7 ms·

It's the 21st century – why are we working so much?

82 points by dmitriy_ko 13y ago

claudius 13y ago
We are working less and, more importantly, we are working differently (at least in the industrialised/western world). I doubt that there are still many children around in Europe working 60+ a week in coal mines, nor are people who put in exhausting physical work usually working such long hours – both of which was perfectly common less than two centuries ago. Besides, wouldn’t it be just lazy to stop working and rest on the results of the sweat and pain of our forefathers? :\
- Torkild 13y ago
  I average 100 hours per week. I think you sound sickly sheltered.
  - beachstartup 13y ago
    i work about 60. 100 is excessive. that's not impressive, just stupid.
    - Torkild 13y ago
      I do only what is necessary to survive. You sound like most of your bills are still paid by mommy and daddy.
      - iyulaev 13y ago
        How do you have time to post on HN?
      - pearjuice 13y ago
        Mind me asking what exactly your living standards are and which position you fullfill that you need 100 hours of work to survive?
      - sliverstorm 13y ago
        Person works 60 hours a week, and is thus clearly still freeloading on their parents? Are you attempting to be comical?
      - beachstartup 13y ago
        did you catch the part where i said i work? happens every week, in fact.
  - claudius 13y ago
    How many of said 100 hours do you spend in coal mines or heavy engineering factories?
  - rdouble 13y ago
    I agree. I'm 13 and spend over 120 hours per week in the oil mines of North Dakota. I puked when I read the first comment and slammed my laptop shut because I was shaking with disgust.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      You get to leave the oil mines? Talk about preferential treatment, you have it easy!
      - rdouble 13y ago
        We are allowed 45 minutes for cigarettes and internet before Sunday prayers and lights-out.
  - freehunter 13y ago
    After too long of averaging 100 hours a week, I think you're just going to be sickly, not sickly sheltered. No matter what, you don't have to work 100 hours a week to survive. The fact that you choose to do so isn't saying much about you.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      > No matter what, you don't have to work 100 hours a week to survive. Assuming this is talking about Americans, that's sort of an entertaining claim, since most of the modern policy discussions have been about deciding whether or not you are allowed to survive if you don't work enough.
      - icebraining 13y ago
        I'm not American, but surely "enough" is still less than two full time jobs plus a part time one?
  - Noughmad 13y ago
    I don't know where you live, but I'll assume US. In other countries, the wages are different (usually lower), but the salary/cost of living ratio tends to be similar. The minimum wage over there is $7.25. Are you really telling me that you need $3K per month to survive?
    - croisillon 13y ago
      Norway apparently
      - icebraining 13y ago
        Probably not, considering Torkild got a cellphone under an US federal benefit program.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Are you really telling me that you need $3K per month to survive? Maybe we need to take him more literally. Maybe what he means is he owes the mob a lot of money, and if he doesn't pay them $2.5k/month they will kill him?
- saraid216 13y ago
  > Besides, wouldn’t it be just lazy to stop working and rest on the results of the sweat and pain of our forefathers? No, it wouldn't.
  - cgag 13y ago
    Yeah, what the hell kind of a question is that. What are we doing building all this technology if not trying to work less?
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Trying to achieve more, perhaps? Work x Leverage = Achievement
      - danenania 13y ago
        But trying to achieve more for what purpose, ultimately?
        sliverstorm 13y ago
        Who knows what the future holds? FTL travel? Space colonization? Cold fusion? Yes, we could stop where we are, decide things are good enough, and operate the world at subsistence levels. But who's to say we aren't twenty years from doubling the efficiency of agriculture? A hundred years ago we could have said, trains are pretty awesome, let's stop here. But then we never would have had flight. Five hundred years ago we could have said, horse and buggy is so much better than walking, how can I get any better than this, let's stop here. But then we wouldn't have had trains. Technological advancement has a long track record of being very good for quality of life for everyone, and it certainly hasn't stopped, so why should we stop?
        saraid216 13y ago
        I realize you're just replying to cgag and danenania, but I want to point out that this thread is running the risk of a bad conflation: Work != technological advancement. More to the point, while good things come out of work, so do a lot of bad things. The more selective we can be about how we work, the more capable we are of filtering out the bad effects while retaining the good ones.
