8 ms·

Let’s Be Less Productive

56 points by arnoooooo 14y ago

jeffool 14y ago
The thought of eschewing productivity makes me cringe instantly. But that said, I worry he's not wrong about some things. Our economies don't seem to be growing fast enough to negate the downsides of things like automation. Rather than slow down productivity, which surely few other nations would do, wouldn't it serve us better in the long run to do a better job of splitting up the work between capable hands? In that vein, I'd be more for dropping the full time work week significantly, as he mentions offhand. The story mentions 21 hours as a good work week number. I'd like to see that as three 7 hour days. I'm fine with that. Lots more family/me/we time. Of course, the issue becomes "compensation". How are you going to survive off of roughly half of what you made before? The ideals of a crazy person like me would be "hike up the minimum wage insanely high, pry money from the pockets of the wealthy" but I doubt much of this crowd would be with me there. (Based on my casual browsing I think it's fair to call HN of a, to use American terms, slightly economically Libertarian bent.) But the US already sees a large disparity between productivity and compensation ^1, and it seems to be growing. I'd love to see this discussed here though, if anyone has any insight. We all agree there are many smart people here. So what happens? We find a magical new job creating field like the Internet? (Because 3d printers only seem like they'll increase productivity further.) We let a generation or two pass and become an even more entrenched class based society? I'm not asking anyone for answers. I'm just asking for other possible outcomes. From my (hopefully wrong) view, it seems like we either reduce the relatively abundant resource of laborers, increase the amount of labor to be done, or even the two out in some fashion. The author here chooses one avenue of balancing, I mentioned another. What else would other options entail? ^1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/18/wages-productivity-report_n_837814.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/18/wages-productivity-...
- __alexs 14y ago
  > The ideals of a crazy person like me would be "hike up the minimum wage insanely high, pry money from the pockets of the wealthy" but I doubt much of this crowd would be with me there. Don't let the status quo put you off of a good thing.
- ef4 14y ago
  You're forgetting a key point. If productivity doubles, living on half your current salary would be no problem, because all that productivity will be driving down the cost of most things.
  - dbingham 14y ago
    It rarely actually works like that anymore. Companies have gotten very good at controlling their supply to ensure they can maintain high enough margins that their executives can take home ridiculous paychecks.
    - KaoruAoiShiho 14y ago
      Well theoretically that shouldn't be possible. Someone else should be there to expand supply and drive down your margins. Speaking on a macro level ef4 is right.
    - eru 14y ago
      Any sources? Margins for most industry are quite public. And while corporate profits are at high levels historically, they aren't that high.
- dbingham 14y ago
  On the whole 21 hour work week thing, I think one way to deal with the compensation issue would be to enforce maximum gaps. By which I mean, write a law that says the top compensated individual in any company can only be compensated so many times the bottom. So if an executive wants to be paid more, after a certain point he has to raise everyone else's salary too. This would also help deal with the issue of executive salaries being roughly 400x average wage. Limit that to 50x or 10x. Money would be much more evenly distributed.
  - politician 14y ago
    That sounds like a fine idea, but realize that just before the law comes into force affected companies will move their operations overseas [1]. Do you support punitive tariffs on foreign imports? [1] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2040142,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2040142,00....
    - dbingham 14y ago
      Charging a fine? No. Disallowing the entry of their goods into the US market entirely unless they obey US labor laws? Yes. It'd cause all manner of hell on implementation, because it would completely turn the world economy on its head. Right now we're really dependent on abusing the hell out of cheap labor and countries that don't have a solid regulatory structure. So while we sit here and claim to decent labor and environmental standards we're consuming a ton of goods produced with out them at a cheap cost. But the world is a single, closed system. At some point, this is going to catch up to us. We could use our consumer power to force an equalization in the global labor market by making a simple declaration: obey our labor and environmental standards -- and let us confirm that you do -- or you don't get to sell your goods to our market. Period. Suddenly, outsourced labor looks a lot less attractive. If you can't abuse the cheap labor and lax environmental laws in other countries, then there's no reason not to put your production in the US. Of course, this all depends on the fact that the US is one of the top consumer markets in the world, and that companies will do anything to avoid being cut out of it. The window of opportunity in which that's true is closing fast with the rise of China. And may, actually, already be closed. Of course, if you could get multiple high consumption countries together and agree on mutual labor standards to enforce and that any company not fulfilling them would be kept out of any of those countries then it'd have a lot more power. And of course, there's always the fact that any companies that refused could always be replaced by start-ups. The change