The bit where he references Sydney Chapman's obscure theory as being of critical importance and then doesn't actually tell you what it actually stated is even m

The bit where he references Sydney Chapman's obscure theory as being of critical importance and then doesn't actually tell you what it actually stated is even more annoying. This paper - funnily enough written by the article author - does attempt to tell you what Chapman argued. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1125543#:~:text=Sidney%20Chapman's%20theory%20of%20the%20hours%20of%20labour,,authoritative%20by%20the%20leading%20economists%20of%20the%20day https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1125543#.... Assuming his paraphrase is accurate, Chapman argued that workers would act against their interests by picking higher pay over shorter hours, and employers would respond in kind by poaching employees from rivals by offering higher salaries for longer hours. It's also implied that this is somehow also against the corporation's long term interest but without a proper explanation of why; but perhaps the original writing offered a less muddled concept of the "optimal" amount of working hours (for whom, on what basis?) than the paraphrase. That provides some theoretical justification for state limits on reducing working hours in the interests of preserving employee health, something which happened in many industries a year after Chapman made his argument (a bunch of industries where people worked an average of 57 hours saw a mandatory 48 hour maximum working week; though I suspect arguments that UK mining and manufacturing workers didn't have much choice over schedules was a larger factor in that decision than the assumption they were working those hours out of greed) But I'm not sure this theory which doesn't have a whole lot of empirical support particularly conflicts with what mainstream economists believe[1] or gives us any reason to support the author's contention that the "optimal" maximum working week is 35 hours. [1]few economists will argue for the benefits of a 57 hour work week, and other theories in labour economics acknowledge certain scenarios in which workers will become overly fixated on the size of their pay package over longer term considerations