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> She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days

> She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. This just sounds so staggeringly inefficient. A person doing one full-time job well is gonna easily beat out many people doing that job part-time (and thus poorly). Plus, think of all the extra unnecessary commuting that comes with doing lots of little jobs spread throughout the day vs just the one job. I don't know how anyone can seriously advocate that this state of the world would be an improvement for anyone, except possibly the employers.

whiddershins 5y ago
What about boredom, and the advantages of being less beholden to a single source of income?
- bluGill 5y ago
  It is called a mid-life crisis in popular culture. Many people do get bored and switch to a new job track once or twice in their life. They in general do worse overall monetarily (there are other factors that might be important) than someone who focuses, but it isn't unheard of to do this. If your single source of income is a good choice, the experience of doing it for years makes you much better at it than a jack-of-all-trades who can do anything but none of them well. You need to make the right choice for your situation. Don't knock someone else for making a different choice.
- mcguire 5y ago
  What if they don't like the color of their uniforms? In this world, there are first-order effects, second-order effects, and a further deep hierarchy. Estimating which is which is a useful skill.
bluGill 5y ago
It will be worse for the employers than anyone else. McDonald's can train anyone to flip a burger, but if they are only getting 2 hours of work from someone they are net negative as the person training could do the job. With just a little experience though the new person can flip burgers on his own leaving the trainer to do some other station. The same for every other job - you are either hiring someone who already has the experience to do the job right, or you are hiring someone for long enough that the time spent teaching them to do the job is paid off by all the work they do after they learn how to do it.
- ArtDev 5y ago
  If you ever read "Supersize Me", you would know that fast food is designed around very high turnover. Walmart does that as well. Instead of paying more or providing a better workplace, these companies just figure another sucker will come along.
  - justanotherguy0 5y ago
    High Turnover within certain boundaries. 1:1 training to time on job would be disastrous. And it does take training to work at McDonald's.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Right, it is better to say McDonald's is oriented around fast training. If you speak the local language they can turn you into an employee worth having in just a few hours. Then over the next months they will teach you more and more things as you prove you worth.
- mcguire 5y ago
  This is where technology comes to the rescue, by de-skilling jobs.
- st1ck 5y ago
  McDonald's probably can be automated enough to do without any burger flippers.
  - kqr 5y ago
    It wouldn't surprise me if the programming, repairing, and regular maintenance of automated burger flippers cost more than a fleet of humans (that are versatile enough to also be able to take orders and clean tables.) It's a very common mistake to reach for automation because it makes things locally more efficient but forget all the things it makes less flexible and thus less efficient.
Grustaf 5y ago
The point is that it's very efficient to have an underclass of people that are ready to step in and pick up the slack. If you have a traditional company you need to pay a monthly full-time wage, but there will always be peaks in demand, and if you then can hire people on a minute by minute basis that's going to be very efficient for you as a capitalist...
mcguire 5y ago
Do keep in mind that, beyond a certain point, efficiency is the enemy of resiliency. Plus, it has tax and regulatory consequences. /s
bsanr2 5y ago
There is a third option: most people work a menial, part-time job (not "part-time", but 20 hours a week, tops) that is paid a decent full-time wage, which supports their aspirational contribution to society - their "creative" or "professional" work. I know, qué horror that a world-class engineer, architect, or artist would not be able to devote themselves fully to their craft. However, the truth is that most of us are not world-class, and get maybe 4 hours of good, intensive professional work done a day - work, as you know, that can be done in no small proportion from a home office, no "second commute" required. Even among the best of the best, it is acknowledged that only a few are able to nose -> grindstone ad nauseum (and often to just that - see the recent, untimely passing of infamously workaholic manga artist Kentaro Miura). So, you do your client meetings, work on your highly-technical project, and after lunch, head to your retail sales job, or food service, or customer support, which you work for ~4 hours. This engenders humility and community engagement, while also flooding those spaces with workers so that no one employee has to put in a 12-hour shift (increasing the quality of their work and decreasing the risk of injury). And everyone gets paid enough to live on. I understand that this dashes the paradigm of expertise or other specialized quality (like social connections...) deciding one's level of income, but it has always confused me that we pay LESS money to do the things people DON'T want to do. Most professionals and academics don't enter their fields for the high pay; aside from the necessity of meeting material needs (including student loan payments), it seems that the primary drivers of entrance into and achievement in such careers are intellectual interest and social prestige. Perhaps our attitude to compensation should reflect these truths. It means giving up the privileges and structures we've heretofore considered indelible, certainly, but it solves a lot of the problems mentioned above.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Most professionals and academics don't enter their fields for the high pay Those careers still have to pay enough to compensate for the effort involved in acquiring the relevant skills. This is the main limiting factor to labor supply in these fields, and also a reason why putting one's "nose to the grindstone" once working in the field may actually be efficient. Even accounting for the fact that some or even most of this effort may not be as "good, intensive or professional" as the first few hours in the workday, it might nonetheless be more socially beneficial than merely working some generic, unskilled job. (In fact, since one of the factors behind wages is the inconvenience of the marginal unit of work, we also shouldn't be surprised that pay can be high even though on average one might be willing to work for less!)
imtringued 5y ago
The big irony about the 4 hour work week is that if it were true one person can 10 of these jobs, thereby obsoleting 9 other people because it is more efficient. That person then proceeds to pretend that the other 9 are lazy and not doing their part demanding that everyone should work at least as hard even though all 10 people could get away with working 4 hours a week. Therefore a 4 hour week is impossible even in an utopia.
hellisothers 5y ago
But this is how it is, today, I know people who stock shelves at target part time and then do a little Uber before doing a maid service. It’s not like they want this, it’s the only option to scrounge enough money together. And this isn’t a coastal city, it’s just somewhere in the Midwest. It is indeed the employers who benefit.
- btbuildem 5y ago
  At this point these "employers" are not much more than glorified middlemen who take a cut and make the work landscape just a little more cutthroat

whiddershins 5y ago

What about boredom, and the advantages of being less beholden to a single source of income?

