes, higher income should be taxed more.
  - refurb 8y ago
    Ok, fair point. But as someone already mentioned, would we want someone like Elon Musk to not work?
    - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
      Just because you don’t have to work doesn’t mean you wouldn’t want to anyway - perhaps money is not the only motivation for working when your basic needs are met.
cmiles74 8y ago
People can contribute in many ways, I don't agree that only contributions that furthers someone else's economic goals should be judged worthy. That said, I don't think we will see shortening of the workday without some sort of incentive for employers. From their point of view, why not simply make more money? Indeed, for many boards of directors profits is the only goal. IMHO, this is where a basic income would fit in. Perhaps when people are allowed more freedom of movement they will find novel ways to contribute to society.
zjs 8y ago
Interestingly, working fewer hours a year was typical in pre-industrial society[1]. 1: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
pmiller2 8y ago
What is your evidence that UBI reduces people’s contribution to society? If you’re referring to people not “working” in the traditional sense, not all contributions map nicely to economic output.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Exactly, the UBI would enable people to be paid for often non paying contributions like open source contributions, keeping park lands clean, creating educational content online and lots of other things. If I was paid a UBI I would still spend most of my time contributing but I would just do the things I see value in without having to worry about how will I make someone pay for this.
  - cheeseomlit 8y ago
    Oh come on. If I was paid UBI I'd sit at home playing video games all day and so would everyone else I know.
twblalock 8y ago
If work hours were shortened and productivity remained the same, wages would be reduced by a proportional amount.
skybrian 8y ago
There are plenty of employers who hire part time and often people need to work more than one job as a result. Partial basic income would fit right into that if it helps people afford to work one job instead of two, or move to part time.
throwawayjava 8y ago
I think a three day weekend with a "day of service" is a much better solution. Working 8 hours a day already leaves enough downtime in my schedule to get bored, but not enough to turn that boredom into something productive. 6 hours would be outright hell. The problem is, the extra two hours don't really provide me with any compelling new opportunities to contribute! That's barely enough time to get at a school and volunteer and get back to work. Barely enough time to get into the flow of things if I'm volunteer programming. Etc. But an entire additional day off of work would be great. I could commit to do real things. I could bake so much bread for the church's food shelter. I could build an entire web app using the city's open data to help people avoid tickets. I could spend an entire day in a classroom. Etc. If you distribute service days evenly and treat them like "just another business function" for businesses, then you could pretty much replace the teaching aspect of higher ed with volunteers. 2-3 people prep+lecture+office hours one day a week, 2-3 people are spending all their service hours helping design curriculum, 2-3 people do a day of grading each week. A <10 person team can teach an entire university course @ 1 day per person per week. Multiply across the whole city, every company. Universal 4 year higher education for "free". And there's still tens of millions of volunteer days per week left over for all the other stuff.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  I'd prefer the shorter days. A 6 hour day would leave more time for daily exercise and cooking healthy food for dinner and lunch the next day. I would probably also feel more relaxed on the weekend to work on personal programming projects.
  - throwawayjava 8y ago
    That's fair. There are probably a lot of ways to structure this.
gumby 8y ago
> I don't believe in Universal Basic Income though, we live in a society and it is our duty to contribute to that society. There are plenty of things people do that are valuable to society yet are not captured in the GDP, and are thus not highly valued by contemporary society. They range from visiting and looking after elder parents, playing with your children, writing poetry etc. Then there are undervalued activities which, due to being undervalued, are often rejected by people who would be good at them but can't afford a sacrifice (e.g. teaching, various kinds of social work, etc). As the marginal cost of production asymptotes towards nil, peoples' sense of self worth from work (which is largely a modern belief anyway dating from the middle of the industrial revolution) can be sloughed off. > I think the answer is that we need to move towards a shorter workday. Raise wages and shorten work hours. I agree that we should do this urgently, but beware a belief in the "lump of labor fallacy". Also, because people currently do develop a sense of self worth from their work, we should be investing heavily in helping people readjust to the loss of economic value in their work. For example governments offer retraining programs, but while a 20 year old coal miner may be able to find a job repairing trucks or writing reactive web apps, a 60 year old coal miner, who after two years of training becomes a 62 year old auto mechanic or web developer, will struggle to find employment. These people (both at 20 and 60) need assistance that also preserves their dignity.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  I knew a guy who worked 6 months a year doing contract work and then spent the other 6 months on hobbies and personal projects. I remember asking him if he gets bored during those 6 months not working and he said to me "I don't base my life enjoyment off of making someone else money". That advice has really stuck to me and its really cool to see the electronics projects he builds in those 6 months.
