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Think about it in reverse: imagine that you increased the workweek to six days. Do you think productivity would increase? Now imagine that you increased the wor

by kibwen 4y ago

Think about it in reverse: imagine that you increased the workweek to six days. Do you think productivity would increase? Now imagine that you increased the workweek to seven days out of the week, giving workers no rest days whatsoever. Would you expect productivity to rise or fall as a result of working people to absolute unending exhaustion? Since ancient times we have known that there is a tradeoff between days of work and days of rest, which is where the idea of "rest days" came from in the first place. Societies with rest days managed to outcompete societies without rest days, despite the former seeming to produce less on paper. Regardless of whether the optimal ratio is 2:5 or 3:4 or whatever, the general mechanism is not in doubt.

logifail 4y ago
> Do you think productivity would increase? How are we planning on measuring productivity of our hypothetical worker, and what kind of job does she do? If she's stacking supermarket shelves, or picking and packing in a warehouse, or repairing cars, or caring for the elderly, then I think most people would assume her weekly output is basically some fairly standard "unit output/hour" figure, multiplied by the hours she works in that week. If she works fewer hours, her output decreases. If she works more hours (subject to limits, and assuming breaks, weekends, and vacation), her output increases. Here on HN we don't seem to tend to think about (or hear from) people like her, though...