3 ms·

> Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working

> Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day. Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the gains all go to the people at the top. Just like they have for 40 years.

gruez 1y ago
>Just like they have for 40 years. Taking that at face value, what happened before 40 years ago? There was unimaginable growth in per-person GDP, so people could have plausibly kicked back and relaxed rather than toiling in factories.
- bbuut 1y ago
  Well for one, no computers collating every persons value to the economy to buy and sell as and manipulate through targeted effort Credit system didn’t exist, which conveniently grandfathered in all the Bloomberg, Trump, and other old money …obviously inheritance made them geniuses who deserved it Basically Boomers came of age 40 years ago and needed something to do. So the 80-90 year olds of the day handed them all the power. I mean come on. Do we really need to circumlocute the cause? Why the old rich people writing the rules and always winning is suspicious af still?
  - gruez 1y ago
    All of that might be true, but it doesn't address my core question: why didn't people kick back and relax 50 or even 100 years ago? If people 50, 100, or 200 years ago made the choice to keep working hours constant rather than convert productivity gains into leisure, why is the choice to keep working hours constant today suddenly caused by malign influence of the powers that be?
    - bbuut 1y ago
      They did. The average person worked fewer hours through almost all of recorded history until the last few decades. They did not have vague “line go up” motives. They worked to stabilize biological necessity. Workers today work more because of a large investor class that doesn’t. We’re working for two or more shareholders not our own roof and food.
      - gruez 1y ago
        >The average person worked fewer hours through almost all of recorded history until the last few decades. If you're claiming that people worked fewer hours during the industrial revolution than today, I'll need a citation for that. If you're referencing the claims made by "Original affluent society", that has problems around how working hours are counted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#Crit...
        bbuut 1y ago
        The criticisms have the same lack of information problems. So modern anecdotes make the most sense. I grew up in 80s dairyland. None of the farmers worked a 9-5 but they rarely worked 40+ too. We worked much much less in rural-landia before the last few decades gave rise to "service and knowledge" work with no concrete goal but "make line go up". Knowledge work comes along with zero concrete termination points. Programmers grinding code 80+ hours are not stopping to see if it's useful or just repetition. Sure from a physics perspective they're doing "work". From a lived experience, to real needs of biology, economy perspective they're just sitting at a computer juicing their hormones, while exploiting farmers labor, who now works more hours as more knowledge workers contribute less real outputs essential to biology. Same with why carpentry and other trades services are so expensive; supply and demand. Millennials wanted 24/7 office jobs. While I grew up in farmland I later went into EE, and have a good sense for who is moving the ball. It isn't software people. Their biology is addicted to a stupid loop of zero real productivity. Playing abstract snake games in one's head, to count initialized memory registers and recording their data is some basic bitch work marketed to the point of fostering delusion it's cutting in 2010-2020 to use 1960s style syntaxes to manage machines.
- danaris 1y ago
  If you're asking "what caused the change?" the answer is "Ronald Reagan". If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible". Just to expand on that a bit, in case it isn't fully clear: There is a level of productivity per worker required to support everyone in the society. This level fluctuates some with the overall standard of living, but does not vary with total productivity, population, or GDP. Let's call this level P, for Parity. (And let's assume it's not "just barely enough to support everyone", but "enough to support them comfortably and reliably, with a decent buffer".) Once the level of productivity per worker passes certain thresholds—multiples of P—the total amount of work required to maintain the society at the same level drops. More work produces surplus. That surplus can be then used in a variety of ways. One of those ways is by reducing the amount of work being done. So, for instance, if the productivity level reaches 2P, then every worker can work half the amount of time they were working before, and still be producing enough to fully provide for everyone. If it reaches 3P, then every worker can work 1/3 the amount of time, and so on. If, instead, the surplus is captured by the wealthy, the workers don't see benefit, and inequality grows. I don't know exactly when real-world productivity got enough higher than P that we could realistically start reducing worked hours, but it definitely did so at some point in the last several decades. I'd say that at this point, just as a rough estimate, we're probably somewhere between 1.5P and 2P, but that's not really my field of expertise. But because the wealthy have captured approximately all productivity gains above the level we were at in 1980, they have seen their wealth massively increase, while the rest of us have just been scraping by.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible". >[...] I don't know exactly when real-world productivity got enough higher than P that we could realistically start reducing worked hours, but it definitely did so at some point in the last several decades. [...] GDP per capita has been growing exponentially for centuries[1]. Is there some arbitrary GDP per capita level where people should be expected to kick back and relax? Why makes your arbitrary line more or less correct than someone else's arbitrary line? Moreover people's revealed preferences show that for most people, that line hasn't been reached yet. Why should people's revealed preferences be overridden by whatever number you came up with? [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-project-database?tab=line https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-p... >If, instead, the surplus is captured by the wealthy, the workers don't see benefit, and inequality grows. Economic statistics shows it hasn't been captured. Even if you're some sort of marxist that thinks labor's share of GDP should be 100%, at the very most this means the point at which everyone can kick back and relax is delayed by 40%. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG

gruez 1y ago

>Just like they have for 40 years. Taking that at face value, what happened before 40 years ago? There was unimaginable growth in per-person GDP, so people could have plausibly kicked back and relaxed rather than toiling in factories.

