4 ms·

as nice as that utopia would be, the fundamental flaw with trying to limit working days/hours is that some people will still pour their whole lives into work, w

as nice as that utopia would be, the fundamental flaw with trying to limit working days/hours is that some people will still pour their whole lives into work, which creates an iterated game that pushes the equilibrium for everyone toward working more. there's no practical way to mitigate this powerful, arguably inate, incentive. the other option is actively coercing a daily/weekly work limit, and that not only severely infringes personal liberties, but eventually makes whole economies less competitive as the hardest working & most ambitious workers migrate away. the better approach is to try to ensure everyone has dignity and fair pay for the amount of work that they do. that's a function of the distribution of pay and wealth, which is something we can legislate via sticks and carrots.

Frost1x 5y ago
>some people will still pour their whole lives into work, which creates an iterated game that pushes the equilibrium for everyone toward working more. there's no practical way to mitigate this powerful, arguably inate, incentive. The trick here is to make sure those who don't push for the incentives are taken care of. You need to make sure everyone participating at the sane rates are taken care of in their needs and some wants. After that, you allow for those obsessed with incentives and wants to work as much as they want to get extravagant things. It's easier said than done but I believe its attainable. If you can create an economy where that sort of effort at work is used to buy luxuries and not necessities, then you have a good model that still has a balance of incentives without dragging the rest of society into a work obsessed life. People who put for this amount of effort shouldn't be doing it because they have to, they should be doing it because they want to. Unfortunately many people are doing it because they really have to, that or their standard of living drops significantly, their overall longevity. Unfortunately that's the world we have. People are forced to work at these sorts of rates to survive and it's only getting worse. It's not that they're slaving away their lives because they want to get a new luxury car or exotic vacation, it's that the alternatives to not doing it means they may be homeless next month or looking for somewhere new to live.
- clairity 5y ago
  yah, that's why ultimately the better focus is on a more equitable (but not equal) distribution of pay and wealth. worrying about the number of hours in a work week (or even minimum wage, in the long run) is a distraction in this regard (popular distractions on hn and elsewhere, by how well received such misguided ideas seem to be). we should be making labor markets radically transparent for workers, and legislatively shifting power to humans over amoral corporate entities. companies should be working for the people at large, not the other way around. once you accumulate about $2-10MM in assets, you've won the economy and we should make it steeply, progressively harder (but not impossible) to accumulate more. this also has the nice side effect of making the economy more dynamic and resilient, while also fostering more innovation all around.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
> the fundamental flaw with trying to limit working days/hours is that some people will still pour their whole lives into work, To be clear, I am talking about a voluntary system. No one would be prevented from working more, it just wouldn't be necessary to survive. I love to work pretty much all the time, though only some of that is hours I am billing to my employer. EDIT: I quickly rewrote my original comment after posting, but I do see one quoted reply got in before the change. Just wanted to add this note about the change.
- nemothekid 5y ago
  >I see no contradiction or flaw. What I desire is a world where it is possible for any person to survive working 20 hours a week with a couple months off. What GP is arguing is that is achieved by fixing the pay distribution, not by limiting hours. If you only limit hours but don't fix the pay problem you create perverse incentives where people have to work undocumented "overtime" or face the threat that they will be replaced by someone who will or where people who want to work overtime face punitive punishments if they do so.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    I am also not describing a scenario where we limit hours. While I do have ideas on solutions, I am not even proscribing a particular solution. As I said, we must first agree that we are capable of changing things. Some want to imagine everything is as it is due to unchanging natural laws, when in fact individuals and collectives made a lot of decisions along the way. I suggest we question those decisions and imagine how things would be different. One thing I can be extremely clear on is that I do NOT think the US government legally limiting work hours is any kind of solution. I am all about looking at society as a whole and reasoning on society-wide changes we can make voluntarily to achieve a better world.
    - dennis_jeeves 5y ago
      Too bad you are being down voted and being misunderstood. I fully agree with you that in this day given our over all productivity, humans should be able to, in theory able to design systems to minimize work without co-coercion. But as you partially correctly observed, typical human nature ( ranging from bureaucratic govts, to seeing survival as a zero sum game ) is a hindrance to achieving this goal. Where I completely disagree is that you will completely not change people's mind en masse even if you showed them a working example, so in a manner speaking any strategizing that one does is moot.
distributedsean 5y ago
