7 ms·

It’s strange that we even work more or even at the same amount of time as 100 years ago. We have systems that increase worker productivity and even software by

It’s strange that we even work more or even at the same amount of time as 100 years ago. We have systems that increase worker productivity and even software by itself for the most part should be decreasing the amount of work to be done since it’s supposedly a large force multiplier for productivity. Economists predicted we would be working less (but they are bad at predicting most things) so while there might be a few more jobs why should work hours have stayed constant? I’m not even saying we have bs jobs either.

ralph84 3y ago
Because humans don’t care about absolute wealth they care about relative wealth. As long as someone else is working more there’s going to be pressure to keep up with them.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- OJFord 3y ago
  I assume 'absolute wealth' means some amount (or not) of property, assets, that one's content with? Not like I'll be happy with 100k in the bank no matter how much anyone else has - because that just doesn't make sense, it's inherently relative; to care about the absolute value we have to mean real goods. So then I think it's just plainly not true? I think most people even want particular things, not to have the same or more things as others. To the extent that it's clichéd parenting, or associated with derogatory remarks like 'social climber', 'keeping up with the Jones', etc. Certainly Instagram and 'influencer' culture in general acts against that, but it's not hard to find people eschewing it either.
xyzelement 3y ago
//It’s strange that we even work more or even at the same amount of time as 100 years ago. We don’t. A hundred years the average man was putting in 7 to 7 shifts on the factory or the farm. Physically exhausting, dangerous and painful labor that required your physical presence and likely left you too exhausted for anything else. Today you and I are click clacking our keyboards in a safe and air conditioned environment, likely can fuck off for hours with out anyone noticing etc. The idea that we work “the same” as even two generations ago is preposterous.
- DougN7 3y ago
  Add to that our much improved relative standard of living (even lower classes are much better off than their long ago counter parts), and it’s clear we’re working less for what we get.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  On top of that, most of those farmers were earning subsistence wages and could be ruined by one bad harvest.
- tw04 3y ago
  Much like the anti-vax movement, the average American seems in complete denial of how things really were a hundred years ago. Prior to unions, work looked completely different - EVERYONE has benefitted from the change unions brought about. It's easy to tell yourself that sort of thing would never happen in a country like this when you weren't a direct witness to people (including children) literally being worked to death in a factory.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    > EVERYONE has benefitted from the change unions brought about The unions brought us the congés payés in France in 1936. Think about the guilt. While the Germans where manufacturing bombs day and night in Germany, we were on the frigging beach. Thank you, unions, we got invaded because of your irresponsibility. Also half of France had congés payés in 1935. Unions only brought the to sectors who couldn’t afford it.
  - 1auralynn 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm glad The Jungle was required reading in my high school history class.
  - nyokodo 3y ago
    > Prior to unions, work looked completely different Average working hours were dropping for decades before Labor Unions became popular in the 1930s driven by the productivity gains referenced elsewhere in the thread. The trend continued unabated other than an increase during WWII even after Union membership peaked in 1980 and dropped for 30 years. It doesn’t seem that Labor Unions were the cause of this improvement trend. 1. https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
kortilla 3y ago
If you want the same quality of life of 100 years ago you don’t need to work at all.
- acdha 3y ago
  This is bizarrely incongruous with the news about living conditions experienced by people who are homeless, disabled, etc. Anyone who isn’t working is going to have a worse experience than almost anyone who was working a century ago - even coal miners got to sleep indoors!
  - kortilla 3y ago
    Being unemployed does not result in homelessness unless you also join it with either a drug addition or an aversion to the requirements of unemployment/shelter programs.
    - HPsquared 3y ago
      And unemployed people don't have to go into the mines.
    - acdha 3y ago
      You’re assuming that those programs are well funded enough to have space available, it’s safe, and doesn’t come with the expectation of working. I don’t know where you live but that’s a long way from being universally true in the United States.
satvikpendem 3y ago
There is more work to go around. Back in the day, the only work that was required was sustaining one's caloric intake via farming (not to even mention the sibling's point that that work was much more strenuous that today's). As civilization advances, more work is uncovered. It is akin to a form of Parkinson's Law (work expands to fill the time allotted), only in this case, the time allotted is the entire future history of humanity.
mxkopy 3y ago
The things that make the maintenance of modern infrastructure easier themselves need maintenance. There’s also a hedonic treadmill effect, where we start to expect the amenities that modern infrastructure affords and use them as a base for greater aspirations (ground travel is solved for the average person, now let’s solve air -> space -> etc)
purplerabbit 3y ago
I believe the purpose of life is to create possibility. If that’s true, there will never be an incentive to work less so long as there is more possibility to be created (assuming that people are living purposefully, and it seems to me that those that don’t are evolutionarily selected against)
- UncleOxidant 3y ago
