29 ms·

We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

• Zigurd 14y ago
  Until we come to grips with what will likely be a post-labor world, this is a good transitional approach. The 40 hour week is an arbitrary standard, and it may now be rational to reduce that number. Few jobs are now so arduous that 70 year olds cannot perform well. We are suffering from outdated standards for work weeks and retirement age, and un-sticking our assumptions is likely to benefit the situation.
  • rndmize 14y ago
    I'm fairly sure the 40 hour week is far from arbitrary. There's someone on HN who has a long post about working hours and the wide variety of studies that were done demonstrating that 40 hours resulted in higher efficiency than 50 or more as far back as the 1930s, and that peak efficiency for white collar work is even less (6 hour days). I'll have to see if I can find it.
    • electromagnetic 14y ago
      The thing is, 40 hours less my hour lunch a day ends up at 35 hours, which over 7 days is only 5 hours. To me personally I would prefer to work 5 hours a day every day than be getting up at 6am to get home for 6pm, and forget it if I want to do groceries on a night, I'll be getting home in time to have a shower, read a chapter of a book and fall asleep. My weekend work usually averages around 4-5 hours a day, I get to relax, I get to run out and do groceries and don't even notice having worked.
      • wildgift 14y ago
        FYI, the standard US lunch is 30 minutes and doesn't count toward the 40 hours. It's been this way for a long time.
        • yardie 14y ago
          That is if you are waged. If salaried your lunch break is supposed to be built into your renumeration. But I know plenty of people taking 15-30 minute unpaid lunches verses an hour unpaid lunches just so they can leave the office in a reasonable amount of time.
  • bertzzie 14y ago
    > Few jobs are now so arduous that 70 year olds cannot perform well. I think it's mostly physical jobs that 70 year olds cannot perform well. And that kind of job can be automated by robots anyway. For job like programming or CEO, I kind of think that 70 year olds can do better than say 20 year olds.
    • danso 14y ago
      Mental acuity is very much a physical quality. Yes, there are 70 year olds who can think and mentally adapt exceptionally well, just as there are 70 year olds who can do one arm push-ups and live till 100. But it doesn't mean that 70 year old are just like 30 year olds, but with more experience.
      • learc83 14y ago
        Most of the studies that showed rapid mental decline in old age have been debunked. A 70 year old with no actual problems (e.g., Alzheimer's) is very likely to function perfectly fine mentally. A 2002 study (published in the Alzheimer's and Dementia Journal) found that ~91% of people 70 and older were capable of normal mental function.
        • Strshps1MoreTim 14y ago
          Seriously? How many 70 year old people do you know? Let say you need to urgently take your child to a doctor and can choose between a 30 yo and a 70 yo. What would you do?
          • obstacle1 14y ago
            Parent cited an experiment that found 70 year-olds to have mental functioning on par with young people. Would you like to argue against the study's conclusion in a meaningful way? Or are you just pointing out that regardless of what is true, humans tend to act in a biased and ineffective manner?
          • jdotjdot 14y ago
  • _delirium 14y ago
    More years at fewer hours per week is an interesting idea. Managing burnout could be one way to make it reasonable for people to work into older age, and having norms with fewer hours a week could be one part of that. You see a lot of burnout in tech currently even by middle-age, but I'm not sure the subject matter fundamentally requires it.
  • ekianjo 14y ago
    > what will likely be a post-labor world Says who ? This preposterous way of thinking has been around for x years already. "when the world population will reach 4 billions people, there will be no jobs for everyone", yet the population is still increasing beyond 6 billions and most people still work to live/survive. There is no hint we are moving to a post-labor world. You will see that there is a strong relationship between reduced employment/working hours, welfare benefits when not working, and government spending. And somehow most of the countries which went down that way have now humongous public debt problems to solve. Their model is not sustainable in the long term.
    • _delirium 14y ago
      > And somehow most of the countries which went down that way have now humongous public debt problems to solve. This is just ideology, and not factually accurate. (P.S. Cheers from Scandinavia.)
      • ekianjo 14y ago
        Not just ideology, the size of government in Scandinavia is way smaller than in other developed countries. See the economist article last week about this subject.
        • _delirium 14y ago
          It's true that regulations are relatively low, in terms of invasive bureaucracy in the economy. Yet in Denmark we have a 37-hour maximum workweek, 8 weeks of vacation, and strong unemployment benefits, and all that doesn't seem to be ruining the country. Perhaps that can't be replicated elsewhere, but I don't see a solidly established relationship between working hours, unemployment benefits, and economic prosperity.