I can't believe people are even having this conversation. As a civilization we solved this problem about a century ago. We know the solution. In the US labour law has been subverted and undermined. Thats the problem. It's not that nothing can be done about it. Lots can be done and has been done around the globe (but predominately in advanced economies, of which the US is one).
- boring_twenties 5y ago
  Which civilization solved this, exactly? Of the advanced economies, Western Europe seems to have the exact issue identified by GP: the hardest working/most ambitious workers move to the US. On the other hand, in Japan "death by overwork" seems to be close to or at the level of a genuine public health crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    If the US implemented more reasonable restrictions on labor in the US do you propose the hardest working most ambitious are going to move to China or Brazil?
  - Daishiman 5y ago
    This isn't obvious at all. A few very specific, niche employment areas in which the US dominates (software engineering in certain niches, medical practice, and maybe show business) have a modest influx of Western European workers, but that says nothing. Among the reasons for emigration to the US, there's not a single living soul that says "oh, I'm not legally allowed to work enough in my area of employment to achieve my dreams". It's a laughable and ridiculous statement.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  "We solved it but the solution failed."
rantwasp 5y ago
if people want to work more that’s fine but the others should not be punished for it. you see: some people push very hard because their life is their work. They don’t have time for something else because they work a lot, and they work a lot effectively consuming what should be their free time because they don’t have the mental energy to so something else. Once you create a bit of space and disentangle yourself from your work not a lot of people want to work extra time. ideally life should be split between work and creative pursuits and the percentage of work should decrease until it eventually hits 0. People will still do stuff, but your livelihood should not be tied to your job. You should pursue your “hobbies” because they are fun and/or fulfilling. Automation is good enough today that we should not have to work more than 15-20 hours per week. Knowledge workers already do this but “butt in seat” mentality still says 40 hours per week. It’s a tragedy really. We took all the productivity gains our technological advances brought and use them to create more bs work instead of reducing the amount of work we have to do.
- codyswann 5y ago
  What industry do you work in?
  - rantwasp 5y ago
    software development. anybody that tells you they are working 40hours/week at full steam is bs-ing you
    - codyswann 5y ago
      I run a software development company. I don't care if employees work 40 hours / week or 4 hours per week as long as they hit their deadlines. That said, 100%, straight coding for 40 hours / week is probably unrealistic, but that's not really the full job description of a software developer.
      - rantwasp 5y ago
        this is the right attitude. Things should be results oriented not hours-worked oriented. The problem with the industry is that the factory worker metaphor still persists when knowledge work is nothing like producing something in a repetitive manner.
michaelmrose 5y ago
Instead of there being no way its completely trivial. Furthermore you just said we have to choose between hard limits that will provably reduce exploitation and harm and handy wavy notions of dignity and equality with literally zero actual suggestions of any kind given. The people that are vulnerable to exploitation and harm are virtually always the lower paid individuals without options or stability. If you want to allow a high powered lawyer or a highly paid software developer to work 80 hours this week while protecting lowly paid people who fab "chips" composed of delicious cheese instead of silicon its simple. Add exceptions for individuals making n dollars where n is a function of the median income in the state preferably multiple times n. For example the median income in WA state is about 41k. Make individuals making 164k+ exempt from overtime rules under the reasonable presumption that they can negotiate their own rules. Otherwise - Time past 8 hours in a day paid double, time past 12 hours paid triple. - Days in a row past 6 paid double, days in a row past 8 paid triple. - Hours in a week past 40 paid double, past 60 triple - Require 2 consecutive days of rest after every 5 or more days on. Working on one of these days double the pay. Forbid any employment that doesn't guarantee a minimum of 24 hours and tax the beejesus out of anyone who makes use of more than 30% part time labor defined as less than 36 hours. Ensure that running on >30% part time labor is substantially more expensive than not. Forbid paying employees less than their scheduled hours for the week. Schedule someone for 24 hours and figure out you planned poorly. Yes you can send your people home but you can't opt out of paying them. Make work schedules agreed with less than 2 weeks notice cost 1.5x rate to discourage forcing people to live on call for meager wage jobs. Propose this and people will scream that you are destroying their business. Let people live this for a year and you will shockingly find them adapting to it by providing predictable scheduling to their 75%+ full time staff who work sane hours.
- clairity 5y ago
  sorry, again, you're focusing on the wrong problem, and trying to implement arbitrary and strict controls to boot (which might work for computers, but not so much with humans). we already have overtime rules (and a number of the other provisions), and they don't change the equation in any meaningful way, as this very article elucidates. it's perhaps well-meaning, but it's plainly the wrong approach.