  What if there's a point where superintelligent AI is out there creating all the possibility? Also, "creating possibility" sounds kind of like "self actualization" ie. the top of Maslow's hierarchy.
  - purplerabbit 3y ago
    Your first question is a good one to which I don’t have an answer. On the second: possibility applies at all levels of the hierarchy. Obtaining basic health increases possibility — it increases the ways you can navigate the world at a simple physical level, and “unlocks” The possibility of “higher levels” e.g. relationships, which unlock still higher levels of possibility.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
Regardless of the facts, actually it does fall out from certain first principles: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch If someone else worked harder, they'd out-compete you, maybe conquer you. So we set a threshold and say, you can work 40-80-ish hours without going totally insane and dying. But there's no point working less than that, because someone else is ready to push the envelope. Even if the whole US agreed to just take it easy, I fear the other two superpowers (China and..... well Russia seems weak, maybe India?) would outdo us in GDP and it wouldn't be a great position politically to be in, since the US is my favorite superpower by a country mile. It's unfortunate math.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > It's unfortunate math. True, but only in the sense of "the math" itself being a big McNamara fallacy. Not only does GDP have some potential pitfalls, but "more people working harder" doesn't necessarily mean working toward success or future globe domination etc.
- StefanBatory 3y ago
  It's the same in Europe. We work on average way less than you do in US. ... and well, it's USA that is the superpower, not Europe. Even looking at software salaries - in Germany/France 50k is a high salary for software engineer. In USA you wouldn't even look at it after being fresh out the uni.
HPsquared 3y ago
It's the Jevons paradox, but for labour.
CalRobert 3y ago
But you are not trying to produce a fixed amount of goods. You are trying to compete with your peers for a limited supply of goods. Some of these things are artificially constrained (housing), and some of these things are hard or impossible to scale and thereby subject to Baumol's cost disease (surgeons, teachers/tutors, etc.) So long as 2 people are chasing 1 house, or worse, one oncology appointment for their child, you will have people working themselves to the bone to outcompete their peers. We could, of course, allow building more homes and improve the supply of healthcare, but that might mean people wouldn't work as hard, which would mean less surplus wealth for capital owners and state actors to enjoy.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >But you are not trying to produce a fixed amount of goods At some point we should, for the most part of what we consume, instead of ever expanding into BS things we don't need (like "smart fridges") and burning down things we do need (time, which we aren't getting back, and is spend working and paying for such bullshit).
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    Absolutely! All I really want is a warm, insulated home where my kids can run and bike around with other kids, and decent access to education and health care. A 70sqm flat in a car-free city would do the trick. We definitely need less crap in our lives, and more time with the people we love.
j7ake 3y ago
If you’re working half the time versus millions of comparably talented people full time: you will soon be out of a job (if employee) or a business (if employer).
lm28469 3y ago
An image is worth a thousand words: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/US_productivity_and_real_wages.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/US_produ...
lynx23 3y ago
Maybe those cconomists were already working less, which explains why their predictions were crap.
badpun 3y ago
It’s by choice. Most people in the US could achieve 1920s standard of living by working for a fraction of standard career (say 10-20 years), and retiring early. Instead, people choose to work till old age, to be able to afford modern comforts and pleasures.
compumetrika 3y ago
I think the data are that we are working a bit less than we used to, it's rather that the norms and mental categories have shifted. For example 40hr work week is now a sort of norm, vs "sunrise to sunset." The average workday is also much safer and less physically painful than it used to be. There are two things I have in mind, and if I have time later I'll see if I can find them and update the post -- one chart of total working hours per worker, and one article, about how much added safety has or hasn't slowed down productivity growth (which inevitably has a lot of data in it about workplace injury and death over time). Children also work much less than they used to. I think that Keynes wasn't completely wrong in his prediction (...and maybe if AI really kicks off he will be more vindicated, just missed on the timing)
joshuahedlund 3y ago
Work may have not decreased, but due to productivity an hour of work buys WAY more than it did 100 years ago. Our shelter is larger, climate-controlled, with plumbing and electricity. Our food has way more variety, quality, and year-round availability, carries fewer diseases, and can be stored in a giant cold box inside our homes for longer preservation. Our transportation is climate-controlled, faster, safer, and more convenient. Everything we use our wages on has seen massive gains in quality. It’s just that instead of working less and being just as poor as we were in 1924, we work the same and buy the uber top level wealthy (in 1924 terms) version of everything.
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
> It’s strange that we even work more or even at the same amount of time as 100 years ago. why is this strange? if a candybar maker spends $0.75 to make a candybar and sell it for $1.00 and then they suddenly find they can make 2 for the same price, they're going to continue selling them individually for $1.00. When you increase productivity like that you now have an effective increase in available resources, why would you assume there's only 1 place those effective resources can go?