  - 52-6F-62 8y ago
    That sounds pretty pleasurable. IIRC that second six months is the true classical definition of a life of leisure.
    - 8y ago
malandrew 8y ago
The problem with moving from 8 hours to 6 hours is that there will always be workers willing to do 10 hours or even 12 hours. These workers end up producing 50-100% more with about the same overhead. If you have a worker that will work 12 hours, you only need to pay for one health insurance plan as opposed to having to pay for two insurance plans if you need to get two 6-hour employees. On top of that, the 12-hour employee is accruing experience at twice the speed of the 6-hour employee. For some fields, putting in the additional hours can make the employee willing to work more hours more productive on a per hour basis. Obviously this doesn't apply to all professions, but for many professions it does apply to some degree. You'd basically have to outlaw working more than 6 hours to keep overachievers from taking all the good jobs.
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  So, basically how things are today? With regard to health insurance specifically, the way to solve that is moving the burden of healthcare from the employer to the state.
TomMckenny 8y ago
Higher wages with shorter work hours would be a great step in the right direction. I believe Keynes even suggested it. But, a post-scarcity society, where labor is nearly valueless, still requires everyone have their needs met regardless of what they "own". But in that future as through all the past, most people are born owning little more than their labor. So a post-scarcity society does not just require the technology we are approaching. It also requires a radically different perception of ownership. This is the harder problem. In the language of today, it means a person without property and whose labor will always be essentially valueless, gets the produce of someone else's robots, ownership of which will be passed down though generations. Changing this is close to unthinkable in current society. But unless this massive social shift emerges, it appears that larger and larger portions of society will be converted into a euphemistically renamed servant class where their labor has not intrinsic value except prestige or amusement value to the person hiring. Pardon the following if it's upsetting, but I notice our current path is to add more and more store clerks, waiters, maids, sign spinners etc. Not because machines/systems can't do theses things (amazon, self serve restaurants, billboards) but because the customer enjoys/gets a kick out of them. On the current path, what would have become a post-scarcity society will instead have vast numbers of such people earning their minimum requirements at such jobs. Plus perhaps homeless people permanently converted into a prison workforce.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  > Higher wages with shorter work hours would be a great step in the right direction. I believe Keynes even suggested it. No he didn’t. He suggested we’d have chosen to work fewer hours and have more leisure because we could afford both greater consumption and greater leisure than were possible when he wrote. Higher wages than now, with shorter work hours than now is possible only with growth in economic productivity so we can produce more (goods, services) with less (material input, labour). We can’t just decide to work 20 hours a week and maintain our current standard of living by fiat. Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) https://assets.aspeninstitute.org/content/uploads/files/content/upload/Intro_and_Section_I.pdf https://assets.aspeninstitute.org/content/uploads/files/cont...
  - 8y ago
AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
Our productivity has indeed grown immensely, but, for good or for bad, instead of making things cheaper we're directing all our free resources to making them better. Instead of cheaper cars we're making safer cars, instead of cheaper houses we're building bigger houses, and so on.
- Dumblydorr 8y ago
  A very large percentage of free resources are being hoarded in wealth and cash piles, would you actually claim a company like Apple is directing all of it's free resources to making better products? Why the stock buybacks and 200 billion pile?
  - graeme 8y ago
    That's capital. It gets given back to investors, who invest it elsewhere. They don't just stick it under the mattress. It is moved from Apple to a place where it can be put to use. With a buyback (or dividend) apple is saying "we ran out of productive ways to spend this money"
    - nybble41 8y ago
      Even if they did just keep a few billion dollars of physical cash in a vault somewhere, that would just increase the purchasing power of the remainder. The total value of all currency in circulation (all forms combined) tends toward the total value of all of the goods available for purchase. Taking money out of circulation is a bit like making a loan to everyone in proportion to the amount of currency they hold; when you do decide to put it back into circulation, that increase in value (deflation) represents the interest you receive on the loan.
  - xamuel 8y ago
    It's a mistake to think of money as resources--as if money is something we dig out of the ground and need in order to make our machines run. No-one eats cash. Whatever could be done if Apple spent its cash, could be done if Apple didn't spend its cash. Money's only purpose is to incentivize people to do things, so you're basically asking Apple to play king and start directing society. I'd prefer they just sit on their money rather than that!