          • ekianjo 14y ago
            Out of interest, can you find out where the budget of the government in Denmark is spent in, and in what proportions ? On top of that, how much of welfare system relies on private actors instead of governmental/public ones?
  • pteredactyl 14y ago
    I agree we are stuck in an outdated model however I am not keen on someone me telling how many hours I can or should work.
    • pogden 14y ago
      If you're like most people, somebone already does: your boss, who answers to "convention."
      • pteredactyl 14y ago
        I'm assuming the Danish professor is framing his findings as a viable public policy assertion.
    • wildgift 14y ago
      I don't see how a shorter work week prevents anyone from working longer, or even less than the minimum. There are plenty of people working more than 40 hours, and plenty working fewer. The only that the 40 sets is the threshold at which workers attain specific rights regarding overtime, benefits, and other things.
• bertzzie 14y ago
  This is interesting. I live in Indonesia, where except on our capital (Jakarta and most Java), working 60 hours a week is the norm. I have noticed (and I think this has been proved over and over again) that people who works 60 hours a week is actually less productive and less happy than those who have a free weekends and work only 8 hours a day. I wonder how much working time can we cut until the benefits disappear.
  • zht 14y ago
    do you have extremely long days but 5 days a week or do you spread it out over 6 or 7 days?
    • ekianjo 14y ago
      In Japan, by the way, it is not uncommon to work 6 days a week (Saturdays). It depends on your contract.
      • bluedanieru 14y ago
        I heard a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the national government commissioned a study a few years back to investigate ways to curb this practice. The committee was disbanded after a minor scandal when it was discovered that they were making everyone come in on Saturdays to work.
    • bertzzie 14y ago
      We spread it out over 6 days, but still around 9 - 10 hours a day. Still longer than avarage 8 hours in most first world countries I think? As I said above, some big enterprises like bank have started to give 8 hours weekday work time, but most company haven't.
  • mikecane 14y ago
    >>>working 60 hours a week is the norm What kind of labor is that? White collar or factory assembly?
    • 14y ago
• _delirium 14y ago
  Centrist professor takes a moderate position about halfway between the "standard" workweek and Tim Ferriss's 4-hour workweek. ;-)
• shasta 14y ago
  The time you spend past 25 hours a week is making you less productive anyway...
  • eliben 14y ago
    I assume you speak from personal experience. Allow me to disagree.
• timfletcher 14y ago
  I do this but in a different way. I work 40 hours a week for most of the year and then take off a few months at a time. This allows me to travel with my family before I'm retired and too old to climb mountains etc. You have your whole life to live, it doesn't begin when you retire. I'm fully prepared to work past the standard retirement age.
• mikecane 14y ago
  Twenty-five hours a week at what rate of pay? There are people working at Walmart and such who make in a week what I would make in a day or two in past years. I also did 60-80 hour weeks in my life (eejit that I was). With all the opposition towards a living wage (read: serf wages), I'll file this under the category that includes jetpacks and flying cars -- and I'd bet on those appearing first.
  • _delirium 14y ago
    Well, the biologist quoted in the story is Danish, so may be starting from different norms. The de-facto minimum wage [1] is already around $18/hr, and would probably increase if the work-week were changed. That could perhaps be funded in part by putting less money towards retirement (current employer contribution is 17% of salary), since his proposal is to raise the retirement age considerably as well. Serf wages are a bit less of an issue in any case when that's the starting point. [1] A bit complex: "de-facto" because Denmark has no statutory minimum wage. Nonetheless, a negotiated wage floor of a bit above 100 DKK/hr (~$18/hr) covers most workplaces. Denmark's labor system, partly driven by law and partly by cultural norms, makes heavy use of sector-wide bargaining agreements between large employer confederations and large cross-company unions. The whole process tends to be very consensus-oriented (strikes are rare), and reaches blanket agreements that apply sector-wide. Small mom-and-pop stores, freelancers, independent moving-van operators, etc. are the main exceptions, since they aren't part of one of the employer confederations that's party to those agreements.
• r4dius 14y ago
  If I didn't have to answer email or deal with any middle management, this could work. But the paradox is that the only scenario in which legitimate optimal efficiency can be attained is in a small-group, highly-communicative environment (like a startup); in that kind of environment, you're putting in 80-hour weeks so you can get profitable as quickly as possible, so there's no way anyone is saying "I've put in my 25 hours, see you guys next week!"