over would be a little rough and chaotic, and it's hard (impossible?) to predict what would actually happen during it. But if we manage to make it through it, the resulting world would have a level playing field for labor and environmental practices. It's difficult to predict the effect it would have on living standards for those of us currently abusing everyone else. Our living standard might drop a bit as the price of goods goes up. But then, if this were linked with the previously mentioned law, a lot of the wealth that's caught up in the top of the economy right now would be forced down. That wealth would create a lot more consumers with money to spend, which means more demand, which means more jobs for everyone. So it could mean everyone's living standards go up -- despite a rise in the cost of labor and therefor goods. I'd be really interested to see someone model it.
- mahyarm 14y ago
  The problem is one more practiced 40 hour worker is less overhead, cheaper and usually more productive than two 21 hour workers.
- broadstrokes 14y ago
  Given the typically disproportionate cost of housing in most areas, I'm in favour of utterly massive protectionism/nationalization of housing infrastructure and other non-tradable goods fundamental to human need; disallow all speculative investment in property (foreign or otherwise), voila, instant price drops and quality of life increase for anyone who doesn't already own a home. What isn't usually mentioned in discussions like this are the resulting lack of returns on investment on behalf of future retirees, but to be honest, I can't imagine why anyone would rationally expect an economy to be stable enough that they could plan not to work for 40+ years of their life - looking around the world, this delusion is almost exclusively a Western phenomenon; there are other valid models.
  - orangecat 14y ago
    disallow all speculative investment in property (foreign or otherwise), voila, instant price drops and quality of life increase for anyone who doesn't already own a home. Well, that or massive shortages and black market sublets. I agree that housing is way too expensive, but before coming up with new ways to solve it with central planning, how about fixing the central planning that's a primary cause of the problem (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4032046 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4032046).
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  The ideals of a crazy person like me would be "hike up the minimum wage insanely high, pry money from the pockets of the wealthy"... Ignoring the normative reasons why one might oppose this, how would it even work practically? At the level of most of us, wealth is a claim on consumption. So redistribution of wealth among the middle class does enable redistribution of consumption At the level of rich people, it isn't - wealth represents the ability to direct productive enterprise (e.g., the ability to tell Facebook to do more photo sharing or invade privacy more). Suppose you were to tax Zuckerberg or Ellison and then redistribute, and now every American owns a couple of shares of Facebook and Oracle. How will this enable you to increase the consumption of the lower classes?
  - SudarshanP 14y ago
    I hope more people realize this. What the rich have more of beyond a threshold is power not objects. If you take the "stuff they own" and give it to the poor, each person on this planet will get very little. They will become a little more freer from the tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies... but it is unlikely that their standard of living will improve at all. We need to have more energy and resources to actually improve the conditions of the masses. Just moving the money around will not get us there. Things like dematerialization: "Turning Gramaphones into iPods into a feature on a tablet" is an example. Elimination of books and paper is another. Education is slowly moving in that direction. To learn something, the student needs to spend time and effort.... not gobs of money to buy a piece of paper. Medicines cost pennies to produce. We spend an inordiante amount of human effort to discover them. If we get better at this, we can spend a lot lesser on health-care. Such changes bring huge improvements. If you need to work only 3 days a week. You save 40% on travel. Earn less and spend less. You will have lesser traffic woes too. Parents could participate more in the education of their kids and take better care of the elderly. Asking people to mine with spoons instead of shovels so that they can all be busy is silly. Jobs are a milder version of slavery for most people. Let us liberate the planet from this as much as possible. But if people had to switch to a 3 day work week, we need to ensure that the quality of life should not drop but improve by doing so.
    - batista 14y ago
- sp332 14y ago
  Rich people are not the biggest source of employment in the USA. Most people work for smallish businesses. Forcing those companies to pay very high minimum wage would put them out of business. Unemployment would spike, and how would that help anyone?
- orangecat 14y ago
  The ideals of a crazy person like me would be "hike up the minimum wage insanely high, pry money from the pockets of the wealthy" I'm the only libertarian I know who is provisionally in favor of a universal income. But once you have that, you don't need a minimum wage and in fact you don't want one, because you want to maximize the number of people who can find work. The minimum wage exists to prevent exploitation, but if everybody automatically receives enough to live on, that's no longer a factor.
  - jeffool 14y ago
