4 ms·

Only if the assumption is that people need to be employed 40 hours a week. If we reduce the preferred workweek to something closer to 20, then we have 2x the am

by sxp 2y ago

Only if the assumption is that people need to be employed 40 hours a week. If we reduce the preferred workweek to something closer to 20, then we have 2x the amount of jobs available.

raincom 2y ago
Wherever one can get jobs, there the cost of living--mostly housing--is exorbitantly high. Whether one works 20 hours a week or 40 hours a week depends on the cost of housing.
schmidtleonard 2y ago
We brought women into the workforce but instead of splitting the work 50/50 we split it 100/100. Now nobody has time to raise children, but hey, the stocks, bonds, and real estate got pumped (in units of median-worker-hours) and I guess that's what's important. Ugh. What to do? Policy aimed at reducing the market-induced-labor-quota so that people can raise kids again? Something that substitutes the effect of "one spouse works, one spouse stays home" but without the sexism this time? No, never! That's radical! That's lazy! (Unintelligible screeching vaguely resembling the words "pareto optimality.") We've seen the complete domination of labor by capital once before: in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. It was fixed by a giant war that wiped out the asset holders in Europe and a less cataclysmic series of events that reduced their power in America (Great Depression got FDR into office, business leaders got caught red-handed trying to coup him and forced into concessions, WWII veterans made labor delegitimization difficult). Here's hoping we can find another Roosevelt without finding out what WWIII means.
- Swizec 2y ago
  > Something that substitutes the effect of "one spouse works, one spouse stays home" but without the sexism this time This more or less only existed in the upper classes and for a brief few decades after ww2 when global economy was growing fast fueled by recovery. Lower classes never had this. Read some Dickens — all the women have full time jobs. Read some post-ww2 communist stuff – all women are expected to work. Even before industrialization women worked on subsistence farms right alongside their husbands. Peasant and working class women have always had jobs. I remember a discovery channel documentary about Victorian life and it had this fun line: While the doctors debated if exercise is healthy for women, the women working in their kitchens were throwing around 50L pots of water (50kg) all day like it’s nothing.
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    It says volumes that your reference for "normal" is Dickens, the industrial revolution working class, subsistence farming, and literal peasants. You had to put the bar on the floor to make our policies sound reasonable. For your next act, could you tell us how the children yearn for the mines?
    - Swizec 2y ago
      > For your next act, could you tell us how the children yearn for the mines? No but I can tell you that both my surviving grandparents worked in the local factory and that at my great grandma’s farm every able bodied man woman and child pitched in during harvest and slaughter time. And yeah my mom worked up to 3 jobs at times to make ends meet for me and my sis. Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you. Most people you interact with are living Dickens right now. The lives of your uber driver, facebook moderator, barista, hair stylist, etc are much more Dickens than Austen.
      - schmidtleonard 2y ago
        So you're saying women didn't tend to be excluded from the formal economy? That's news to me. > Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you. ...and why is that? Is it because everyone isn't working hard enough? Or is it because we have a system that needs less labor than it has, thereby dumping the price of labor unless we control this dynamic with policy interventions? If you don't want to consider the division of labor as a natural experiment, let's dig into something else that you cited: the reconstruction era following WWII. It led to a golden age for labor, and not just in the US. Isn't that odd? The need for labor shot up, but instead of making labor more stressed it did the opposite, and let them partake in the prosperity. This dynamic isn't unique to WWII, and it isn't unique to events that negatively impact capital. Events that positively impact capital tend to dump labor. Germany after the Franco-Prussian war is probably the cleanest example, but the offshoring of the United States industrial base is probably the most familiar. This should be a hint: the disease perpetually afflicting labor is not laziness, it's bargaining power. Policy interventions that target laziness will tend to make the problem worse, and policy interventions that tend to improve bargaining power will tend to make the problem better.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  The war effects were population collapse based, it had happened once before after the black plague. It is happening again slow moving, just due to lack of mating success.
j_timberlake 2y ago
But who would make that adjustment? Companies aren't going to choose to make less money. Governments can fiddle with minimum wages and full-time thresholds, but companies will work around those and pass any cost-increases to the customers. And very many employees will gladly work 40 hours anyway to outcompete their 20 hour coworkers for promotions and bonuses.