  • zanny 14y ago
    But those startups are people basically willingly surrendering themselves to the ideology. The article isn't about the empassioned individuals who want to make it big, it is about Average Joe who works at any middle class company 40 hours a week without any desire to do it and no passion to continue. If you have the drive to try to do something big, putting all your time into it is kind of mandatory. But if you just work for the money to survive on, you shouldn't need to put in such a significant portion of ones time.
    • wildgift 14y ago
      The average joe might have passion for work, but also a family and other responsibilities that preclude extended periods of long workdays. They might not want to get divorced.
• msoad 14y ago
  I don't get it. Why we have fixed number of working hours when we have deadlines for our tasks? You want me to solve that problem for you by Friday? Why should I come to office and stare at monitor four days if I figured it out right in Monday?
  • mylittlepony 14y ago
    When I worked as an employee, I learned to slow all my tasks down to finish them right on time. That way I wouldn't be assigned more tasks than my coworkers, in punishment for being efficient and fast.
• lnanek2 14y ago
  That would be nice, then startups where people work 80 a week will be even more magical and money earning. :)
  • sievert 14y ago
    This is exactly what I thought when reading the article. One of the reasons I'm interested in start-ups is the idea of condensing my career so I can have more time to do the things I love later on.
  • tikhonj 14y ago
    Except that there's no guarantee that working more hours makes you more productive. If anything, studies seem to have shown the opposite. Ultimately, efficiency trumps hard work--there are only so many hours in a week where the limit on your efficiency is much further away.
• mattschoch 14y ago
  Great idea in theory, but there's a reason young people work such long hours: money. If a 22 year old graduates from college and works 25 hours a week, they won't have enough money to pay off their (almost certain) debt and live comfortably, much less have excess money to spend traveling and doing fun things. Young people work so hard so they can have the money to buy and do the things they want. Most just never stop working that hard in order to enjoy those things. Working 25 hours/week would basically push "life" back a few years, meaning maybe you rent a small apartment and drive a old car until you're 35-40. As they saying goes, young people have lots of time and no money, but older people have lots of money and no time.
  • Zuph 14y ago
    Not every country saddles their young graduates with tens (to hundreds!) of thousands of dollars in debt.
    • mattschoch 14y ago
      Touché. I guess I'm speaking of the average middle-class American.
  • sievert 14y ago
    In Denmark college is free or close to it, I don't think they've got massive debts to pay.
  • jblow 14y ago
    Costs of stuff like rent and cars are normalized to average income levels. (Though of course with cars there is a base cost of manufacture that makes them less flexible than something like rent). Which is to say, if everyone works 25 hours a week, rents will go down (because if they don't, you have most properties sitting empty). If instead everyone works 60 hours a week, rents go up. Of course, economics is really complicated and rarely works out this simply. But that's the idea. It's a little silly to post here presuming that someone in Mr. Vaupel's position has somehow not thought of the fact that when you work fewer hours your nominal earnings go down. (I think this qualifies for what pg was calling Middlebrow Dismissal). It's a more reasonable response to say, well, of course he has thought of that, but I wonder what the answer is?
• ekianjo 14y ago
  25 hours to earn less? What's the point of having more free time if you have no money to do anything with it ? There's a reason why we have a current optimal 40-60 hours kind of range for working hours in most countries. That's an equilibrium point between how much people are willing to work vs how much they are willing to earn. Everyone still wants to have free time, but not at the expense of their well-being or the future of their family (education, etc.). Working 25 hours and earning the same amount as working 40 would not sit well with companies (if this was made mandatory by state regulation, for example). Local companies would lose their competitive edge vs other companies elsewhere and this would end up in increased unemployment. Let people work how long they want. That's their choice.
  • _delirium 14y ago
    Because of standardization on "normal" workweeks, it's pretty hard to have the choice even if you're willing to forego salary for fewer hours. Google won't let you work a 4-day week for 80% of the regular salary, for example (or even for 60% of it!), and more traditional companies are even less likely to. You take their 5-day, 40-hour offer or you don't. You typically only have an option to work a 25-hour week if you have either a consulting/freelance career, or a very low-end hourly-wage job.
    • ekianjo 14y ago
      Note that the standardization you are talking about is also heavily driven by work regulations, saying that a work week is x hours and nothing else. If such restrictions were abolished I believe there would be much more flexibility (up and down) in the job market.