ralph84 3y ago

Because humans don’t care about absolute wealth they care about relative wealth. As long as someone else is working more there’s going to be pressure to keep up with them.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
OJFord 3y ago
I assume 'absolute wealth' means some amount (or not) of property, assets, that one's content with? Not like I'll be happy with 100k in the bank no matter how much anyone else has - because that just doesn't make sense, it's inherently relative; to care about the absolute value we have to mean real goods. So then I think it's just plainly not true? I think most people even want particular things, not to have the same or more things as others. To the extent that it's clichéd parenting, or associated with derogatory remarks like 'social climber', 'keeping up with the Jones', etc. Certainly Instagram and 'influencer' culture in general acts against that, but it's not hard to find people eschewing it either.

xyzelement 3y ago

//It’s strange that we even work more or even at the same amount of time as 100 years ago. We don’t. A hundred years the average man was putting in 7 to 7 shifts on the factory or the farm. Physically exhausting, dangerous and painful labor that required your physical presence and likely left you too exhausted for anything else. Today you and I are click clacking our keyboards in a safe and air conditioned environment, likely can fuck off for hours with out anyone noticing etc. The idea that we work “the same” as even two generations ago is preposterous.

DougN7 3y ago
Add to that our much improved relative standard of living (even lower classes are much better off than their long ago counter parts), and it’s clear we’re working less for what we get.
idopmstuff 3y ago
On top of that, most of those farmers were earning subsistence wages and could be ruined by one bad harvest.
tw04 3y ago
Much like the anti-vax movement, the average American seems in complete denial of how things really were a hundred years ago. Prior to unions, work looked completely different - EVERYONE has benefitted from the change unions brought about. It's easy to tell yourself that sort of thing would never happen in a country like this when you weren't a direct witness to people (including children) literally being worked to death in a factory.
- eastbound 3y ago
  > EVERYONE has benefitted from the change unions brought about The unions brought us the congés payés in France in 1936. Think about the guilt. While the Germans where manufacturing bombs day and night in Germany, we were on the frigging beach. Thank you, unions, we got invaded because of your irresponsibility. Also half of France had congés payés in 1935. Unions only brought the to sectors who couldn’t afford it.
- 1auralynn 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm glad The Jungle was required reading in my high school history class.
- nyokodo 3y ago
  > Prior to unions, work looked completely different Average working hours were dropping for decades before Labor Unions became popular in the 1930s driven by the productivity gains referenced elsewhere in the thread. The trend continued unabated other than an increase during WWII even after Union membership peaked in 1980 and dropped for 30 years. It doesn’t seem that Labor Unions were the cause of this improvement trend. 1. https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours

kortilla 3y ago

If you want the same quality of life of 100 years ago you don’t need to work at all.

acdha 3y ago
This is bizarrely incongruous with the news about living conditions experienced by people who are homeless, disabled, etc. Anyone who isn’t working is going to have a worse experience than almost anyone who was working a century ago - even coal miners got to sleep indoors!
- kortilla 3y ago
  Being unemployed does not result in homelessness unless you also join it with either a drug addition or an aversion to the requirements of unemployment/shelter programs.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    And unemployed people don't have to go into the mines.
  - acdha 3y ago
    You’re assuming that those programs are well funded enough to have space available, it’s safe, and doesn’t come with the expectation of working. I don’t know where you live but that’s a long way from being universally true in the United States.

satvikpendem 3y ago

There is more work to go around. Back in the day, the only work that was required was sustaining one's caloric intake via farming (not to even mention the sibling's point that that work was much more strenuous that today's). As civilization advances, more work is uncovered. It is akin to a form of Parkinson's Law (work expands to fill the time allotted), only in this case, the time allotted is the entire future history of humanity.

mxkopy 3y ago

The things that make the maintenance of modern infrastructure easier themselves need maintenance. There’s also a hedonic treadmill effect, where we start to expect the amenities that modern infrastructure affords and use them as a base for greater aspirations (ground travel is solved for the average person, now let’s solve air -> space -> etc)

purplerabbit 3y ago

I believe the purpose of life is to create possibility. If that’s true, there will never be an incentive to work less so long as there is more possibility to be created (assuming that people are living purposefully, and it seems to me that those that don’t are evolutionarily selected against)