- Daishiman 13y ago
  And before that, many societies would work 4-hour days, or work during part of daylight and have the rest of the day off. I really don't see why people affix any sort of value to the amount of work they take when they should be concentrating on their results and how work aligns to their life. I work less than 20 hours a week to finish my studies and generally speaking I do what I want, which includes reading technical literature (out of a personal desire to do so), cooking, and taking a 3 or 4-day weekend off every month to visit people and travel. I leave the stress to the difficult stuff (the studying bit) and live within my means, and the lack of anxiety or rush means my work is actually solid without spending excessive time to concentrate or get results. I consider this my ideal lifestyle, not because I work little, but because I have a choice on how I live my life and how much effort I get to focus towards the things that I want.
- shubb 13y ago
  Children spend ~ 35 hours a week, essentially preparing to be efficient workers. That is, if you ask them, usually what they will tell you they are at school to do. They will phrase it 'score high in exams, in order to get a good job'. The fact is that they have to be there. They have to do as they are told. If they do not, the punishment lasts a lifetime. There are other schooling systems, such as Stiener schools, which focus more on personal development. They form children who want to explore, then allow them to self direct what they explore. (That particular system also has many, many faults). This is rather like 'work'. Your grandfather had to be in a factory many hours a day. You have to be in an office. Society says so. If you are the sort of person who is bad at knowledge work, you may well wish society told you to do something more physical. But the point is that you lack freedom. The demographic of this message board is people working on, or thinking about, startups. Essentially, when you do a startup, you choose what you are spending your time doing. You trade in your job security for freedom. I have known people 'drop out' of society, go on the dole, and work 14 hour days developing computer games that later sold for good money. Less admirably, I've known them to go on the dole, and spend all day playing computer games. They trade their place in society for freedom. This shows that in truth, modern society does give us the freedom. (in my country). So why do people work? Or more pressingly, why do people work in jobs that do not meet their psychological needs for respect, autonomy, and purpose, and pay badly? Because they do, regardless of what you read in the papers, keep working at those jobs. My local supermarket is full of people who derive little identity from their work - I was one of them as a child and I know how the adult staff there think. The answer, I think, is fear of what other people would think of them for scrounging. People like the post I am replying to. I think most people think like him. He should, rationally, hate startup founders consuming someone elses money to mess about on a project that probably won't make a dime. And that contradiction is the problem. Societies attitude to work is not rational, and it forces people to keep doing jobs they don't want to that could be automated, instead of being free. Eventually, economics will destroy those jobs. A new role will be created that didn't exist before, adding even less value than the last (but the labour is there so why not use it). Those workers desperately take the work to avoid seeing themselves as scroungers, as the enemy. And their children will grow up desperate not to be free.
  - aidenn0 13y ago
- azakai 13y ago
  > We are working less and, more importantly, we are working differently (at least in the industrialised/western world). I doubt that there are still many children around in Europe working 60+ a week in coal mines, nor are people who put in exhausting physical work usually working such long hours – both of which was perfectly common less than two centuries ago. Yes, two centuries ago, but only very briefly. In human history, overall we work today far more than most humans that ever lived used to work. Farmers and hunter-gatherers for example had and have far more leisure time than "modern" people do (see for example "The World Until Yesterday").
  - claudius 13y ago
    I would believe you can still lead the life of a farmer and hunter-gatherer if you absolutely insist on doing so. But be prepared for every other of your children dying before their fifth birthday, be prepared to bury your parents at the age of twenty or forty when some perfectly-treatable disease strikes and be prepared to give up half your village’s population if it doesn’t rain as much one year. I very much prefer working 40 to 50 hours/week than the above (though, case in point, I'll likely only start my first ‘real’ job this fall after 22 years of education…).
pg 13y ago
I've often wondered about this. As some commenters have pointed out, we don't work quite as hard as people used to have to. But we still work a lot. I suspect the short answer is healthcare costs. I was an expert in the earn-little-spend-little lifestyle for a while, but I knew it only worked because I was a healthy 25 year old with no one I had to take care of.
- simonbarker87 13y ago
  That might be the case for the US but in the UK and most other developed countries that isn't a factor and we still work a lot. I think the main factor is that we both do more (waste time and push paper/design etc) than in the past thanks to computers. Also, many jobs are simply a function of population size, more people = more emails to send, calls to take etc.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    I don't really understand what you mean about population size. If the need for a job scales at O(P) and you have O(P) workers, population cancels out. Not many jobs grow per-capita when population rises.