      • _delirium 14y ago
        The regulations just put a maximum; there is nothing preventing companies from offering lower hours if they wish. Before those maximums were brought in, you had the same situation as now, just with more hours being standard: you had to agree to 6-days-a-week, 10+ hour days, or nothing. The union movement successfully negotiated that down to 5-days-a-week, 8-hour days as a cap, which was at least an improvement.
• readme 14y ago
  This guy might be on to something, but I have an even better idea, and it required 0 scientific research to synthesize. We should all do whatever the fuck we want, until we die.
  • olliesaunders 14y ago
    > We should all do whatever the fuck we want, until we die. Yeah but we’re not allowed to. Most employers will demands you show up for 40 hours a week and then frown at you or, at least, never promote you if you don’t stay for a lot more.
    • ahomescu1 14y ago
      You could start your own company, be your own employer and work as much as you feel like.
      • tossacct 14y ago
        >>>You could start your own company, be your own employer and work as much as you feel like. Most people in the United States do not have this option because they do not have enough money to do so.
        • burntsushi 14y ago
          They have the option to raise that money. You're searching for the ability to live without constraint. So long as scarcity exists, this is fundamentally impossible.
          • tossacct 14y ago
            >>>So long as scarcity exists, [living without constraint] is fundamentally impossible. Absolutely agree. >>>They have the option to raise that money. Absolutely disagree. They are working 2 and 3 jobs, my friend. They do not have the money to raise that money. >>>You're searching for the ability to live without constraint. Please explain where I indicated this, I did not mean to.
• jebblue 14y ago
  I wonder if this could be where we're headed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine_(1960_film) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine_(1960_film)
• harshpotatoes 14y ago
  As a 26 year old, I can agree with his conclusion (or at least want his conclusion to be true). With 40-60 hour work weeks for both my girlfriend and I, it can be difficult sometimes. Similarly, new friendships can be hard to come by. With current job dynamics, moving can be an almost certainty, increasing the difficulty of maintaining friendships. However, I have to wonder, would 25 hour work weeks actually increase the length of our employ-ability, allowing us to work until the age of 80? I thought part of today's current long term unemployment problem (in the US), is that finding employment for older, more skilled, adults was difficult, due to perceived overqualifications or lack of training in newer technologies. I thought part of the point of work hard while you're young, was to save enough money to allow you to survive the possibility of permanent unemployment in old age (either due to health or over qualification in unused technologies).
• michaelochurch 14y ago
  25 hours is a good number for average people. I'd say 15-20, even. Ambitious or highly dedicated people will always work more than that, and that's a good thing. What they should have is a lot more freedom in how they spend that time-- working two jobs, one job and school, side projects. The problem is this bullshit conformist fiction in which everyone has to pretend to be ambitious (but only internally) and dedicated (despite mediocre social status and compensation, that fail to justify such dedication). I don't think that such a problem can be legislated away. The best that the law/government can do is to break up the collusions (e.g. among VCs) that keep talent trading at such a dog-low rate against property. The other problem, and one of the main reasons why the 40-60 hour anachronism lives on, is that companies aren't really buying (as they see it) 40 hours of time. They're also buying (in their entitled view of the world) single-minded loyalty. That's why they demand hours at such a level that a person can't possibly hold two jobs, even if she is easily capable of the work. The goal isn't just to get some quantity of the person's work, but to take that person off the market so no one else can hire her.
  • samstave 14y ago
    I think that the title should be: "It should only require 25 hours per week to make a comfortable living" We should all put in the most amount of time to our lives and passions, but to maintain a comfortable life should not consume 100% of our available productive hours. (assuming productive hours == 8/day, 5 days/week) If maintaining a living (comfortable or not) requires 100% of our productive work time (40 hours/week) then how are you not a slave to that subsistence lifestyle?
    • burntsushi 14y ago
      > (assuming productive hours == 8/day, 5 days/week) Bad assumption. > If maintaining a living (comfortable or not) requires 100% of our productive work time (40 hours/week) then how are you not a slave to that subsistence lifestyle? What is "subsistence" about it? I understand subsistence living to mean "having just enough to survive."
      • 14y ago
• olliesaunders 14y ago
  Incidentally, an enforced max number of hours per work week is a potential solution to the high unemployment a lot of countries have right now.
  • youngerdryas 14y ago
    Please no. More useless busybodies and paperwork. It would probably be cheaper to extend unemployment benefits.
    • fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
      So you prefer that we actually cultivate a loafer class and a worker class?