    That's okay, I'm the only person I know who's talked in support of the idea too. To me a guaranteed minimum income just... Makes sense to me. That's the closest we'll get to each person getting the opportunity to pursue happiness. I'm way crazy liberal, but if everyone had the ability to take care of themselves, and live as they want, well, we wouldn't need a minimum wage. You're right. (But then, I'd want health treatment to be like police/fire. Something everyone needs, and we're better all paying for.) So, yeah. The military, police, fire, health, roads, public school to about 10th grade, I guess the post office as we need a way to ensure public notices, and provide a baseline life through these means? I'd good with that. That's the only government I need. Just about any other social institutions can be done by people living on their GMI and aided by donations.
freshnote 14y ago
I consider myself highly productive, efficient (when I'm not on HN) and reasonably smart and informed, and yet I'm not living any better than other people who don't even know how to turn on a computer and never read books. In terms of material wealth, I'm way behind many others my age (I don't own furniture or a vehicle). Still trying to figure that one out.
- JonnieCache 14y ago
  What is it you're producing so much of so efficiently that somehow nobody is willing to pay you for?
  - freshnote 14y ago
    I get paid, but I'm feeling the squeeze by everyone for lower rates (I do freelance web design, writing, social media management). When not doing client work, I experiment with new ideas, products and so on, and so there are time and development costs and more misses than hits. Admittedly, I'm not a materialist guy, but my point is knowing a lot of tech stuff and working long hours doesn't guarantee wealth. I might even be better off financially if I didn't know this stuff.
    - virmundi 14y ago
      It seems like you're getting squeezed because you haven't stayed with the market. I've seen companies advertise template sites for as little as $100. The sites are all customizable via a WYSIWGY interface. They are also hosted for a small monthly fee because none of them will be a huge burden on the ISP. As a result, this space is moving to more automated, but non-distinct sites. Are you creating a similar setup? Are you able to compete by having a site made for $100 in under an hour? If not, you can still make money in this space, but you're going to have to be high end. Your clientèle will have to be high end. They will have to be willing to pay high end prices too. And let's not forget that there are many competitors aiming for this exact space. What differentiates you from them? Can you buy/merge with them? All things to consider.
gouranga 14y ago
Ultimately, it should be: Let's be as productive as long as it doesn't compromise ethics. The latter (ethics) is usually too flexible.
robfig 14y ago
I could be mistaken, but part of the assumption here seems to be that everyone is equally good at their job. It seems far better to have the incredible teachers leveraged as far as possible (to teach the most number of students while still remaining effective) rather than having everyone chip in their 21 hours and go home. Since this applies in every industry, it seems to explain why businesses prefer to have fewer (but more highly paid) employees. In short, this would have happened if it was in anyone's interest. The employee wants to work more to earn more. The employer gets value out of consolidating production to the most productive.
- CookWithMe 14y ago
  > It seems far better to have the incredible teachers leveraged as far as possible And your assumption is that the potential leverage is quite big. I doubt it: I've seen many students profit a lot from 1 on 1 private lessons - from students 2 or 3 years ahead of them (or even from the same class). They are arguably nowhere near as good as a teacher who has studied teaching and has years of experience. Yet they can help the student a lot more because they can focus 100% of their time on the single student and his individual needs.
  - heliodor 14y ago
    He was talking about hours worked, not class size. And he has a very good point. All the talk in the tech community about the 10x programmer comes to mind.
_pferreir_ 14y ago
OK, we could all settle at a lower per capita productivity level, but then companies that have resources would be able to increase their workforce, effectively obtaining an even more significant advantage over less wealthy competitors (who can't afford increasing their staff). This probably means that many small companies would go out of business.
Jauny 14y ago
I often have a discussion about that with a friend whom is a bit less capitalistic than me, and we always argue about if growth is absolutely needed or not; I think the first thing is that this article might mix productivity and growth, and I don't think lowering and staying at the same level of productivity means less growth; The need of growth mentioned by the article comes from the fact population growth, inflation, etc., brings the need to have en economical growth at least equivalent of the prior to let us keep the same level of wealth. But in that case, it means no evolution; no research; no development; stagnation. It means we will never cure cancer. Never go further in space anymore. And I mean, if people are ok with that, it's a way of thinking. But I personally think that the human being is motivated by evolution/revolution and that's what makes us search for better. We always want better for us, for our kids and next generations. This is what differentiate human to animals. We have ambition, a need to create and to reach better, all the time. Maybe sometimes we do too much, and we could decide for a max growth, a max productivity increase, etc. But stopping growth or productivity wouldn't be good I think. At least not in our economy, lifestyle and culture.
lmm 14y ago
