5 ms·
If you ever want this back, the solution is simple: less work hours for the same pay. I suspect that societal health isn't a priority of capitalism though.
by hnthrow90348765 2y ago
If you ever want this back, the solution is simple: less work hours for the same pay.
I suspect that societal health isn't a priority of capitalism though.
- HPsquared 2y agoIf everyone just (on average) worked less, rent would be lower.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoAnd houses would be proportionally fewer, smaller, and and in need for repair. That is unless we assume builders and maintenance people are exempt from working less
- HPsquared 2y agoAnd that would be okay!
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI agree, as long as folks realize there is no free lunch.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoThere may be some. I can’t recall where I saw it, but there can be large productivity increases when the work week is shorter. If the main tasks aren’t constant time but dependent on worker performance, there may be a free lunch to be had.
- riehwvfbk 2y agoI take it you haven't been to Silicon Valley, the tech capital of the world. It's a place where everyone is hyper competitive and works as much as they physically can, and then some. And those are the slackers, the ones who truly want to get ahead optimize their sleep schedule to need only a few hours. It's also a place where poorly built and maintained budget housing from the 1960s sells for several million USD. Or you know, Japan. They are such slackers that they have a special word for death by overwork (karoshi). I hear they live in giant mansions.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI don't know what point you are getting at. Can you say it plainly? My point is simply that if everyone works less, society will have proportionally less material stuff.
- FooBarBizBazz 2y agoHe's saying that, in the places where people do work harder, they don't actually have more/larger/better houses. Rather, the work just becomes part of a zero-sum competition that bids up the price of the (fixed) quantity/quality of houses. This partially contradicts your point. What I would add (to reconcile the two points), is that one kind of work is not fungible with another kind of work. Yes, people work very hard in Silicon Valley -- but they are not working hard at building houses. If they were, there'd be a lot of supply, and the price would fall. Overall, this is perhaps a comment about the (mis-)allocation of work in society.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI would agree with that. Neither work nor houses are fungible. Time and effort and suffering are distinct from value creation.
- blargey 2y agoAs a vague platitude yes, total output has to be reduced by some amount if labor input is reduced. When actually thinking of concrete impacts on society, though, the quantity and quality of many kinds of societal outputs do not scale linearly with overall work-hours, nevermind that relative allocation of work-hours across different fields and disciplines would be scaled in nonlinear ways (see also: complaints about make-work and "bullshit jobs"). And housing in particular is almost universally bottlenecked by the supply of land and limitations in organization/planning of cities and towns rather than any shortage of construction labor. Given all that, "houses would be proportionally fewer, smaller, and and in need for repair...unless we assume builders and maintenance people are exempt from working less" is not actually self-evident, and is more likely to be taken as an attempt to paint an exaggerated picture for rhetorical purposes.
- chaostheory 2y agoI doubt it because demand would be the same. For lower prices you need an increase in supply for housing. This is why the YIMBY movement exists.