    - simonbarker87 13y ago
      No, but large, divers populations give opportunities for work that didn't previously exist and create an extra overhead in many sectors that requires more staff (not 1 for 1 relationship but it will impact)
  - glesica 13y ago
    I've thought for some time now that corporate inflexibility was part of the cause. More of us work for large, bureaucratic companies than in the past. These sorts of companies often won't employ someone on a flexible or part-time schedule because it would be too complicated to manage. It's actually easier and cheaper to let you site at your desk and waste time for 10-20 hours a week than it would be to figure out and manage an alternative. Do you think this rings true in the UK? It certainly does (in my experience and observation) in the US, though I think in the US healthcare is at least as important a factor.
stefantalpalaru 13y ago
I blame it on the culture. It's considered unethical to survive without working so now we need to work in order to survive. The constant push for more jobs is the biggest enemy of automation. Until we get something like a no-strings-attached minimum income we won't make the transition.
aspensmonster 13y ago
>We have the machines to make that a reality today – but none of the will. Correction: "we" don't have the machines. Society on the whole does not collectively own the means of production, and the workers who utilize the machines are not compensated for the entirety of the value they produce. Productivity has steadily risen thanks to mechanization, and real wages did at one point tend to track more or less equally with that rise, even if the wages did not entail the entirety of the value produced. That is until the late 70s. I think the more important question is: given how well we've been doing for the past ~35 years, why is our compensation still stuck in the 70s?
Zoepfli 13y ago
The tools that allow me to be more efficient are not only available to me, but to everybody including my competitors. This results in an efficiency jump of the whole industry. Workers don't benefit that much, because my competitors suddenly have a lot of free time to sell, which drives down prices. Me and my competitors end up working more, until our previous work/life balance and wage level is restored. End result: Workers are more efficient, but work the same amount, and earn the same amount. Buyers benefit because they get more for less money.
- aidenn0 13y ago
  Except workers are also buyers; why can't the workers take advantage of reduced prices to work fewer hours?
stdbrouw 13y ago
One amusing thing about corporations is that they tend to keep hiring people as long as there is at least some marginal benefit (profits minus costs for that employee higher than zero) to it. Most companies I can think of could probably operate quite well at half their current head count, or with 20 or 30 hour work weeks for their existing work force. It would work. They would still make money. It just wouldn't be financially optimal.
rndmize 13y ago
When a machine replaces the work of a man, the value that work generates goes to the owner of the machine instead. I don't see why this would lead to less work for anyone, as the man the machine replaced still has to work to make money - until you have a universal income, or a high minimum wage, increasing automation does nothing to create less toil for the average worker. In fact, you could argue that it's the opposite - by devaluing/automating the work that man did, you make it harder for him to make money, as whatever expertise he might have had is now worth less, leaving him to continue doing the same work for less money (as long as that might be possible) or moving to a new field and likely starting from the bottom.
- StandardFuture 13y ago
  What if it's not a machine replacing the man but another man who will do the same work for less?
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  There is the argument that eventually automation could make universal social support so economically viable that it is politically hard to avoid.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    The biggest problem is still how do we get there from here. I don't expect all the power structures that profit from inequality to go silently.
    - moocowduckquack 13y ago
      I know. There's a big phase change in the middle there and it don't look pretty.
- makomk 13y ago
  Arguably it's obvious, but an optimistic vision of a future of happy idleness sells a lot better than a dystopia of near-total unemployment. What's more, the owners of newspapers and TV channels have good reason to portray machines as beneficial to everyone - after all, it's their income from the many other industries they're invested in that's being improved in.
norswap 13y ago
If you find the idea we should work less interesing, or in the contrary, revolting, you should read "In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html It's a piece written in 1932, but that finds a surprising echo in these modern times.
StandardFuture 13y ago
Price of automation > Price of Chinese/Indian Labor Wages ... I think the reason we don't have things automated is because of how little companies like Walmart can get away with paying its employees. A lot of people will look at automation as taking away jobs and thus a sort of 'immoral' pursuit. But I am not sure the average person these days has that much of a 'job' to begin with. :/ (And I mean in both terms of pay AND responsibility) Is the morality of how humans should be treated (home, food, healthcare, etc.) distinct from how job-dense an economy is?
- wavefunction 13y ago
  How can we bring "foreign" labor into line with domestic labor? Barring FWD.US's attempts to maintain the status quo by labor dumping?
azakai 13y ago
> Nonetheless, the workers' movement was once dedicated to the eventual abolition of all menial, tedious, grinding work. We have the machines to make that a reality today – but none of the will. No, we do not have such machines. While we have made big strides in getting machines to do menial labor, the fact is that 1. There are huge amounts of menial labor that we simply cannot make sophisticated-enough machines to do. Humans are still necessary for many menial jobs. (If they weren't, they would have been replaced long ago with cheaper machines.) While we can land robots on mars, we still do not have the technology to, for example, clean our entire house using robotic labor. Achieving that would require solving some very hard problems in robotics, but humans can just do those types of work with hardly any training. 2. The amount of labor required keeps increasing, as the standard of living goes up. People expect more and more. We do everything we can with machine labor, but then we can get humans to do work machines cannot that further improves our quality of living, so we do that. For that reason it seems unlikely that human labor will vanish until robots can literally do everything humans can, which we are nowhere close to.