mcherm 8y ago
But I DON'T work just 40 hours a week. I work more like 50-55 hours most weeks. I LIKE my work, and I don't want to do less. I agree that the belief that we must work 40 hours a week in order to be a good person lies at the root of many of society's problems. And I do think that people ought to contribute to society. But somehow that does not lead me away from the idea of a Universal Basic Income, but instead leads me to believe that something roughly that shape is what we need to save society. I guess the key difference is who defines "contribute to society". If it is employers, then we need a system where as many people as possible must report to an employer who controls how they spend their time. (Requiring people to get paid a salary seems to do that quite effectively.) If it is the government that defines how one ought to "contribute to society" then we get mandated work programs. But if you believe that each individual is the best judge of how they ought to "contribute to society" then it leads to the belief that we should order society such that as many individuals as possible have a choice about how they spend their time. Some variant of UBI seems to me like a good way to achieve that goal in a society no longer tightly constrained by scarcity.
- donaldknuth123 8y ago
  >But somehow that does not lead me away from the idea of a Universal Basic Income, but instead leads me to believe that something roughly that shape is what we need to save society. The fascination with UBI is so strange. You are basically admitting that you think the system is so broken that the only way for it to continue to operate is to give people free money. How you come to that conclusion and not that the current system is completely broken and likely needs to be replaced confuses me.
CalRobert 8y ago
Amen to that - more than this, I worry that "we" didn't decide anything, but rather that keeping people in a state of imagined scarcity proved handy for preserving the status quo in terms of concentration of power. What would a population do if people were able to act freely and do the things they cared about? How many folks would be fighting climate change but are _instead_ doing Dumb Shit That Doesn't Matter (most jobs) because we have to pay bills? How many people work a job that is at best a net neutral to society, and at worst parasitic, because it personally enriches them, but makes everyone else poorer? How many are doing that only because they decided to buy a house close to work, so now they have a pile of debt, so now they _have_ to spend their time working for the last owner of the house instead of for themselves? Why do we make it so goddamned hard to live cheap? Want university? That'll be an arm and a leg. Want a house? Expect to pay many, many years of income for it. Decide you're ok with a small home and riding your bike or taking the bus? Screw you, that's illegal, build a damn parking spot and make sure you meet minimum size reqs and oh btw you're not allowed to build in this old neighborhood because the existing homeowners' cartel made it illegal. You can build a modest home for ~$40,000. It's expensive because we made it (mostly) illegal to build new homes anywhere near jobs. Not only that, instead of putting homes where they're cheap to serve (close to electric, water, etc) we push everyone out to the middle of nowhere where it's massively expensive to provide services. Not to mention that instead of relying on your feet and a $300 bicycle to get around you now need a gigantic money incinerator (a car) for basic mobility. God help you if you get sick or hurt. A broken wrist could bankrupt plenty of people in the wrong circumstances. How many people make six figures (yes, that's a lot of money relatively speaking - try leaving SF before sneering) and still manage to somehow worry about money? How the fuck did we decide this was the best way to build a society? Why did we make everything so goddamn expensive? Building supplies and calories are cheap after all - practically free. Maybe it's because keeping a population in fear ensures they can't organize to better their situation at the cost of tearing down existing power structures.
- xamuel 8y ago
  Here's another perspective you might not be accounting for. Currently, people who work elite jobs tend to live around people with elite interests. If you're an upper class developer, you'll live in a neighborhood with other developers, lawyers, doctors, white-collar workers. If somehow housing were made affordable everywhere, how would that pattern be maintained? By definition, there would be nothing stopping "Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel" (from The Simpsons) from moving to Mountain View, CA. So you end up with a situation where elite software engineers are trying to sleep, because they have work tomorrow, and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel is keeping them awake by blowing up fireworks or firing his shotgun at 2am. What recourse do you have? You can't kick Cletus out--that would violate all sorts of human rights and so on. So when you look at it this way, higher price housing is almost inevitable. Before you can have any realistic hope of addressing it, you need to figure out what to do with Cletus!
FussyZeus 8y ago
I'm curious how you plan to have a less-than-40-hour workweek while still having living wages? It's going to be hard enough to get the capitalists on board with just paying people who do work they find inferior enough to live.
jeffreyrogers 8y ago
> We replace people with robots and retain the same output That's not how manufacturing works. Most manufacturing still requires human input because robots aren't very flexible. You have to build an entire line around a robot which means you adapt slowly to changes in the market.