  • marksbrown 14y ago
    Such a limit exists within the EU already. The working-time directive[1] limits people to 48 hours work per week. High unemployment is unfortunately still about despite this. As to reducing this to a lower number, the UK already has 1 in 10 people 'underemployed'[2]. Fewer hours would of course be preferable, but housing and a disposable income does come first. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive [2]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20526259 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20526259
• noarchy 14y ago
  I am sure that I get 25 hours of real work done per week, if that. Once I factor in the meetings and phone calls that knock me out of the "zone", it is certainly less than 40.
• scotty79 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35-hour_workweek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35-hour_workweek
• Claudus 14y ago
  I left my job a year ago, and started doing remote work for a small company. Since then, I've worked between 15 to 25 hours a week. As a result: - I'm more rested and stress free - I get a lot more exercise and I eat healthier - I'm much more efficient and motivated in my work - My creativity and exploration into new fields has bloomed I used to put almost all of my effort into my work, with not enough time devoted to maintaining and improving myself.
  • jdotjdot 14y ago
    Absolutely agreed. I just did the opposite--quit remote freelancing to take on a full time job (this one with insane hours unfortunately, 14hour/day average)--and my level of stress and unhealth has skyrocketed. Autonomy and agency matter, and part of that is the ability to choose the amount of and timing of working hours that are best for you.
    • wildgift 14y ago
      Technically, that's not a "full time job". It's nearly two full time jobs.
  • codewright 14y ago
    I'm considering getting back into remote work and/or contracting but it's been some time since I last did so. For exactly the same reasons you're enjoying it now. Do you have any pointers on finding permanent or contracted remote work? Most of the connections I had fron before have since died out.
• xijuan 14y ago
  But ....what about college students???? People rarely talk about the fact that college students can be as stressful if not more stressful. In graduate school, students are expected to work/study almost all the time... Should we also have a reduce in our work/study load?
  • marvin 14y ago
    You could in principle do the same. I'm currently in a Masters program and have been doing what this link describes since I first started university: Four or five hours of very focused work each day, followed by real leisure time. Granted, it might be different if I were doing a PhD, but at least up until where I am now this has worked perfectly. I get done just as much while being less stressed and feeling a lot better about life.
• newbie12 14y ago
  Of the 40 hour week, from 10 to 30 hours are spent working for the government. Your tax rate is dependent on where you live and how much you earn, of course.
• jdietrich 14y ago
  In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption. The cost of living hasn't meaningfully increased, we've just continually redefined luxuries as necessities. My grandparents are perfectly typical working-class people. They grew up in cramped, damp houses with no central heating or indoor plumbing. They ate mainly seasonal vegetables, considered a chicken or roast of meat a rare treat and often went to bed hungry. They bought new clothes or furniture only when their old ones were beyond repair. They aspired to owning a bicycle, not a car. The only people they knew who had been abroad had done so while in uniform. They didn't regard themselves as materially deprived, because that was the only lifestyle they knew. As much as we might deny being materialistic, the naked truth is that what we consider to be a basic comfortable lifestyle today was, within living memory, unattainable luxury. We continue to work 40 hour weeks because we have adjusted our expectations to our income. We overwhelmingly choose to work the greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and 60 hours for most people), in order to maximise our spending power. The recent kerfuffle over "The 1%" is illustrative of this phenomenon. There was widespread mockery of people earning 500k who regarded themselves as just making ends meet. In a very real sense, we are all a part of that laughably oblivious 1%. The lifestyles we consider just about tolerable are, by any historical or global standard, utter luxury. Almost everyone who has ever lived (and almost everyone living today) would consider themselves lucky to have the spending power of an American on minimum wage.
  • pteredactyl 14y ago
    “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” -- Edward Bernays, 'Propaganda', 1928
• ruswick 14y ago
  The idea is obviously appealing, but is a pipe dream to which employers will never agree. Employers don't care about one's utility over a lifetime, because they only have access to laborers for a finite period of time. (In most cases 3-6 years.) Employers thus want to maximize utility in the short term. Fewer hours means less work and thus companies have to lower salaries, which may make this untenable for workers, and hire more people to compensate for these reduced workweeks, adding to fixed-costs like healthcare and making this untenable for employers. Would it be great to spend more time with friends, sleeping or otherwise pursuing leisure? Obviously. But the labor market doesn't care about one's happiness (and the companies that do institute "leisure cultures" usually explicitly state that they do so simply because it increases productivity. In this case, companies don't care about you for your sake, they care about you for their own sake) and pursuing it comes at a loss of compensation.