Aqueous 13y ago
It is leading to less work. Why do you think we still haven't recovered full employment from the 2008 financial crisis? Fewer people are working more hours. Fewer and fewer and fewer people will continue to work more and more hours. As the machines pick up the slack full employment will begin to seem almost laughable. The problem is, that in order for the wealth to accrue to everyone - to allow everyone to survive with fewer total available jobs - we need to be redistributing the wealth that the machines create. Or else we're going to have a future with third world inequality in first world nations.
Gustomaximus 13y ago
It's because of where most people assign value - consumer goods ownership. People are always going into debt for unneeded goods like that giant TV or upgraded car. These things make them feel good because society says you're a success if you have them. Very few people can look past this and get that $3k car by choice when they can afford much more. And until society puts greater social value on things like time with family this won't change and people will seek the dollar for as many hours as they reasonably can. And surely not fight for the opposite. What I find sad is that almost every politician would say they are 'family orientated' but I never see any fighting to make sure people can spend more time with their family - the most important thing IMO. In my life I have only seen one country reduce official working hours. This was France about 10-ish years ago. This to me is the sign of an advancing society far above the TV screen size I own.
- StandardFuture 13y ago
  I completely agree with you. However, let's not forget the inevitability of game theory: people will always take advantage of the system for their good. France made their rules and it really did not solve the problems they were trying to solve e.g. unemployment. And a jobless family may end up worse off (family-wise) than a family whose parents work 5-10 more hours a week.
  - Gustomaximus 13y ago
    With the French example they said it didn't improve employment as they just increase output. So in a way it was a win as no-one lost and workers gained time. Personally I have seen this result in myself when I go from extended long hours back to a more normal routine, I'm just more efficient. I've seen studies saying the most efficient work hours are about 6 hours a day (I think I found on HN). I'm not sure how you get to the jobless family being worse off... what is the logic there?
general_failure 13y ago
Speaking about computer science - As technology progresses so fast, it takes a lot of time to master them. By the time you master something, another technology comes along obsoleting the old one. So, this is really a long long job race - you have to keep moving learning new stuff. Otherwise, you will be branded into a specific technology (like 'ios developer', 'php coder') and there's no way getting out of it.
RivieraKid 13y ago
- Income inequality is higher than before. The rich are getting richer much faster than others. - I don't know if people are working less on average, but I suppose so. I think I could live quite comfortable life if I worked just two or three days a week as a freelance developer.
legolandbridge 13y ago
We have to support a ravenous State that gives little in return but barriers to industry and inflation (in education and healthcare most visibly). The point is that everything should be cheaper than it is. Yet we're told deflation is such a great evil. We work but we're not productive. All these visions of the leisurely future in the article were during in the boom of capitalism, when the State really was small and unobtrusive, and the standard of living absolutely surged. It's a pity that the US has not embraced these core values in time of recession but have gone the opposite way in directing the economy. Creating jobs is not the goal. You could hire one guy to dig a hole and one to fill it and you wouldn't be any better for it. All slaves had jobs. The goal is to create efficiency, productivity, and encourage entrepreneurship and profit, for they are incentives to best serve customers. You could name too many ways that government make everyday product more expensive to 'protect' and cater to smaller segments of society.
wavefunction 13y ago
Maybe Karl had some valid criticisms, just sayin'...
- e12e 13y ago
  Indeed. When a small elite control the means of production, high efficiency (less need for waged labour), means more will starve -- or have to live off welfare. That is, unless we do something to change the system.
rdouble 13y ago
In this particular story the answers are easy. The work of a steveadore, one of the examples given, has been vastly automated and unionized. The work is much physically easier than before: operating a crane vs. manually moving cargo. Dockworker's unions have negotiated strong agreements related to overtime pay which guarantee time and a half. There are a far smaller number of employees needed, and those employees want to pack in as many hours as they legally can, to reap the overtime benefits. Automation of an industry can actually lead to longer hours for the fewer employees still working in the industry. Since there are far fewer well paying positions like being a longshoreman, people who may have once gotten a job on the docks have to compete with everyone else for service jobs. The service jobs don't pay enough, so many need 2 or even 3 jobs to keep their families afloat. The need for multiple jobs explains why this class of people is working longer.
subsystem 13y ago
Spending money is giving away time. Look at what you spend money on and you will know why you work so much.
stephenbez 13y ago
I'd say sexual selection is a cause. There is pretty much a fixed pool of potential mates. Women highly value mates who are good providers. Some of my female friends say they wouldn't date a guy who made less than them. Thus if you are a guy and are considering cutting back on your work, you will become significantly less attractive to many females.
