8 ms·

Why did Keynes believe that, say, a doubling of efficiency (through technology) would half work time for everyone? Sure it’s a solution to the equation, but so

Why did Keynes believe that, say, a doubling of efficiency (through technology) would half work time for everyone? Sure it’s a solution to the equation, but so is what actually happened[1]: half the workforce gets laid off. This halves the costs, which facilitates price reduction and thus a competitive edge. Did Keynes believe that benevolence would win over profit? Don’t get me wrong, I wish it had, but that seems a little naive. [1] It occurs to me that another solution is to keep the work force, but double the work. This also happened; it seems like there are plenty of jobs that are just busy work with no real purpose.

zozbot234 6y ago
> half the workforce gets laid off. Technological progress has made labor productivity itself a lot more uneven and sharply unequal than it used to be when Keynes was writing. So the currently most marginal workers tend to be laid off first, especially given the increasing regulatory barriers that have made low-productivity positions unsustainable since then.
tehjoker 6y ago
If workers controlled the workplace, this is precisely what would happen. It's only because the people doing the work don't control the work that this seems fanciful.
- vslira 6y ago
  You know, what's funny is that we'll never be sure if that's the case[0]. What guarantee is there that the median socialist voter wouldn't vote for more work for everyone because they want fancier tvs, or more dazzling musical spectacles, or fancier video games, bigger homes, etc? What if society doesn't democratically vote for idleness and quality of life / tranquility? [0] I mean unless there's a real and successful socialist revolution.
  - sm4rk0 6y ago
    Fancier TVs are not going to make their ~miserable~ (edit: too heavy word) lifes more meaningful. That's what capitalism has made you believe in order to keep you in its chains voluntarily.
    - sm4rk0 6y ago
      Sitting 8+ hours at desk plus few more in a car only to get home and continue sitting in front of a fancy TV. And you call this advanced society or civilisation?
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    What if the workers actually controlled the factory and not a commissar sent by central planning? There are lots of different ways to do this. For central planning, one proposal I saw offered that the workers could be organized into sectoral unions that participate as a sector in government. This weight and common interest allows them to counter the weight of voters that ask for too much. It's also large enough of an agglomeration that the workers still represent society as a whole to a great degree.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Well, we have one big agglomeration in the US for policing workers. That hasn't led to positive results for society.
      - tehjoker 6y ago
        I'm not sure what you're talking about? The police?
        renewiltord 6y ago
        The police.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Well there are worker co-ops. Lots of farming is as co-operatives. Sunkist is a cooperative, for instance. https://growers.sunkist.com/ https://growers.sunkist.com/
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      It's a cooperative for owners, not workers. A lot of cooperatives in the US exist for owners.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  "Worker-controlled workplaces" are rather common in some industries where capital intensity is especially low, such as legal services (with firms being organized as partnerships; indeed, capital intensity is the main obstacle to this kind of structure in other industries). And yet, top lawyers tend to work quite a bit more than the typical worker.
  - deadbunny 6y ago
    > And yet, top lawyers tend to work quite a bit more than the typical worker. I would argue that the reason for that is that they more directly see the fruits of their labour.
    - chii 6y ago
      and yet a worker getting paid by piece-meal don't?
ncallaway 6y ago
> It occurs to me that another solution is to keep the work force, but double the work I think one other solution is to keep the work force, but double the output. I think this also happened (in addition to the other two that you identified). The overall productivity and output of society has massively increased.
- nomel 6y ago
  And, of course, output doesn't have to be number of bars of soap. All of the automation I'm familiar with is making the design and manufacturing processes more fluid, giving faster iterations at reduced cost. This allows the tech/process/whatever to progress faster. You'll finish your product sooner, but that means you can start the next sooner. This whole concept of having more time assumes there's nothing else to do. There will always be something to do if you're not making something static, like soap.
perfunctory 6y ago
> what actually happened[1]: half the workforce gets laid off. The article says as much: > In a sane world, Russell thought, the factory would simply halve working hours, maintaining the same wages but greatly increasing the time that the workers could devote to the joys of leisure. But, as Russell observed, this rarely happens. Instead, the factory owner will opt to keep half the workers on the same hours and lay off the rest. The gains from the advances of technology will be realised not as an expansion of leisure but rather as drudgery for some and jobless destitution for others, with the savings enjoyed only by the winner, the factory owner.
- sm4rk0 6y ago
  From above, we can only conclude that capitalism and profit-oriented economy are insane. But people are still blindly defending them, just like the slavery was defended not so long time ago.
  - YetAnotherNick 6y ago
    > From above, we can only conclude that capitalism and profit-oriented economy are insane I don't see the conclusion. I can only see there are many specific problems with capitalism.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - sm4rk0 6y ago
      The quote starts with "In a sane world" and from the rest of the quote we can see that we're not living in such world. Isn't that enough to conclude that the (most of the) world is not sane, ie insane?
    - megameter 6y ago
      A major function of capitalism is to direct human attention towards utilitarian valuation, which produces the growth-and-exploitation formula we are familiar with: more stuff is made, more land is developed, but it is often done by overfitting to market prices. But increasingly we are turning the valuation process over to algorithms, sensors, and other precision instruments. If we extrapolate this onwards, the market exchange will become vestigial in not that many years: the algorithms involved will already know how much can be sustainably produced, consumed, transported and trashed, and there will be known bounds to personal and societal consumption relative to planetary capacity. At that point, transition away from capitalism will seem obvious. And we might be closer to this point than it looks.
monoclechris 6y ago
Was Keynes right about anything?
renewiltord 6y ago
Are there societies which have smooth scaling on workers? i.e. where the cost of adding a new worker for 20 hours is about the same as the cost of adding 20 hrs to a worker working under 20 hrs? I like to think of what an amoral money machine would do as a base-case for what we set up the incentives to be. Then we can tweak the incentives to get the outcome, but we start with the machine. After all, moral outrage alone rarely has lasting change without policy change. Things that encourage fewer-people w/ more-work-per-person are: * Laws that explicitly disincentivize larger companies (that kick in at >24 people or >49 people, or that are flat per-person-on-payroll fees like medical benefits) * The learn rate of individuals given sustained work * Increased overhead with more individuals (i.e. communication costs, scheduling costs, hiring costs) There's portions I can't immediately nail like the fact that if I share a desk with someone I can't spray my things all over it like I normally do. My hardware has to be out of the way and clean for the other guy.
tmnvix 6y ago
> what actually happened I can't find the comment, but I do remember someone on HN suggesting that the gains of extra productivity are claimed by a corresponding increase in credit and therefore debt.
LatteLazy 6y ago
Keynes believed we would as a society, change our behavior (2 day working week etc) to maintain employment. He was semi right. We've actually made work weeks longer, but less than 50% of people work (at all, let alone full time). The issue here is equality. Keynes assumed everyone would be viewed ad equal and given the same time off. Instead a large number of people have been allowed to opt out entirely and others have been forced to pick up the slack...
neilwilson 6y ago
Regrettably he believed far too much in fungibility as well. As technology increases you need fewer people with higher skills to produce everything, but there is no reason why they should spend all their time producing a surplus to supply everybody else. They would rather stop and have Thursday and Friday off. We all work in solidarity with those we need to work. Because it is more difficult to share out the unemployment than it first appeared. The solution is to retire people earlier and have a public job option so younger people can always contribute their labour hours for others. Retiring people at 50 makes sense in a Covid world.