• seagreen 14y ago
  Spending more time with kids is good, still . . I want a beautiful and open network all across the planet. I want to see North Korea become free, and sit drinking coffee in a café in Pyongyang. I want Africa to become a garden stretching from Cape Town to Khartoum. I want to visit the Silicon Valley of the Congo, and take the suborbital to Tokyo if I'm in the mood for sushi that night. I want cold sleep and ramships and I want to see sunrise on Alpha Centaur Bb (after moving its orbit out a bit:) No matter how good leisure is in the short term, if it slows those goals down I'm against it. There PG, call that middlebrow criticism!
• dscrd 14y ago
  We should work exactly the correct amount of hours a week. The correct amount varies between fields and people.
• loca 14y ago
  The New Economics Foundation (nef) proposes 21 hours: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/21-hours http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/21-hours A ‘normal’ working week of 21 hours could help to address a range of urgent, interlinked problems: overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life.
• cllns 14y ago
  For those who are interested in more than the cursory description offered in the article, I also came across this: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13339-the-25-hour-work- http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13339-the-25-hour-work-
• Osiris 14y ago
  It would be interesting if people were paid on some measure of productivity rather than just raw hours. Then we could get paid based on our contribution to economic output. Of course, the problem with that is how to do you measure productivity?
  • wildgift 14y ago
    How do you measure productivity for management, especially.
• rowanseymour 14y ago
  A counter philosophy to this is that we should be striving to find jobs that we enjoy and find so fulfilling that we don't mind working 40+ hours per week... until we're 80... I say that wondering how realistic that is and whether that's a yet another imaginary carrot dangling over our heads to make us work harder. I like my job a lot (software developer making medical software for clinics in Kenya) but flip I'd love a 4 day week because there's always something more enjoyable than work. And I'm not sure if every single job we need people to do can be that fulfilling raison d'être for someone.
• afterburner 14y ago
  Let's get 6-8 weeks of vacation like Europeans too, that's what I keep arguing for...
• enraged_camel 14y ago
  Well, 25 hours a week is for how long your average worker is productive throughout the typical work-week anyway. The rest is spent dicking around on the Internet and socializing with coworkers. I feel like if we cut down the "official" work to 25 hours, people would suddenly realize that they need to be a lot more productive to get the same amount of work done. No more pointless interruptions. No more bullshit meetings. Everyone would try to get shit done, and enjoy the extra three hours they get everyday and be a lot happier.
  • pkorzeniewski 14y ago
    Being on site is just as important as being productive. Employers buy your time and in these 8 hours a day, whenever something pops up and has to be done quickly, you have to be ready to take on it.
• simonh 14y ago
  One problem I've come to appreciate in Britain is that we are all in direct competition with each other for access to good housing. As disposable incomes go up, property prices rocket as the middle class use their new wealth to bid up the price of houses in an attempt to trade that wealth for a nicer place to live. I'm keenly aware of this because that's exactly what my wife and I have been doing. A big chunk of our income goes into our mortgage. The dynamic my well be very different in other countries. In the USA for example there's much more scope for increasing the supply of housing, something that's harder to do in a more densely populated country like the UK. I think this is why the US had a property crash while we didn't - the housing market here is a lot less elastic. Still, my point is that if incomes generally go up, a proportion of that will be expended in price wars over scarce local resources, property being the most obvious example.
• wildgift 14y ago
  "We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor after pulling another 14-hour day of intensive data gathering and number-crunching."
• gergderkson 14y ago
  If everyone only worked 25 hours per week, nothing of value would be accomplished.
• nacker 14y ago
  Why just extend work in the direction of the aged? I think that instead of going to school, children over the age of 12 should have the option of working 25 hours a week as apprentices.
• kyllo 14y ago
  The true sign of progress will be that everyone has a bit more freedom to decide how many hours per week they work. In order for that to happen, the job market needs to become a lot more liquid. That will happen when needed benefits like health insurance and basic income are met by the government, and most people are able to work on a freelance or contract basis, and are able to take time off in between jobs without so much risk, because they are not dependent on a specific employer. I don't think 25 hours will necessarily be the standard, so much as I think that there won't really be a standard that everyone is expected to adhere to anymore. 40 hours is totally arbitrary in a way that smacks of Communism.
• czbond 14y ago
  The reality of what will happen in the U.S. is the exact opposite. If anyone watched the recent Davos Economic Summitt - U.S. companies can no longer easily grow using debt instruments, which just leaves productivity and competitiveness. Translation: Employees will be working more hours for easily the next 5 years.