Frost1x 5y ago

>some people will still pour their whole lives into work, which creates an iterated game that pushes the equilibrium for everyone toward working more. there's no practical way to mitigate this powerful, arguably inate, incentive. The trick here is to make sure those who don't push for the incentives are taken care of. You need to make sure everyone participating at the sane rates are taken care of in their needs and some wants. After that, you allow for those obsessed with incentives and wants to work as much as they want to get extravagant things. It's easier said than done but I believe its attainable. If you can create an economy where that sort of effort at work is used to buy luxuries and not necessities, then you have a good model that still has a balance of incentives without dragging the rest of society into a work obsessed life. People who put for this amount of effort shouldn't be doing it because they have to, they should be doing it because they want to. Unfortunately many people are doing it because they really have to, that or their standard of living drops significantly, their overall longevity. Unfortunately that's the world we have. People are forced to work at these sorts of rates to survive and it's only getting worse. It's not that they're slaving away their lives because they want to get a new luxury car or exotic vacation, it's that the alternatives to not doing it means they may be homeless next month or looking for somewhere new to live.

clairity 5y ago
yah, that's why ultimately the better focus is on a more equitable (but not equal) distribution of pay and wealth. worrying about the number of hours in a work week (or even minimum wage, in the long run) is a distraction in this regard (popular distractions on hn and elsewhere, by how well received such misguided ideas seem to be). we should be making labor markets radically transparent for workers, and legislatively shifting power to humans over amoral corporate entities. companies should be working for the people at large, not the other way around. once you accumulate about $2-10MM in assets, you've won the economy and we should make it steeply, progressively harder (but not impossible) to accumulate more. this also has the nice side effect of making the economy more dynamic and resilient, while also fostering more innovation all around.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

> the fundamental flaw with trying to limit working days/hours is that some people will still pour their whole lives into work, To be clear, I am talking about a voluntary system. No one would be prevented from working more, it just wouldn't be necessary to survive. I love to work pretty much all the time, though only some of that is hours I am billing to my employer. EDIT: I quickly rewrote my original comment after posting, but I do see one quoted reply got in before the change. Just wanted to add this note about the change.

nemothekid 5y ago
>I see no contradiction or flaw. What I desire is a world where it is possible for any person to survive working 20 hours a week with a couple months off. What GP is arguing is that is achieved by fixing the pay distribution, not by limiting hours. If you only limit hours but don't fix the pay problem you create perverse incentives where people have to work undocumented "overtime" or face the threat that they will be replaced by someone who will or where people who want to work overtime face punitive punishments if they do so.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  I am also not describing a scenario where we limit hours. While I do have ideas on solutions, I am not even proscribing a particular solution. As I said, we must first agree that we are capable of changing things. Some want to imagine everything is as it is due to unchanging natural laws, when in fact individuals and collectives made a lot of decisions along the way. I suggest we question those decisions and imagine how things would be different. One thing I can be extremely clear on is that I do NOT think the US government legally limiting work hours is any kind of solution. I am all about looking at society as a whole and reasoning on society-wide changes we can make voluntarily to achieve a better world.
  - dennis_jeeves 5y ago
    Too bad you are being down voted and being misunderstood. I fully agree with you that in this day given our over all productivity, humans should be able to, in theory able to design systems to minimize work without co-coercion. But as you partially correctly observed, typical human nature ( ranging from bureaucratic govts, to seeing survival as a zero sum game ) is a hindrance to achieving this goal. Where I completely disagree is that you will completely not change people's mind en masse even if you showed them a working example, so in a manner speaking any strategizing that one does is moot.

distributedsean 5y ago

I can't believe people are even having this conversation. As a civilization we solved this problem about a century ago. We know the solution. In the US labour law has been subverted and undermined. Thats the problem. It's not that nothing can be done about it. Lots can be done and has been done around the globe (but predominately in advanced economies, of which the US is one).