zozbot234 6y ago

> half the workforce gets laid off. Technological progress has made labor productivity itself a lot more uneven and sharply unequal than it used to be when Keynes was writing. So the currently most marginal workers tend to be laid off first, especially given the increasing regulatory barriers that have made low-productivity positions unsustainable since then.

tehjoker 6y ago

If workers controlled the workplace, this is precisely what would happen. It's only because the people doing the work don't control the work that this seems fanciful.

vslira 6y ago
You know, what's funny is that we'll never be sure if that's the case[0]. What guarantee is there that the median socialist voter wouldn't vote for more work for everyone because they want fancier tvs, or more dazzling musical spectacles, or fancier video games, bigger homes, etc? What if society doesn't democratically vote for idleness and quality of life / tranquility? [0] I mean unless there's a real and successful socialist revolution.
- sm4rk0 6y ago
  Fancier TVs are not going to make their ~miserable~ (edit: too heavy word) lifes more meaningful. That's what capitalism has made you believe in order to keep you in its chains voluntarily.
  - sm4rk0 6y ago
    Sitting 8+ hours at desk plus few more in a car only to get home and continue sitting in front of a fancy TV. And you call this advanced society or civilisation?
- tehjoker 6y ago
  What if the workers actually controlled the factory and not a commissar sent by central planning? There are lots of different ways to do this. For central planning, one proposal I saw offered that the workers could be organized into sectoral unions that participate as a sector in government. This weight and common interest allows them to counter the weight of voters that ask for too much. It's also large enough of an agglomeration that the workers still represent society as a whole to a great degree.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Well, we have one big agglomeration in the US for policing workers. That hasn't led to positive results for society.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      I'm not sure what you're talking about? The police?
      - renewiltord 6y ago
        The police.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Well there are worker co-ops. Lots of farming is as co-operatives. Sunkist is a cooperative, for instance. https://growers.sunkist.com/ https://growers.sunkist.com/
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    It's a cooperative for owners, not workers. A lot of cooperatives in the US exist for owners.
zozbot234 6y ago
"Worker-controlled workplaces" are rather common in some industries where capital intensity is especially low, such as legal services (with firms being organized as partnerships; indeed, capital intensity is the main obstacle to this kind of structure in other industries). And yet, top lawyers tend to work quite a bit more than the typical worker.
- deadbunny 6y ago
  > And yet, top lawyers tend to work quite a bit more than the typical worker. I would argue that the reason for that is that they more directly see the fruits of their labour.
  - chii 6y ago
    and yet a worker getting paid by piece-meal don't?