bbuut 1y ago
Well for one, no computers collating every persons value to the economy to buy and sell as and manipulate through targeted effort Credit system didn’t exist, which conveniently grandfathered in all the Bloomberg, Trump, and other old money …obviously inheritance made them geniuses who deserved it Basically Boomers came of age 40 years ago and needed something to do. So the 80-90 year olds of the day handed them all the power. I mean come on. Do we really need to circumlocute the cause? Why the old rich people writing the rules and always winning is suspicious af still?
- gruez 1y ago
  All of that might be true, but it doesn't address my core question: why didn't people kick back and relax 50 or even 100 years ago? If people 50, 100, or 200 years ago made the choice to keep working hours constant rather than convert productivity gains into leisure, why is the choice to keep working hours constant today suddenly caused by malign influence of the powers that be?
  - bbuut 1y ago
    They did. The average person worked fewer hours through almost all of recorded history until the last few decades. They did not have vague “line go up” motives. They worked to stabilize biological necessity. Workers today work more because of a large investor class that doesn’t. We’re working for two or more shareholders not our own roof and food.
    - gruez 1y ago
      >The average person worked fewer hours through almost all of recorded history until the last few decades. If you're claiming that people worked fewer hours during the industrial revolution than today, I'll need a citation for that. If you're referencing the claims made by "Original affluent society", that has problems around how working hours are counted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#Crit...
      - bbuut 1y ago
        The criticisms have the same lack of information problems. So modern anecdotes make the most sense. I grew up in 80s dairyland. None of the farmers worked a 9-5 but they rarely worked 40+ too. We worked much much less in rural-landia before the last few decades gave rise to "service and knowledge" work with no concrete goal but "make line go up". Knowledge work comes along with zero concrete termination points. Programmers grinding code 80+ hours are not stopping to see if it's useful or just repetition. Sure from a physics perspective they're doing "work". From a lived experience, to real needs of biology, economy perspective they're just sitting at a computer juicing their hormones, while exploiting farmers labor, who now works more hours as more knowledge workers contribute less real outputs essential to biology. Same with why carpentry and other trades services are so expensive; supply and demand. Millennials wanted 24/7 office jobs. While I grew up in farmland I later went into EE, and have a good sense for who is moving the ball. It isn't software people. Their biology is addicted to a stupid loop of zero real productivity. Playing abstract snake games in one's head, to count initialized memory registers and recording their data is some basic bitch work marketed to the point of fostering delusion it's cutting in 2010-2020 to use 1960s style syntaxes to manage machines.
danaris 1y ago
If you're asking "what caused the change?" the answer is "Ronald Reagan". If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible". Just to expand on that a bit, in case it isn't fully clear: There is a level of productivity per worker required to support everyone in the society. This level fluctuates some with the overall standard of living, but does not vary with total productivity, population, or GDP. Let's call this level P, for Parity. (And let's assume it's not "just barely enough to support everyone", but "enough to support them comfortably and reliably, with a decent buffer".) Once the level of productivity per worker passes certain thresholds—multiples of P—the total amount of work required to maintain the society at the same level drops. More work produces surplus. That surplus can be then used in a variety of ways. One of those ways is by reducing the amount of work being done. So, for instance, if the productivity level reaches 2P, then every worker can work half the amount of time they were working before, and still be producing enough to fully provide for everyone. If it reaches 3P, then every worker can work 1/3 the amount of time, and so on. If, instead, the surplus is captured by the wealthy, the workers don't see benefit, and inequality grows. I don't know exactly when real-world productivity got enough higher than P that we could realistically start reducing worked hours, but it definitely did so at some point in the last several decades. I'd say that at this point, just as a rough estimate, we're probably somewhere between 1.5P and 2P, but that's not really my field of expertise. But because the wealthy have captured approximately all productivity gains above the level we were at in 1980, they have seen their wealth massively increase, while the rest of us have just been scraping by.
- gruez 1y ago
  >If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible". >[...] I don't know exactly when real-world productivity got enough higher than P that we could realistically start reducing worked hours, but it definitely did so at some point in the last several decades. [...] GDP per capita has been growing exponentially for centuries[1]. Is there some arbitrary GDP per capita level where people should be expected to kick back and relax? Why makes your arbitrary line more or less correct than someone else's arbitrary line? Moreover people's revealed preferences show that for most people, that line hasn't been reached yet. Why should people's revealed preferences be overridden by whatever number you came up with? [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-project-database?tab=line https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-p... >If, instead, the surplus is captured by the wealthy, the workers don't see benefit, and inequality grows. Economic statistics shows it hasn't been captured. Even if you're some sort of marxist that thinks labor's share of GDP should be 100%, at the very most this means the point at which everyone can kick back and relax is delayed by 40%. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG