5 ms·

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

by 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.

by jeffool 14y ago

__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.