dnbgfher 8y ago

I don't see how this tracks. Particularly in relation to many of the jobs going away, productivity isn't inversely related to hours worked. People working 6 hours instead of 8 will get three quarters as much done. How would their wages go up? If you are proposing the government cover the difference, then you're effectively proposing a bastardized version of UBI with an employment requirement, and payout that is proportional to current economic advantage. I'm not even sure it wouldn't cost more than current UBI proposals given that proportionality. I don't understand why you would be in favor of this, but think UBI was bad. Or how it could possibly work, if it wasn't the government paying for it.

jlgosse 8y ago
I think the argument is that most people are truly only attaining maximum productivity for 5-6 hours in a day, so why are they even there for the extra 2-3? If you make $100/hr for 8 hours but are only productive for 5 of those hours, your employer is really paying you $160/hr. Why are we wasting employees time and employers money?
- saiya-jin 8y ago
  This is very IT-centric point of view, where mostly creative work can be done in various speeds, depending on effectivity and motivation in given time. I know its definitely valid for me and colleagues. Imagine tons of other jobs where this simply doesn't apply - doctors, teachers, bureaucrats, farmers, drivers, shop/restaurant crew, people working in tourism, many factory jobs and probably tons of other types of jobs. Yes, I just mentioned more than 90% of the world population. We can gradually improve efficiency of probably every single job out there, but simply slashing 30% will have very direct negative consequences on output for most people, in many cases directly proportional. Now who wants to take 30% pay cut?
zeckalpha 8y ago
People working 6 hours will get slightly more than three quarters done. People lose steam through the day.

seem_2211 8y ago

It's not that simple though - if you read the article it talks about how 1: High paying jobs aren't really increasing in number but are becoming ever better paid and 2: Low paying jobs are exploding in number but not in wages paid. So part of the problem is that there aren't many mid level jobs that get people in and help them then increase. Tech doesn't really automate the stuff that's not super low level (like cleaning toilets, or mopping floors), and it doesn't do stuff at the high end (M&A banking, negotiating policy, writing code). But it eats a ton of stuff in the middle.

zeckalpha 8y ago
How do we incentivize atuomation at the extreme ends?

refurb 8y ago

What about people who want to work? Their productivity increases even further, they make more money and inequity increases. Or are you suggesting we ban working?

nicklaf 8y ago
Or are you suggesting we ban working? Well, with a sufficiently progressive tax, you might choose to stop volunteering your time for what will be diminishing returns in income.
- twblalock 8y ago
  > Well, with a sufficiently progressive tax, you might choose to stop volunteering your time for what will be diminishing returns in income. A solution that incentivizes successful people to hold themselves back from fulfilling their potential is going to make society poorer overall. If you want to redistribute wealth, you should incentivize the creation of wealth so you have enough to move around.
  - nicklaf 8y ago
    Possibly! I don't know enough about economics to say one way or another.
  - pnutjam 8y ago
    You are assuming all work is paid work. The majority of people would find very productive things to do, and yes, higher income should be taxed more.
- refurb 8y ago
  Ok, fair point. But as someone already mentioned, would we want someone like Elon Musk to not work?
  - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    Just because you don’t have to work doesn’t mean you wouldn’t want to anyway - perhaps money is not the only motivation for working when your basic needs are met.

cmiles74 8y ago

People can contribute in many ways, I don't agree that only contributions that furthers someone else's economic goals should be judged worthy. That said, I don't think we will see shortening of the workday without some sort of incentive for employers. From their point of view, why not simply make more money? Indeed, for many boards of directors profits is the only goal. IMHO, this is where a basic income would fit in. Perhaps when people are allowed more freedom of movement they will find novel ways to contribute to society.

