3 ms·

You underestimate how many people are "employed" in making their boss feel powerful and their customers feel special. Or how many people are employed in ensuri

You underestimate how many people are "employed" in making their boss feel powerful and their customers feel special. Or how many people are employed in ensuring that folks working for competitors are unable to sell their products. Most of these are white-collar office workers rather than "essential" workers, but there's still a massive amount of waste that comes from people playing financial or competitive games rather than directly contributing to their customers' well-being.

gpm 7y ago
The shutdown isn't preferentially impacting those people though. If we could wave a magic wand and eliminate that waste we obviously should (shutdown or no shutdown), but we can't. Or at least that magic wand probably costs more resources enforcing it than those people consume. When GP says "minimum economy to maintain our standard of living would necessarily be all of it" I imagine they mean "the minimum portion of our economy that we can choose to restart to maintain our standard of living would necessarily be all of it" - because we don't have the knob to chose to restart only the good parts.
- lmm 7y ago
  When the UK went on a 3-day week in the 1970s, productivity was 97% of normal. I'm hopeful that the crisis could help unblock the shift towards part-time working and/or ensure that the protections that full-time workers get are extended to part-time and gig-economy workers. Right now there's a regulatory cliff that strongly incentivises people to work at least 30 hours/week at a single job rather than working the most productive hours or combination of jobs, and a business-social norm that prioritises spending 40 hours/week in the office over doing productive work. The former is a knob that we can turn; the latter is not entirely under conscious control, but is one of those things that's likely to shift suddenly once enough pressure has built up.

gpm 7y ago

The shutdown isn't preferentially impacting those people though. If we could wave a magic wand and eliminate that waste we obviously should (shutdown or no shutdown), but we can't. Or at least that magic wand probably costs more resources enforcing it than those people consume. When GP says "minimum economy to maintain our standard of living would necessarily be all of it" I imagine they mean "the minimum portion of our economy that we can choose to restart to maintain our standard of living would necessarily be all of it" - because we don't have the knob to chose to restart only the good parts.

lmm 7y ago
When the UK went on a 3-day week in the 1970s, productivity was 97% of normal. I'm hopeful that the crisis could help unblock the shift towards part-time working and/or ensure that the protections that full-time workers get are extended to part-time and gig-economy workers. Right now there's a regulatory cliff that strongly incentivises people to work at least 30 hours/week at a single job rather than working the most productive hours or combination of jobs, and a business-social norm that prioritises spending 40 hours/week in the office over doing productive work. The former is a knob that we can turn; the latter is not entirely under conscious control, but is one of those things that's likely to shift suddenly once enough pressure has built up.