ncallaway 6y ago

> It occurs to me that another solution is to keep the work force, but double the work I think one other solution is to keep the work force, but double the output. I think this also happened (in addition to the other two that you identified). The overall productivity and output of society has massively increased.

nomel 6y ago
And, of course, output doesn't have to be number of bars of soap. All of the automation I'm familiar with is making the design and manufacturing processes more fluid, giving faster iterations at reduced cost. This allows the tech/process/whatever to progress faster. You'll finish your product sooner, but that means you can start the next sooner. This whole concept of having more time assumes there's nothing else to do. There will always be something to do if you're not making something static, like soap.

perfunctory 6y ago

> what actually happened[1]: half the workforce gets laid off. The article says as much: > In a sane world, Russell thought, the factory would simply halve working hours, maintaining the same wages but greatly increasing the time that the workers could devote to the joys of leisure. But, as Russell observed, this rarely happens. Instead, the factory owner will opt to keep half the workers on the same hours and lay off the rest. The gains from the advances of technology will be realised not as an expansion of leisure but rather as drudgery for some and jobless destitution for others, with the savings enjoyed only by the winner, the factory owner.

sm4rk0 6y ago
From above, we can only conclude that capitalism and profit-oriented economy are insane. But people are still blindly defending them, just like the slavery was defended not so long time ago.
- YetAnotherNick 6y ago
  > From above, we can only conclude that capitalism and profit-oriented economy are insane I don't see the conclusion. I can only see there are many specific problems with capitalism.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - sm4rk0 6y ago
    The quote starts with "In a sane world" and from the rest of the quote we can see that we're not living in such world. Isn't that enough to conclude that the (most of the) world is not sane, ie insane?
  - megameter 6y ago
    A major function of capitalism is to direct human attention towards utilitarian valuation, which produces the growth-and-exploitation formula we are familiar with: more stuff is made, more land is developed, but it is often done by overfitting to market prices. But increasingly we are turning the valuation process over to algorithms, sensors, and other precision instruments. If we extrapolate this onwards, the market exchange will become vestigial in not that many years: the algorithms involved will already know how much can be sustainably produced, consumed, transported and trashed, and there will be known bounds to personal and societal consumption relative to planetary capacity. At that point, transition away from capitalism will seem obvious. And we might be closer to this point than it looks.

monoclechris 6y ago

Was Keynes right about anything?

renewiltord 6y ago

Are there societies which have smooth scaling on workers? i.e. where the cost of adding a new worker for 20 hours is about the same as the cost of adding 20 hrs to a worker working under 20 hrs? I like to think of what an amoral money machine would do as a base-case for what we set up the incentives to be. Then we can tweak the incentives to get the outcome, but we start with the machine. After all, moral outrage alone rarely has lasting change without policy change. Things that encourage fewer-people w/ more-work-per-person are: * Laws that explicitly disincentivize larger companies (that kick in at >24 people or >49 people, or that are flat per-person-on-payroll fees like medical benefits) * The learn rate of individuals given sustained work * Increased overhead with more individuals (i.e. communication costs, scheduling costs, hiring costs) There's portions I can't immediately nail like the fact that if I share a desk with someone I can't spray my things all over it like I normally do. My hardware has to be out of the way and clean for the other guy.

tmnvix 6y ago

> what actually happened I can't find the comment, but I do remember someone on HN suggesting that the gains of extra productivity are claimed by a corresponding increase in credit and therefore debt.

LatteLazy 6y ago

Keynes believed we would as a society, change our behavior (2 day working week etc) to maintain employment. He was semi right. We've actually made work weeks longer, but less than 50% of people work (at all, let alone full time). The issue here is equality. Keynes assumed everyone would be viewed ad equal and given the same time off. Instead a large number of people have been allowed to opt out entirely and others have been forced to pick up the slack...

neilwilson 6y ago

Regrettably he believed far too much in fungibility as well. As technology increases you need fewer people with higher skills to produce everything, but there is no reason why they should spend all their time producing a surplus to supply everybody else. They would rather stop and have Thursday and Friday off. We all work in solidarity with those we need to work. Because it is more difficult to share out the unemployment than it first appeared. The solution is to retire people earlier and have a public job option so younger people can always contribute their labour hours for others. Retiring people at 50 makes sense in a Covid world.