zjs 8y ago

Interestingly, working fewer hours a year was typical in pre-industrial society[1]. 1: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

pmiller2 8y ago

What is your evidence that UBI reduces people’s contribution to society? If you’re referring to people not “working” in the traditional sense, not all contributions map nicely to economic output.

baroffoos 8y ago
Exactly, the UBI would enable people to be paid for often non paying contributions like open source contributions, keeping park lands clean, creating educational content online and lots of other things. If I was paid a UBI I would still spend most of my time contributing but I would just do the things I see value in without having to worry about how will I make someone pay for this.
- cheeseomlit 8y ago
  Oh come on. If I was paid UBI I'd sit at home playing video games all day and so would everyone else I know.

twblalock 8y ago

If work hours were shortened and productivity remained the same, wages would be reduced by a proportional amount.

skybrian 8y ago

There are plenty of employers who hire part time and often people need to work more than one job as a result. Partial basic income would fit right into that if it helps people afford to work one job instead of two, or move to part time.

throwawayjava 8y ago

I think a three day weekend with a "day of service" is a much better solution. Working 8 hours a day already leaves enough downtime in my schedule to get bored, but not enough to turn that boredom into something productive. 6 hours would be outright hell. The problem is, the extra two hours don't really provide me with any compelling new opportunities to contribute! That's barely enough time to get at a school and volunteer and get back to work. Barely enough time to get into the flow of things if I'm volunteer programming. Etc. But an entire additional day off of work would be great. I could commit to do real things. I could bake so much bread for the church's food shelter. I could build an entire web app using the city's open data to help people avoid tickets. I could spend an entire day in a classroom. Etc. If you distribute service days evenly and treat them like "just another business function" for businesses, then you could pretty much replace the teaching aspect of higher ed with volunteers. 2-3 people prep+lecture+office hours one day a week, 2-3 people are spending all their service hours helping design curriculum, 2-3 people do a day of grading each week. A <10 person team can teach an entire university course @ 1 day per person per week. Multiply across the whole city, every company. Universal 4 year higher education for "free". And there's still tens of millions of volunteer days per week left over for all the other stuff.

baroffoos 8y ago
I'd prefer the shorter days. A 6 hour day would leave more time for daily exercise and cooking healthy food for dinner and lunch the next day. I would probably also feel more relaxed on the weekend to work on personal programming projects.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  That's fair. There are probably a lot of ways to structure this.

gumby 8y ago

> I don't believe in Universal Basic Income though, we live in a society and it is our duty to contribute to that society. There are plenty of things people do that are valuable to society yet are not captured in the GDP, and are thus not highly valued by contemporary society. They range from visiting and looking after elder parents, playing with your children, writing poetry etc. Then there are undervalued activities which, due to being undervalued, are often rejected by people who would be good at them but can't afford a sacrifice (e.g. teaching, various kinds of social work, etc). As the marginal cost of production asymptotes towards nil, peoples' sense of self worth from work (which is largely a modern belief anyway dating from the middle of the industrial revolution) can be sloughed off. > I think the answer is that we need to move towards a shorter workday. Raise wages and shorten work hours. I agree that we should do this urgently, but beware a belief in the "lump of labor fallacy". Also, because people currently do develop a sense of self worth from their work, we should be investing heavily in helping people readjust to the loss of economic value in their work. For example governments offer retraining programs, but while a 20 year old coal miner may be able to find a job repairing trucks or writing reactive web apps, a 60 year old coal miner, who after two years of training becomes a 62 year old auto mechanic or web developer, will struggle to find employment. These people (both at 20 and 60) need assistance that also preserves their dignity.

baroffoos 8y ago
I knew a guy who worked 6 months a year doing contract work and then spent the other 6 months on hobbies and personal projects. I remember asking him if he gets bored during those 6 months not working and he said to me "I don't base my life enjoyment off of making someone else money". That advice has really stuck to me and its really cool to see the electronics projects he builds in those 6 months.
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  That sounds pretty pleasurable. IIRC that second six months is the true classical definition of a life of leisure.
  - 8y ago

malandrew 8y ago

The problem with moving from 8 hours to 6 hours is that there will always be workers willing to do 10 hours or even 12 hours. These workers end up producing 50-100% more with about the same overhead. If you have a worker that will work 12 hours, you only need to pay for one health insurance plan as opposed to having to pay for two insurance plans if you need to get two 6-hour employees. On top of that, the 12-hour employee is accruing experience at twice the speed of the 6-hour employee. For some fields, putting in the additional hours can make the employee willing to work more hours more productive on a per hour basis. Obviously this doesn't apply to all professions, but for many professions it does apply to some degree. You'd basically have to outlaw working more than 6 hours to keep overachievers from taking all the good jobs.