Think about it on an individual level. Suppose the economy is such that there's only demand for 21 hours/week worth of your labour. Would you rather a) work 21 hours/week b) work 40 hours/week, badly? Because that's what choosing to lower productivity amounts to.
- marvin 14y ago
  Well, from anecdotal evidence, this is what a lot of people already do. Option A seems like a much better idea.
ef4 14y ago
This kind of alarmism is both very old and economically ignorant. We have already experienced this scenario multiple times, and it always leaves us better off. Consider that 200 years ago almost everyone was in farming, and now it employs less than 2%, thanks to drastically higher productivity. We didn't all end up unemployed. We invented whole new things to work on. Most of us are doing things our ancestors would have thought were impossible or frivolous or just bizarre.
- dbingham 14y ago
  Actually, the farming trend is being reversed. We've realized that the compromises we have to make in order to produce enough to feed us with only 2% of the population results in food that is actually killing us and generating super pests. The trend is now headed back to more farmers working on smaller less efficient farms with out machines (or with fewer machines) or chemicals. So don't base your argument on the example of farming.
  - weavejester 14y ago
    Even if there's a (small) current trend in the opposite direction for farming, we're not going to go back to the level of productivity of the 1800s, or the 1900s, or even the 1950s. The overall trend over the past 200 years in farming has overwhelming toward increasing yield.
  - narag 14y ago
    It doesn't seem fair to put all the blame on automatization. I've read here that high fructose corn syrup is suspect of contributing to obesity and some other diseases. But is automatization responsible or USA regulations and subsides? In general, I'd say that the main factor is that the change of having cheap and abundant food is not followed by a change in diet. It takes some pain and a couple generations (in the best case) to adapt.
    - eru 14y ago
      The saddest part of the high fructose corn syrup story is that that syrup is actually only cheaper than sugar in the US, because of subsidies and tariffs.
ecmendenhall 14y ago
Stuff is not growth, in the same way that money is not wealth (PG gets this. You have probably read the essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html). Growth is just increasing wealth, but we measure it in terms of stuff (GDP, factor productivity) because it's easy. There may be natural limits to the amount of stuff we can produce. But there are, in principle, no natural limits to the amount of wealth we can produce. Growth—that is, more wealth due to better technology and higher productivity—is exactly what enabled the New York Philharmonic to play Beethoven's Ninth in the first place, instead of farm potatoes or work in a factory. It's exactly what enables me to buy a ticket and go listen in person, or spend nothing and watch the performance online, even though I'm not a king or priest or robber baron! Pronouncements that growth (read: wealth, innovation, technology, knowledge) must end are as silly as past pronouncements that we have reached the limits of scientific knowledge and all that's left is to look in the sixth place of decimals. In fact, one path to more growth and better wealth is actually more productivity in the "caring professions" singled out here. Medicine, social work, and education all suffer from a similar stuff-growth measurement problem! (Here is one discussion of this argument: http://www.economist.com/node/21016577 http://www.economist.com/node/21016577) We want better health, but we can't measure it very well, so we rely on healthcare spending. We want better social services, but it's tough to quantify outcomes, so we measure inputs like program budgets. We want better education, but we're not sure what works, so we measure number of teachers and test scores. Despite spending more and producing more stuff in each area, there has been little growth in the last few decades. Professors of economics and sustainable development are both susceptible to this fallacy.
blindhippo 14y ago
First thing I thought of when I read about a reduced workweek - especially 21 hours - damn, that would give me time to finish those side projects I've been working on! I doubt most people have the same approach that I do, but you can imagine the entreprenurial boost this might have on our society where many of us are over educated for the type of work we end up doing.
AznHisoka 14y ago
I dunno.. I see a lot of depressed faces in NY subways - the pinnacle of economic growth. While those Himalayan villagers and monks don't seem to worry about economic growth and efficiency.. and they're always smiling.
- orangecat 14y ago
  At yet, you're still in NY. Happiness isn't everything: http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=8311 http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=8311
orangecat 14y ago
This is a ridiculous article. Assuming the problem exists, he notes the obvious and correct solution of reducing the time we spend working. Then he inexplicably abandons that and insists that we deliberately limit our productivity, so we can keep the holy 40+ hour work week. What sense does it make to ask our teachers to teach ever bigger classes? I learned way more in Sebastian Thrun's online courses than most of my college courses. Our doctors to treat more and more patients per hour? If that doesn't compromise quality, then it will lower costs and increase availability of medical care. The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar “commodity.” It can’t be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade. And humans will have more time to care for each other if we aren't forced to work unnecessarily long hours by well-meaning social engineers.