bluGill 5y ago
It is called a mid-life crisis in popular culture. Many people do get bored and switch to a new job track once or twice in their life. They in general do worse overall monetarily (there are other factors that might be important) than someone who focuses, but it isn't unheard of to do this. If your single source of income is a good choice, the experience of doing it for years makes you much better at it than a jack-of-all-trades who can do anything but none of them well. You need to make the right choice for your situation. Don't knock someone else for making a different choice.
mcguire 5y ago
What if they don't like the color of their uniforms? In this world, there are first-order effects, second-order effects, and a further deep hierarchy. Estimating which is which is a useful skill.

bluGill 5y ago

It will be worse for the employers than anyone else. McDonald's can train anyone to flip a burger, but if they are only getting 2 hours of work from someone they are net negative as the person training could do the job. With just a little experience though the new person can flip burgers on his own leaving the trainer to do some other station. The same for every other job - you are either hiring someone who already has the experience to do the job right, or you are hiring someone for long enough that the time spent teaching them to do the job is paid off by all the work they do after they learn how to do it.

ArtDev 5y ago
If you ever read "Supersize Me", you would know that fast food is designed around very high turnover. Walmart does that as well. Instead of paying more or providing a better workplace, these companies just figure another sucker will come along.
- justanotherguy0 5y ago
  High Turnover within certain boundaries. 1:1 training to time on job would be disastrous. And it does take training to work at McDonald's.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Right, it is better to say McDonald's is oriented around fast training. If you speak the local language they can turn you into an employee worth having in just a few hours. Then over the next months they will teach you more and more things as you prove you worth.
mcguire 5y ago
This is where technology comes to the rescue, by de-skilling jobs.
st1ck 5y ago
McDonald's probably can be automated enough to do without any burger flippers.
- kqr 5y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if the programming, repairing, and regular maintenance of automated burger flippers cost more than a fleet of humans (that are versatile enough to also be able to take orders and clean tables.) It's a very common mistake to reach for automation because it makes things locally more efficient but forget all the things it makes less flexible and thus less efficient.

Grustaf 5y ago

The point is that it's very efficient to have an underclass of people that are ready to step in and pick up the slack. If you have a traditional company you need to pay a monthly full-time wage, but there will always be peaks in demand, and if you then can hire people on a minute by minute basis that's going to be very efficient for you as a capitalist...

mcguire 5y ago

Do keep in mind that, beyond a certain point, efficiency is the enemy of resiliency. Plus, it has tax and regulatory consequences. /s

bsanr2 5y ago

There is a third option: most people work a menial, part-time job (not "part-time", but 20 hours a week, tops) that is paid a decent full-time wage, which supports their aspirational contribution to society - their "creative" or "professional" work. I know, qué horror that a world-class engineer, architect, or artist would not be able to devote themselves fully to their craft. However, the truth is that most of us are not world-class, and get maybe 4 hours of good, intensive professional work done a day - work, as you know, that can be done in no small proportion from a home office, no "second commute" required. Even among the best of the best, it is acknowledged that only a few are able to nose -> grindstone ad nauseum (and often to just that - see the recent, untimely passing of infamously workaholic manga artist Kentaro Miura). So, you do your client meetings, work on your highly-technical project, and after lunch, head to your retail sales job, or food service, or customer support, which you work for ~4 hours. This engenders humility and community engagement, while also flooding those spaces with workers so that no one employee has to put in a 12-hour shift (increasing the quality of their work and decreasing the risk of injury). And everyone gets paid enough to live on. I understand that this dashes the paradigm of expertise or other specialized quality (like social connections...) deciding one's level of income, but it has always confused me that we pay LESS money to do the things people DON'T want to do. Most professionals and academics don't enter their fields for the high pay; aside from the necessity of meeting material needs (including student loan payments), it seems that the primary drivers of entrance into and achievement in such careers are intellectual interest and social prestige. Perhaps our attitude to compensation should reflect these truths. It means giving up the privileges and structures we've heretofore considered indelible, certainly, but it solves a lot of the problems mentioned above.

zozbot234 5y ago
> Most professionals and academics don't enter their fields for the high pay Those careers still have to pay enough to compensate for the effort involved in acquiring the relevant skills. This is the main limiting factor to labor supply in these fields, and also a reason why putting one's "nose to the grindstone" once working in the field may actually be efficient. Even accounting for the fact that some or even most of this effort may not be as "good, intensive or professional" as the first few hours in the workday, it might nonetheless be more socially beneficial than merely working some generic, unskilled job. (In fact, since one of the factors behind wages is the inconvenience of the marginal unit of work, we also shouldn't be surprised that pay can be high even though on average one might be willing to work for less!)

imtringued 5y ago

The big irony about the 4 hour work week is that if it were true one person can 10 of these jobs, thereby obsoleting 9 other people because it is more efficient. That person then proceeds to pretend that the other 9 are lazy and not doing their part demanding that everyone should work at least as hard even though all 10 people could get away with working 4 hours a week. Therefore a 4 hour week is impossible even in an utopia.

hellisothers 5y ago

But this is how it is, today, I know people who stock shelves at target part time and then do a little Uber before doing a maid service. It’s not like they want this, it’s the only option to scrounge enough money together. And this isn’t a coastal city, it’s just somewhere in the Midwest. It is indeed the employers who benefit.

btbuildem 5y ago
At this point these "employers" are not much more than glorified middlemen who take a cut and make the work landscape just a little more cutthroat