I agree with this sentiment. Imagine if we tied reductions in working hours to productivity increases… The fundamental problem, IMO, is unintuitive: it’s prope

I agree with this sentiment. Imagine if we tied reductions in working hours to productivity increases… The fundamental problem, IMO, is unintuitive: it’s property rights. Specifically, we have all these complex financial instruments (assets) and have commodified/securitized/priced in many assumptions resulting in a price. Even small changes in those underlying assumptions can hugely affect asset prices and result in some entities losing massive amounts of asset value. This is very upsetting to precisely the people with the most power and influence, who don’t even stand to gain much from things like income redistribution or a reduction in output so we get what you’d expect given that That’s why we often end up with hugely wasteful things like the military industrial complex, US insurance system, or the grant system in the EU. Once people are extracting huge amounts of value from something, even if everybody else would be better of on average if the thing stopped, it’s hard to stop it. There’s also of course the global competitiveness problem. As you note we can simply reduce consumption to address that, but the semantics of that at scale are a hard sell in many cases. When it’s demand driven, like central business district coffee shops going out of business because consumers don’t want to shop there anymore due to WFH, it’s not so bad. But if it’s not demand driven, you end up in a situation like the UK is in now where inflation goes haywire and everybody is sad that the economy sucks.