9 ms·
I have some gripes with this group and their publications: - They don't randomize pilots, so any effect you see is likely to be confounded - In this publicati
by bschne 3y ago
I have some gripes with this group and their publications:
- They don't randomize pilots, so any effect you see is likely to be confounded
- In this publication, it appears there was ~50% attrition between the initial pilot and the follow-up study — again, a huge source of potential confounding
- As another example, in another publication, they showed a plot of GDP per capita against average working hours, and insinuated from the negative relationship that less working hours somehow made workers (causally) more productive, without even hinting at the obvious alternative explanation that people work less as they get more productive because they don't have to work as much to maintain standard of living.
I like that things like this are being tried, but I wish the research conducted on it were more intellectually honest and less obviously geared towards pursuing an agenda. The level of analysis here is more like a company marketing whitepaper than anything bordering on scientific.
Don't get me wrong, personally I think companies where it's feasible should just define minimum presence where the business needs it and leave it to employees where and when to do the work within those constraints depending on preferences and their situation. I don't have an axe to grind against working less (and in my circles it seems like many people are making this decision by reducing their workload to e.g. 80%, albeit at a corresponding salary cut). But the whole thing just seems a big disingenuous.
- timthorn 3y agoThey also count charities/non-profits as "companies" - it's unclear to me if they also include local government, but it would be helpful to see the results that for-profit organisations achieved broken out separately.
- nxpnsv 3y agoHow would you randomize 4 day work weeks in an unbiased way?
- FredPret 3y agoYou can't, which makes it difficult or maybe impossible to have hard facts about it
- black_puppydog 3y agoseems like a bad excuse to not even try to go beyond shrugging/handwaving
- FredPret 3y agoNope - it's a great reason to not even start spreading more bullshit into the info-sphere. (The same can be said for almost everything related to nutritional "science".) If we don't have a good mechanism for knowing something is true or not, we should acknowledge that and approach the problem philosophically / aesthetically. We need to know what we know so that we can use knowledge as our building blocks, not fake information. You can't magic science into existence and then use it to make decisions.
- bschne 3y agoIf you run a trial like this hoping to get an idea of what effect the thing you're doing has, you have two things to worry about (using the terms common at least in econ here). The first is internal validity: Does what you're doing give you a good estimate (i.e., not biased) of the effect you're trying to estimate. The second is external validity: Does your result tell you enough about what would happen if you did the thing you did, but outside your trial context. If you do a trial of four-day workweeks, you're probably always going to have issues with the latter for any feasible setup. As you allude to, the companies that self-select into participating in such a trial are probably not a good representation of the wider economy, even if you randomize among them. Now if you randomize rollout of four-day weeks at least among those willing to participate, and you didn't lose about 50% of participants between the start of your trial and the follow-up survey, you would at least get an unbiased estimate of what the policy did for those companies. But alas, they don't even do that part.