jakelazaroff 8y ago
So, basically how things are today? With regard to health insurance specifically, the way to solve that is moving the burden of healthcare from the employer to the state.

TomMckenny 8y ago

Higher wages with shorter work hours would be a great step in the right direction. I believe Keynes even suggested it. But, a post-scarcity society, where labor is nearly valueless, still requires everyone have their needs met regardless of what they "own". But in that future as through all the past, most people are born owning little more than their labor. So a post-scarcity society does not just require the technology we are approaching. It also requires a radically different perception of ownership. This is the harder problem. In the language of today, it means a person without property and whose labor will always be essentially valueless, gets the produce of someone else's robots, ownership of which will be passed down though generations. Changing this is close to unthinkable in current society. But unless this massive social shift emerges, it appears that larger and larger portions of society will be converted into a euphemistically renamed servant class where their labor has not intrinsic value except prestige or amusement value to the person hiring. Pardon the following if it's upsetting, but I notice our current path is to add more and more store clerks, waiters, maids, sign spinners etc. Not because machines/systems can't do theses things (amazon, self serve restaurants, billboards) but because the customer enjoys/gets a kick out of them. On the current path, what would have become a post-scarcity society will instead have vast numbers of such people earning their minimum requirements at such jobs. Plus perhaps homeless people permanently converted into a prison workforce.

barry-cotter 8y ago
> Higher wages with shorter work hours would be a great step in the right direction. I believe Keynes even suggested it. No he didn’t. He suggested we’d have chosen to work fewer hours and have more leisure because we could afford both greater consumption and greater leisure than were possible when he wrote. Higher wages than now, with shorter work hours than now is possible only with growth in economic productivity so we can produce more (goods, services) with less (material input, labour). We can’t just decide to work 20 hours a week and maintain our current standard of living by fiat. Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) https://assets.aspeninstitute.org/content/uploads/files/content/upload/Intro_and_Section_I.pdf https://assets.aspeninstitute.org/content/uploads/files/cont...
- 8y ago

AlexTWithBeard 8y ago

Our productivity has indeed grown immensely, but, for good or for bad, instead of making things cheaper we're directing all our free resources to making them better. Instead of cheaper cars we're making safer cars, instead of cheaper houses we're building bigger houses, and so on.

Dumblydorr 8y ago
A very large percentage of free resources are being hoarded in wealth and cash piles, would you actually claim a company like Apple is directing all of it's free resources to making better products? Why the stock buybacks and 200 billion pile?
- graeme 8y ago
  That's capital. It gets given back to investors, who invest it elsewhere. They don't just stick it under the mattress. It is moved from Apple to a place where it can be put to use. With a buyback (or dividend) apple is saying "we ran out of productive ways to spend this money"
  - nybble41 8y ago
    Even if they did just keep a few billion dollars of physical cash in a vault somewhere, that would just increase the purchasing power of the remainder. The total value of all currency in circulation (all forms combined) tends toward the total value of all of the goods available for purchase. Taking money out of circulation is a bit like making a loan to everyone in proportion to the amount of currency they hold; when you do decide to put it back into circulation, that increase in value (deflation) represents the interest you receive on the loan.
- xamuel 8y ago
  It's a mistake to think of money as resources--as if money is something we dig out of the ground and need in order to make our machines run. No-one eats cash. Whatever could be done if Apple spent its cash, could be done if Apple didn't spend its cash. Money's only purpose is to incentivize people to do things, so you're basically asking Apple to play king and start directing society. I'd prefer they just sit on their money rather than that!