UncleOxidant 3y ago
What if there's a point where superintelligent AI is out there creating all the possibility? Also, "creating possibility" sounds kind of like "self actualization" ie. the top of Maslow's hierarchy.
- purplerabbit 3y ago
  Your first question is a good one to which I don’t have an answer. On the second: possibility applies at all levels of the hierarchy. Obtaining basic health increases possibility — it increases the ways you can navigate the world at a simple physical level, and “unlocks” The possibility of “higher levels” e.g. relationships, which unlock still higher levels of possibility.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago

Regardless of the facts, actually it does fall out from certain first principles: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch If someone else worked harder, they'd out-compete you, maybe conquer you. So we set a threshold and say, you can work 40-80-ish hours without going totally insane and dying. But there's no point working less than that, because someone else is ready to push the envelope. Even if the whole US agreed to just take it easy, I fear the other two superpowers (China and..... well Russia seems weak, maybe India?) would outdo us in GDP and it wouldn't be a great position politically to be in, since the US is my favorite superpower by a country mile. It's unfortunate math.

Terr_ 3y ago
> It's unfortunate math. True, but only in the sense of "the math" itself being a big McNamara fallacy. Not only does GDP have some potential pitfalls, but "more people working harder" doesn't necessarily mean working toward success or future globe domination etc.
StefanBatory 3y ago
It's the same in Europe. We work on average way less than you do in US. ... and well, it's USA that is the superpower, not Europe. Even looking at software salaries - in Germany/France 50k is a high salary for software engineer. In USA you wouldn't even look at it after being fresh out the uni.

HPsquared 3y ago

It's the Jevons paradox, but for labour.

CalRobert 3y ago

But you are not trying to produce a fixed amount of goods. You are trying to compete with your peers for a limited supply of goods. Some of these things are artificially constrained (housing), and some of these things are hard or impossible to scale and thereby subject to Baumol's cost disease (surgeons, teachers/tutors, etc.) So long as 2 people are chasing 1 house, or worse, one oncology appointment for their child, you will have people working themselves to the bone to outcompete their peers. We could, of course, allow building more homes and improve the supply of healthcare, but that might mean people wouldn't work as hard, which would mean less surplus wealth for capital owners and state actors to enjoy.

coldtea 3y ago
>But you are not trying to produce a fixed amount of goods At some point we should, for the most part of what we consume, instead of ever expanding into BS things we don't need (like "smart fridges") and burning down things we do need (time, which we aren't getting back, and is spend working and paying for such bullshit).
- CalRobert 3y ago
  Absolutely! All I really want is a warm, insulated home where my kids can run and bike around with other kids, and decent access to education and health care. A 70sqm flat in a car-free city would do the trick. We definitely need less crap in our lives, and more time with the people we love.

j7ake 3y ago

If you’re working half the time versus millions of comparably talented people full time: you will soon be out of a job (if employee) or a business (if employer).

lm28469 3y ago

An image is worth a thousand words: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/US_productivity_and_real_wages.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/US_produ...

lynx23 3y ago

Maybe those cconomists were already working less, which explains why their predictions were crap.

badpun 3y ago

It’s by choice. Most people in the US could achieve 1920s standard of living by working for a fraction of standard career (say 10-20 years), and retiring early. Instead, people choose to work till old age, to be able to afford modern comforts and pleasures.

compumetrika 3y ago

I think the data are that we are working a bit less than we used to, it's rather that the norms and mental categories have shifted. For example 40hr work week is now a sort of norm, vs "sunrise to sunset." The average workday is also much safer and less physically painful than it used to be. There are two things I have in mind, and if I have time later I'll see if I can find them and update the post -- one chart of total working hours per worker, and one article, about how much added safety has or hasn't slowed down productivity growth (which inevitably has a lot of data in it about workplace injury and death over time). Children also work much less than they used to. I think that Keynes wasn't completely wrong in his prediction (...and maybe if AI really kicks off he will be more vindicated, just missed on the timing)

joshuahedlund 3y ago

Work may have not decreased, but due to productivity an hour of work buys WAY more than it did 100 years ago. Our shelter is larger, climate-controlled, with plumbing and electricity. Our food has way more variety, quality, and year-round availability, carries fewer diseases, and can be stored in a giant cold box inside our homes for longer preservation. Our transportation is climate-controlled, faster, safer, and more convenient. Everything we use our wages on has seen massive gains in quality. It’s just that instead of working less and being just as poor as we were in 1924, we work the same and buy the uber top level wealthy (in 1924 terms) version of everything.

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

> It’s strange that we even work more or even at the same amount of time as 100 years ago. why is this strange? if a candybar maker spends $0.75 to make a candybar and sell it for $1.00 and then they suddenly find they can make 2 for the same price, they're going to continue selling them individually for $1.00. When you increase productivity like that you now have an effective increase in available resources, why would you assume there's only 1 place those effective resources can go?