boring_twenties 5y ago
Which civilization solved this, exactly? Of the advanced economies, Western Europe seems to have the exact issue identified by GP: the hardest working/most ambitious workers move to the US. On the other hand, in Japan "death by overwork" seems to be close to or at the level of a genuine public health crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  If the US implemented more reasonable restrictions on labor in the US do you propose the hardest working most ambitious are going to move to China or Brazil?
- Daishiman 5y ago
  This isn't obvious at all. A few very specific, niche employment areas in which the US dominates (software engineering in certain niches, medical practice, and maybe show business) have a modest influx of Western European workers, but that says nothing. Among the reasons for emigration to the US, there's not a single living soul that says "oh, I'm not legally allowed to work enough in my area of employment to achieve my dreams". It's a laughable and ridiculous statement.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
"We solved it but the solution failed."

rantwasp 5y ago

if people want to work more that’s fine but the others should not be punished for it. you see: some people push very hard because their life is their work. They don’t have time for something else because they work a lot, and they work a lot effectively consuming what should be their free time because they don’t have the mental energy to so something else. Once you create a bit of space and disentangle yourself from your work not a lot of people want to work extra time. ideally life should be split between work and creative pursuits and the percentage of work should decrease until it eventually hits 0. People will still do stuff, but your livelihood should not be tied to your job. You should pursue your “hobbies” because they are fun and/or fulfilling. Automation is good enough today that we should not have to work more than 15-20 hours per week. Knowledge workers already do this but “butt in seat” mentality still says 40 hours per week. It’s a tragedy really. We took all the productivity gains our technological advances brought and use them to create more bs work instead of reducing the amount of work we have to do.

codyswann 5y ago
What industry do you work in?
- rantwasp 5y ago
  software development. anybody that tells you they are working 40hours/week at full steam is bs-ing you
  - codyswann 5y ago
    I run a software development company. I don't care if employees work 40 hours / week or 4 hours per week as long as they hit their deadlines. That said, 100%, straight coding for 40 hours / week is probably unrealistic, but that's not really the full job description of a software developer.
    - rantwasp 5y ago
      this is the right attitude. Things should be results oriented not hours-worked oriented. The problem with the industry is that the factory worker metaphor still persists when knowledge work is nothing like producing something in a repetitive manner.

michaelmrose 5y ago

Instead of there being no way its completely trivial. Furthermore you just said we have to choose between hard limits that will provably reduce exploitation and harm and handy wavy notions of dignity and equality with literally zero actual suggestions of any kind given. The people that are vulnerable to exploitation and harm are virtually always the lower paid individuals without options or stability. If you want to allow a high powered lawyer or a highly paid software developer to work 80 hours this week while protecting lowly paid people who fab "chips" composed of delicious cheese instead of silicon its simple. Add exceptions for individuals making n dollars where n is a function of the median income in the state preferably multiple times n. For example the median income in WA state is about 41k. Make individuals making 164k+ exempt from overtime rules under the reasonable presumption that they can negotiate their own rules. Otherwise - Time past 8 hours in a day paid double, time past 12 hours paid triple. - Days in a row past 6 paid double, days in a row past 8 paid triple. - Hours in a week past 40 paid double, past 60 triple - Require 2 consecutive days of rest after every 5 or more days on. Working on one of these days double the pay. Forbid any employment that doesn't guarantee a minimum of 24 hours and tax the beejesus out of anyone who makes use of more than 30% part time labor defined as less than 36 hours. Ensure that running on >30% part time labor is substantially more expensive than not. Forbid paying employees less than their scheduled hours for the week. Schedule someone for 24 hours and figure out you planned poorly. Yes you can send your people home but you can't opt out of paying them. Make work schedules agreed with less than 2 weeks notice cost 1.5x rate to discourage forcing people to live on call for meager wage jobs. Propose this and people will scream that you are destroying their business. Let people live this for a year and you will shockingly find them adapting to it by providing predictable scheduling to their 75%+ full time staff who work sane hours.

clairity 5y ago
sorry, again, you're focusing on the wrong problem, and trying to implement arbitrary and strict controls to boot (which might work for computers, but not so much with humans). we already have overtime rules (and a number of the other provisions), and they don't change the equation in any meaningful way, as this very article elucidates. it's perhaps well-meaning, but it's plainly the wrong approach.