56 points by arnoooooo 14y ago

The thought of eschewing productivity makes me cringe instantly. But that said, I worry he's not wrong about some things. Our economies don't seem to be growing fast enough to negate the downsides of things like automation. Rather than slow down productivity, which surely few other nations would do, wouldn't it serve us better in the long run to do a better job of splitting up the work between capable hands? In that vein, I'd be more for dropping the full time work week significantly, as he mentions offhand. The story mentions 21 hours as a good work week number. I'd like to see that as three 7 hour days. I'm fine with that. Lots more family/me/we time. Of course, the issue becomes "compensation". How are you going to survive off of roughly half of what you made before? The ideals of a crazy person like me would be "hike up the minimum wage insanely high, pry money from the pockets of the wealthy" but I doubt much of this crowd would be with me there. (Based on my casual browsing I think it's fair to call HN of a, to use American terms, slightly economically Libertarian bent.) But the US already sees a large disparity between productivity and compensation ^1, and it seems to be growing. I'd love to see this discussed here though, if anyone has any insight. We all agree there are many smart people here. So what happens? We find a magical new job creating field like the Internet? (Because 3d printers only seem like they'll increase productivity further.) We let a generation or two pass and become an even more entrenched class based society? I'm not asking anyone for answers. I'm just asking for other possible outcomes. From my (hopefully wrong) view, it seems like we either reduce the relatively abundant resource of laborers, increase the amount of labor to be done, or even the two out in some fashion. The author here chooses one avenue of balancing, I mentioned another. What else would other options entail? ^1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/18/wages-productivity-report_n_837814.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/18/wages-productivity-...