mcherm 8y ago

But I DON'T work just 40 hours a week. I work more like 50-55 hours most weeks. I LIKE my work, and I don't want to do less. I agree that the belief that we must work 40 hours a week in order to be a good person lies at the root of many of society's problems. And I do think that people ought to contribute to society. But somehow that does not lead me away from the idea of a Universal Basic Income, but instead leads me to believe that something roughly that shape is what we need to save society. I guess the key difference is who defines "contribute to society". If it is employers, then we need a system where as many people as possible must report to an employer who controls how they spend their time. (Requiring people to get paid a salary seems to do that quite effectively.) If it is the government that defines how one ought to "contribute to society" then we get mandated work programs. But if you believe that each individual is the best judge of how they ought to "contribute to society" then it leads to the belief that we should order society such that as many individuals as possible have a choice about how they spend their time. Some variant of UBI seems to me like a good way to achieve that goal in a society no longer tightly constrained by scarcity.

donaldknuth123 8y ago
>But somehow that does not lead me away from the idea of a Universal Basic Income, but instead leads me to believe that something roughly that shape is what we need to save society. The fascination with UBI is so strange. You are basically admitting that you think the system is so broken that the only way for it to continue to operate is to give people free money. How you come to that conclusion and not that the current system is completely broken and likely needs to be replaced confuses me.

CalRobert 8y ago

Amen to that - more than this, I worry that "we" didn't decide anything, but rather that keeping people in a state of imagined scarcity proved handy for preserving the status quo in terms of concentration of power. What would a population do if people were able to act freely and do the things they cared about? How many folks would be fighting climate change but are _instead_ doing Dumb Shit That Doesn't Matter (most jobs) because we have to pay bills? How many people work a job that is at best a net neutral to society, and at worst parasitic, because it personally enriches them, but makes everyone else poorer? How many are doing that only because they decided to buy a house close to work, so now they have a pile of debt, so now they _have_ to spend their time working for the last owner of the house instead of for themselves? Why do we make it so goddamned hard to live cheap? Want university? That'll be an arm and a leg. Want a house? Expect to pay many, many years of income for it. Decide you're ok with a small home and riding your bike or taking the bus? Screw you, that's illegal, build a damn parking spot and make sure you meet minimum size reqs and oh btw you're not allowed to build in this old neighborhood because the existing homeowners' cartel made it illegal. You can build a modest home for ~$40,000. It's expensive because we made it (mostly) illegal to build new homes anywhere near jobs. Not only that, instead of putting homes where they're cheap to serve (close to electric, water, etc) we push everyone out to the middle of nowhere where it's massively expensive to provide services. Not to mention that instead of relying on your feet and a $300 bicycle to get around you now need a gigantic money incinerator (a car) for basic mobility. God help you if you get sick or hurt. A broken wrist could bankrupt plenty of people in the wrong circumstances. How many people make six figures (yes, that's a lot of money relatively speaking - try leaving SF before sneering) and still manage to somehow worry about money? How the fuck did we decide this was the best way to build a society? Why did we make everything so goddamn expensive? Building supplies and calories are cheap after all - practically free. Maybe it's because keeping a population in fear ensures they can't organize to better their situation at the cost of tearing down existing power structures.

xamuel 8y ago
Here's another perspective you might not be accounting for. Currently, people who work elite jobs tend to live around people with elite interests. If you're an upper class developer, you'll live in a neighborhood with other developers, lawyers, doctors, white-collar workers. If somehow housing were made affordable everywhere, how would that pattern be maintained? By definition, there would be nothing stopping "Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel" (from The Simpsons) from moving to Mountain View, CA. So you end up with a situation where elite software engineers are trying to sleep, because they have work tomorrow, and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel is keeping them awake by blowing up fireworks or firing his shotgun at 2am. What recourse do you have? You can't kick Cletus out--that would violate all sorts of human rights and so on. So when you look at it this way, higher price housing is almost inevitable. Before you can have any realistic hope of addressing it, you need to figure out what to do with Cletus!

FussyZeus 8y ago

I'm curious how you plan to have a less-than-40-hour workweek while still having living wages? It's going to be hard enough to get the capitalists on board with just paying people who do work they find inferior enough to live.

jeffreyrogers 8y ago

> We replace people with robots and retain the same output That's not how manufacturing works. Most manufacturing still requires human input because robots aren't very flexible. You have to build an entire line around a robot which means you adapt slowly to changes in the market.