by sxp 2y ago

Only if the assumption is that people need to be employed 40 hours a week. If we reduce the preferred workweek to something closer to 20, then we have 2x the amount of jobs available.

raincom 2y ago

Wherever one can get jobs, there the cost of living--mostly housing--is exorbitantly high. Whether one works 20 hours a week or 40 hours a week depends on the cost of housing.

schmidtleonard 2y ago

We brought women into the workforce but instead of splitting the work 50/50 we split it 100/100. Now nobody has time to raise children, but hey, the stocks, bonds, and real estate got pumped (in units of median-worker-hours) and I guess that's what's important. Ugh. What to do? Policy aimed at reducing the market-induced-labor-quota so that people can raise kids again? Something that substitutes the effect of "one spouse works, one spouse stays home" but without the sexism this time? No, never! That's radical! That's lazy! (Unintelligible screeching vaguely resembling the words "pareto optimality.") We've seen the complete domination of labor by capital once before: in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. It was fixed by a giant war that wiped out the asset holders in Europe and a less cataclysmic series of events that reduced their power in America (Great Depression got FDR into office, business leaders got caught red-handed trying to coup him and forced into concessions, WWII veterans made labor delegitimization difficult). Here's hoping we can find another Roosevelt without finding out what WWIII means.

Swizec 2y ago
> Something that substitutes the effect of "one spouse works, one spouse stays home" but without the sexism this time This more or less only existed in the upper classes and for a brief few decades after ww2 when global economy was growing fast fueled by recovery. Lower classes never had this. Read some Dickens — all the women have full time jobs. Read some post-ww2 communist stuff – all women are expected to work. Even before industrialization women worked on subsistence farms right alongside their husbands. Peasant and working class women have always had jobs. I remember a discovery channel documentary about Victorian life and it had this fun line: While the doctors debated if exercise is healthy for women, the women working in their kitchens were throwing around 50L pots of water (50kg) all day like it’s nothing.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  It says volumes that your reference for "normal" is Dickens, the industrial revolution working class, subsistence farming, and literal peasants. You had to put the bar on the floor to make our policies sound reasonable. For your next act, could you tell us how the children yearn for the mines?
  - Swizec 2y ago
    > For your next act, could you tell us how the children yearn for the mines? No but I can tell you that both my surviving grandparents worked in the local factory and that at my great grandma’s farm every able bodied man woman and child pitched in during harvest and slaughter time. And yeah my mom worked up to 3 jobs at times to make ends meet for me and my sis. Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you. Most people you interact with are living Dickens right now. The lives of your uber driver, facebook moderator, barista, hair stylist, etc are much more Dickens than Austen.
    - schmidtleonard 2y ago
      So you're saying women didn't tend to be excluded from the formal economy? That's news to me. > Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you. ...and why is that? Is it because everyone isn't working hard enough? Or is it because we have a system that needs less labor than it has, thereby dumping the price of labor unless we control this dynamic with policy interventions? If you don't want to consider the division of labor as a natural experiment, let's dig into something else that you cited: the reconstruction era following WWII. It led to a golden age for labor, and not just in the US. Isn't that odd? The need for labor shot up, but instead of making labor more stressed it did the opposite, and let them partake in the prosperity. This dynamic isn't unique to WWII, and it isn't unique to events that negatively impact capital. Events that positively impact capital tend to dump labor. Germany after the Franco-Prussian war is probably the cleanest example, but the offshoring of the United States industrial base is probably the most familiar. This should be a hint: the disease perpetually afflicting labor is not laziness, it's bargaining power. Policy interventions that target laziness will tend to make the problem worse, and policy interventions that tend to improve bargaining power will tend to make the problem better.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
The war effects were population collapse based, it had happened once before after the black plague. It is happening again slow moving, just due to lack of mating success.

j_timberlake 2y ago

But who would make that adjustment? Companies aren't going to choose to make less money. Governments can fiddle with minimum wages and full-time thresholds, but companies will work around those and pass any cost-increases to the customers. And very many employees will gladly work 40 hours anyway to outcompete their 20 hour coworkers for promotions and bonuses.