__alexs 14y ago
> The ideals of a crazy person like me would be "hike up the minimum wage insanely high, pry money from the pockets of the wealthy" but I doubt much of this crowd would be with me there. Don't let the status quo put you off of a good thing.
ef4 14y ago
You're forgetting a key point. If productivity doubles, living on half your current salary would be no problem, because all that productivity will be driving down the cost of most things.
- dbingham 14y ago
  It rarely actually works like that anymore. Companies have gotten very good at controlling their supply to ensure they can maintain high enough margins that their executives can take home ridiculous paychecks.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 14y ago
    Well theoretically that shouldn't be possible. Someone else should be there to expand supply and drive down your margins. Speaking on a macro level ef4 is right.
  - eru 14y ago
    Any sources? Margins for most industry are quite public. And while corporate profits are at high levels historically, they aren't that high.
dbingham 14y ago
On the whole 21 hour work week thing, I think one way to deal with the compensation issue would be to enforce maximum gaps. By which I mean, write a law that says the top compensated individual in any company can only be compensated so many times the bottom. So if an executive wants to be paid more, after a certain point he has to raise everyone else's salary too. This would also help deal with the issue of executive salaries being roughly 400x average wage. Limit that to 50x or 10x. Money would be much more evenly distributed.
- politician 14y ago
  That sounds like a fine idea, but realize that just before the law comes into force affected companies will move their operations overseas [1]. Do you support punitive tariffs on foreign imports? [1] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2040142,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2040142,00....
  - dbingham 14y ago
    Charging a fine? No. Disallowing the entry of their goods into the US market entirely unless they obey US labor laws? Yes. It'd cause all manner of hell on implementation, because it would completely turn the world economy on its head. Right now we're really dependent on abusing the hell out of cheap labor and countries that don't have a solid regulatory structure. So while we sit here and claim to decent labor and environmental standards we're consuming a ton of goods produced with out them at a cheap cost. But the world is a single, closed system. At some point, this is going to catch up to us. We could use our consumer power to force an equalization in the global labor market by making a simple declaration: obey our labor and environmental standards -- and let us confirm that you do -- or you don't get to sell your goods to our market. Period. Suddenly, outsourced labor looks a lot less attractive. If you can't abuse the cheap labor and lax environmental laws in other countries, then there's no reason not to put your production in the US. Of course, this all depends on the fact that the US is one of the top consumer markets in the world, and that companies will do anything to avoid being cut out of it. The window of opportunity in which that's true is closing fast with the rise of China. And may, actually, already be closed. Of course, if you could get multiple high consumption countries together and agree on mutual labor standards to enforce and that any company not fulfilling them would be kept out of any of those countries then it'd have a lot more power. And of course, there's always the fact that any companies that refused could always be replaced by start-ups. The change over would be a little rough and chaotic, and it's hard (impossible?) to predict what would actually happen during it. But if we manage to make it through it, the resulting world would have a level playing field for labor and environmental practices. It's difficult to predict the effect it would have on living standards for those of us currently abusing everyone else. Our living standard might drop a bit as the price of goods goes up. But then, if this were linked with the previously mentioned law, a lot of the wealth that's caught up in the top of the economy right now would be forced down. That wealth would create a lot more consumers with money to spend, which means more demand, which means more jobs for everyone. So it could mean everyone's living standards go up -- despite a rise in the cost of labor and therefor goods. I'd be really interested to see someone model it.
mahyarm 14y ago
The problem is one more practiced 40 hour worker is less overhead, cheaper and usually more productive than two 21 hour workers.
broadstrokes 14y ago
Given the typically disproportionate cost of housing in most areas, I'm in favour of utterly massive protectionism/nationalization of housing infrastructure and other non-tradable goods fundamental to human need; disallow all speculative investment in property (foreign or otherwise), voila, instant price drops and quality of life increase for anyone who doesn't already own a home. What isn't usually mentioned in discussions like this are the resulting lack of returns on investment on behalf of future retirees, but to be honest, I can't imagine why anyone would rationally expect an economy to be stable enough that they could plan not to work for 40+ years of their life - looking around the world, this delusion is almost exclusively a Western phenomenon; there are other valid models.
- orangecat 14y ago
  disallow all speculative investment in property (foreign or otherwise), voila, instant price drops and quality of life increase for anyone who doesn't already own a home. Well, that or massive shortages and black market sublets. I agree that housing is way too expensive, but before coming up with new ways to solve it with central planning, how about fixing the central planning that's a primary cause of the problem (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4032046 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4032046).
yummyfajitas 14y ago
The ideals of a crazy person like me would be "hike up the minimum wage insanely high, pry money from the pockets of the wealthy"... Ignoring the normative reasons why one might oppose this, how would it even work practically? At the level of most of us, wealth is a claim on consumption. So redistribution of wealth among the middle class does enable redistribution of consumption At the level of rich people, it isn't - wealth represents the ability to direct productive enterprise (e.g., the ability to tell Facebook to do more photo sharing or invade privacy more). Suppose you were to tax Zuckerberg or Ellison and then redistribute, and now every American owns a couple of shares of Facebook and Oracle. How will this enable you to increase the consumption of the lower classes?
- SudarshanP 14y ago
  I hope more people realize this. What the rich have more of beyond a threshold is power not objects. If you take the "stuff they own" and give it to the poor, each person on this planet will get very little. They will become a little more freer from the tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies... but it is unlikely that their standard of living will improve at all. We need to have more energy and resources to actually improve the conditions of the masses. Just moving the money around will not get us there. Things like dematerialization: "Turning Gramaphones into iPods into a feature on a tablet" is an example. Elimination of books and paper is another. Education is slowly moving in that direction. To learn something, the student needs to spend time and effort.... not gobs of money to buy a piece of paper. Medicines cost pennies to produce. We spend an inordiante amount of human effort to discover them. If we get better at this, we can spend a lot lesser on health-care. Such changes bring huge improvements. If you need to work only 3 days a week. You save 40% on travel. Earn less and spend less. You will have lesser traffic woes too. Parents could participate more in the education of their kids and take better care of the elderly. Asking people to mine with spoons instead of shovels so that they can all be busy is silly. Jobs are a milder version of slavery for most people. Let us liberate the planet from this as much as possible. But if people had to switch to a 3 day work week, we need to ensure that the quality of life should not drop but improve by doing so.
  - batista 14y ago
sp332 14y ago
Rich people are not the biggest source of employment in the USA. Most people work for smallish businesses. Forcing those companies to pay very high minimum wage would put them out of business. Unemployment would spike, and how would that help anyone?
orangecat 14y ago
The ideals of a crazy person like me would be "hike up the minimum wage insanely high, pry money from the pockets of the wealthy" I'm the only libertarian I know who is provisionally in favor of a universal income. But once you have that, you don't need a minimum wage and in fact you don't want one, because you want to maximize the number of people who can find work. The minimum wage exists to prevent exploitation, but if everybody automatically receives enough to live on, that's no longer a factor.
- jeffool 14y ago
  That's okay, I'm the only person I know who's talked in support of the idea too. To me a guaranteed minimum income just... Makes sense to me. That's the closest we'll get to each person getting the opportunity to pursue happiness. I'm way crazy liberal, but if everyone had the ability to take care of themselves, and live as they want, well, we wouldn't need a minimum wage. You're right. (But then, I'd want health treatment to be like police/fire. Something everyone needs, and we're better all paying for.) So, yeah. The military, police, fire, health, roads, public school to about 10th grade, I guess the post office as we need a way to ensure public notices, and provide a baseline life through these means? I'd good with that. That's the only government I need. Just about any other social institutions can be done by people living on their GMI and aided by donations.

