3 ms·

This is a variant of the broken window fallacy. Paying more in labor for the same amount of output is not good for the economy.

• jmward01 2y ago
  This isn't destroying anything so I'm not sure why you say this has anything to do with the broken window fallacy or why this could be bad for the economy. Since there is confusion here, I'll pose this as a different thought experiment to make my points more clear: If it isn't good for the economy to reduce the average hours per worker then does that mean it is good for the economy to increase them? If we reduce the free-time of people then they will have even less time to spend their money and consume goods. Arguably they would also have less incentive to care about free-time activities that they can only, at best, sample. The basic question I am raising is why is 5 days of 8 hours magically the right number. I'd argue that the more free time people have the more chance to consume they have. We balance that with the need to produce though. So an optimum point is actually driven by efficiency. The more efficient we are the more we should be diverting to free-time in order to drive more demand for the the. efficient goods we are producing. In a world where we are infinitely efficient then 100% of time should be spent in free-time in order to consume the most goods produced by that infinite efficiency. We aren't there yet so we still need to balance production against free-time but we are more efficient than we were 20 years ago so we should be finding ways to give back free-time to drive up demand.