freshnote 14y ago

I consider myself highly productive, efficient (when I'm not on HN) and reasonably smart and informed, and yet I'm not living any better than other people who don't even know how to turn on a computer and never read books. In terms of material wealth, I'm way behind many others my age (I don't own furniture or a vehicle). Still trying to figure that one out.

JonnieCache 14y ago
What is it you're producing so much of so efficiently that somehow nobody is willing to pay you for?
- freshnote 14y ago
  I get paid, but I'm feeling the squeeze by everyone for lower rates (I do freelance web design, writing, social media management). When not doing client work, I experiment with new ideas, products and so on, and so there are time and development costs and more misses than hits. Admittedly, I'm not a materialist guy, but my point is knowing a lot of tech stuff and working long hours doesn't guarantee wealth. I might even be better off financially if I didn't know this stuff.
  - virmundi 14y ago
    It seems like you're getting squeezed because you haven't stayed with the market. I've seen companies advertise template sites for as little as $100. The sites are all customizable via a WYSIWGY interface. They are also hosted for a small monthly fee because none of them will be a huge burden on the ISP. As a result, this space is moving to more automated, but non-distinct sites. Are you creating a similar setup? Are you able to compete by having a site made for $100 in under an hour? If not, you can still make money in this space, but you're going to have to be high end. Your clientèle will have to be high end. They will have to be willing to pay high end prices too. And let's not forget that there are many competitors aiming for this exact space. What differentiates you from them? Can you buy/merge with them? All things to consider.

gouranga 14y ago

Ultimately, it should be: Let's be as productive as long as it doesn't compromise ethics. The latter (ethics) is usually too flexible.

robfig 14y ago

I could be mistaken, but part of the assumption here seems to be that everyone is equally good at their job. It seems far better to have the incredible teachers leveraged as far as possible (to teach the most number of students while still remaining effective) rather than having everyone chip in their 21 hours and go home. Since this applies in every industry, it seems to explain why businesses prefer to have fewer (but more highly paid) employees. In short, this would have happened if it was in anyone's interest. The employee wants to work more to earn more. The employer gets value out of consolidating production to the most productive.

CookWithMe 14y ago
> It seems far better to have the incredible teachers leveraged as far as possible And your assumption is that the potential leverage is quite big. I doubt it: I've seen many students profit a lot from 1 on 1 private lessons - from students 2 or 3 years ahead of them (or even from the same class). They are arguably nowhere near as good as a teacher who has studied teaching and has years of experience. Yet they can help the student a lot more because they can focus 100% of their time on the single student and his individual needs.
- heliodor 14y ago
  He was talking about hours worked, not class size. And he has a very good point. All the talk in the tech community about the 10x programmer comes to mind.

_pferreir_ 14y ago

OK, we could all settle at a lower per capita productivity level, but then companies that have resources would be able to increase their workforce, effectively obtaining an even more significant advantage over less wealthy competitors (who can't afford increasing their staff). This probably means that many small companies would go out of business.

Jauny 14y ago

I often have a discussion about that with a friend whom is a bit less capitalistic than me, and we always argue about if growth is absolutely needed or not; I think the first thing is that this article might mix productivity and growth, and I don't think lowering and staying at the same level of productivity means less growth; The need of growth mentioned by the article comes from the fact population growth, inflation, etc., brings the need to have en economical growth at least equivalent of the prior to let us keep the same level of wealth. But in that case, it means no evolution; no research; no development; stagnation. It means we will never cure cancer. Never go further in space anymore. And I mean, if people are ok with that, it's a way of thinking. But I personally think that the human being is motivated by evolution/revolution and that's what makes us search for better. We always want better for us, for our kids and next generations. This is what differentiate human to animals. We have ambition, a need to create and to reach better, all the time. Maybe sometimes we do too much, and we could decide for a max growth, a max productivity increase, etc. But stopping growth or productivity wouldn't be good I think. At least not in our economy, lifestyle and culture.

lmm 14y ago

Think about it on an individual level. Suppose the economy is such that there's only demand for 21 hours/week worth of your labour. Would you rather a) work 21 hours/week b) work 40 hours/week, badly? Because that's what choosing to lower productivity amounts to.

marvin 14y ago
Well, from anecdotal evidence, this is what a lot of people already do. Option A seems like a much better idea.

ef4 14y ago

This kind of alarmism is both very old and economically ignorant. We have already experienced this scenario multiple times, and it always leaves us better off. Consider that 200 years ago almost everyone was in farming, and now it employs less than 2%, thanks to drastically higher productivity. We didn't all end up unemployed. We invented whole new things to work on. Most of us are doing things our ancestors would have thought were impossible or frivolous or just bizarre.

dbingham 14y ago
Actually, the farming trend is being reversed. We've realized that the compromises we have to make in order to produce enough to feed us with only 2% of the population results in food that is actually killing us and generating super pests. The trend is now headed back to more farmers working on smaller less efficient farms with out machines (or with fewer machines) or chemicals. So don't base your argument on the example of farming.
- weavejester 14y ago
  Even if there's a (small) current trend in the opposite direction for farming, we're not going to go back to the level of productivity of the 1800s, or the 1900s, or even the 1950s. The overall trend over the past 200 years in farming has overwhelming toward increasing yield.
- narag 14y ago
  It doesn't seem fair to put all the blame on automatization. I've read here that high fructose corn syrup is suspect of contributing to obesity and some other diseases. But is automatization responsible or USA regulations and subsides? In general, I'd say that the main factor is that the change of having cheap and abundant food is not followed by a change in diet. It takes some pain and a couple generations (in the best case) to adapt.
  - eru 14y ago
    The saddest part of the high fructose corn syrup story is that that syrup is actually only cheaper than sugar in the US, because of subsidies and tariffs.

ecmendenhall 14y ago

Stuff is not growth, in the same way that money is not wealth (PG gets this. You have probably read the essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html). Growth is just increasing wealth, but we measure it in terms of stuff (GDP, factor productivity) because it's easy. There may be natural limits to the amount of stuff we can produce. But there are, in principle, no natural limits to the amount of wealth we can produce. Growth—that is, more wealth due to better technology and higher productivity—is exactly what enabled the New York Philharmonic to play Beethoven's Ninth in the first place, instead of farm potatoes or work in a factory. It's exactly what enables me to buy a ticket and go listen in person, or spend nothing and watch the performance online, even though I'm not a king or priest or robber baron! Pronouncements that growth (read: wealth, innovation, technology, knowledge) must end are as silly as past pronouncements that we have reached the limits of scientific knowledge and all that's left is to look in the sixth place of decimals. In fact, one path to more growth and better wealth is actually more productivity in the "caring professions" singled out here. Medicine, social work, and education all suffer from a similar stuff-growth measurement problem! (Here is one discussion of this argument: http://www.economist.com/node/21016577 http://www.economist.com/node/21016577) We want better health, but we can't measure it very well, so we rely on healthcare spending. We want better social services, but it's tough to quantify outcomes, so we measure inputs like program budgets. We want better education, but we're not sure what works, so we measure number of teachers and test scores. Despite spending more and producing more stuff in each area, there has been little growth in the last few decades. Professors of economics and sustainable development are both susceptible to this fallacy.

blindhippo 14y ago

First thing I thought of when I read about a reduced workweek - especially 21 hours - damn, that would give me time to finish those side projects I've been working on! I doubt most people have the same approach that I do, but you can imagine the entreprenurial boost this might have on our society where many of us are over educated for the type of work we end up doing.

AznHisoka 14y ago

I dunno.. I see a lot of depressed faces in NY subways - the pinnacle of economic growth. While those Himalayan villagers and monks don't seem to worry about economic growth and efficiency.. and they're always smiling.

orangecat 14y ago
At yet, you're still in NY. Happiness isn't everything: http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=8311 http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=8311

orangecat 14y ago

This is a ridiculous article. Assuming the problem exists, he notes the obvious and correct solution of reducing the time we spend working. Then he inexplicably abandons that and insists that we deliberately limit our productivity, so we can keep the holy 40+ hour work week. What sense does it make to ask our teachers to teach ever bigger classes? I learned way more in Sebastian Thrun's online courses than most of my college courses. Our doctors to treat more and more patients per hour? If that doesn't compromise quality, then it will lower costs and increase availability of medical care. The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar “commodity.” It can’t be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade. And humans will have more time to care for each other if we aren't forced to work unnecessarily long hours by well-meaning social engineers.