- dmitriy_ko 13y ago
  What about women who work 60 hours a week?
  - stephenbez 13y ago
    I don't have a great answer, but maybe: Due to the reasons listed above men work long hours. Women, which in many professions are the minority, must then match those hours in order to not look bad.
jack9 13y ago
Why do people keep asking the question when there are obvious answers? See Richard Wolff. I'm a broken record because it looks like this daily fluff appears once a month to talk about and forget. Healthcare is a minor point if you've been tracking costs (e.g. Costs passed onto the consumer per item, per meal, for most major fast food chains has been rising at about 5 cents a year)
mark-r 13y ago
The question is, to whom do the benefits of automation accrue? The utopians assumed it would be distributed equally, but we all know how it really turned out - the rich get richer. There are some areas of the economy where work hours have been reduced, as a side effect of companies restricting the work week to avoid paying full-time benefits such as healthcare.
mmphosis 13y ago
I think we need to think about work as energy. At the moment, we don't take responsibility for underpaid workers and we don't own the many machines that actually do a lot of work that we depend on. And also, we don't own the means of energy collection and generation. And, we don't account for non-renewable and detrimental energy use.

82 points by dmitriy_ko 13y ago

We are working less and, more importantly, we are working differently (at least in the industrialised/western world). I doubt that there are still many children around in Europe working 60+ a week in coal mines, nor are people who put in exhausting physical work usually working such long hours – both of which was perfectly common less than two centuries ago. Besides, wouldn’t it be just lazy to stop working and rest on the results of the sweat and pain of our forefathers? :\

Torkild 13y ago
I average 100 hours per week. I think you sound sickly sheltered.
- beachstartup 13y ago
  i work about 60. 100 is excessive. that's not impressive, just stupid.
  - Torkild 13y ago
    I do only what is necessary to survive. You sound like most of your bills are still paid by mommy and daddy.
    - iyulaev 13y ago
      How do you have time to post on HN?
    - pearjuice 13y ago
      Mind me asking what exactly your living standards are and which position you fullfill that you need 100 hours of work to survive?
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Person works 60 hours a week, and is thus clearly still freeloading on their parents? Are you attempting to be comical?
    - beachstartup 13y ago
      did you catch the part where i said i work? happens every week, in fact.
- claudius 13y ago
  How many of said 100 hours do you spend in coal mines or heavy engineering factories?
- rdouble 13y ago
  I agree. I'm 13 and spend over 120 hours per week in the oil mines of North Dakota. I puked when I read the first comment and slammed my laptop shut because I was shaking with disgust.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    You get to leave the oil mines? Talk about preferential treatment, you have it easy!
    - rdouble 13y ago
      We are allowed 45 minutes for cigarettes and internet before Sunday prayers and lights-out.
- freehunter 13y ago
  After too long of averaging 100 hours a week, I think you're just going to be sickly, not sickly sheltered. No matter what, you don't have to work 100 hours a week to survive. The fact that you choose to do so isn't saying much about you.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > No matter what, you don't have to work 100 hours a week to survive. Assuming this is talking about Americans, that's sort of an entertaining claim, since most of the modern policy discussions have been about deciding whether or not you are allowed to survive if you don't work enough.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      I'm not American, but surely "enough" is still less than two full time jobs plus a part time one?
- Noughmad 13y ago
  I don't know where you live, but I'll assume US. In other countries, the wages are different (usually lower), but the salary/cost of living ratio tends to be similar. The minimum wage over there is $7.25. Are you really telling me that you need $3K per month to survive?
  - croisillon 13y ago
    Norway apparently
    - icebraining 13y ago
      Probably not, considering Torkild got a cellphone under an US federal benefit program.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Are you really telling me that you need $3K per month to survive? Maybe we need to take him more literally. Maybe what he means is he owes the mob a lot of money, and if he doesn't pay them $2.5k/month they will kill him?
saraid216 13y ago
> Besides, wouldn’t it be just lazy to stop working and rest on the results of the sweat and pain of our forefathers? No, it wouldn't.
- cgag 13y ago
  Yeah, what the hell kind of a question is that. What are we doing building all this technology if not trying to work less?
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Trying to achieve more, perhaps? Work x Leverage = Achievement
    - danenania 13y ago
      But trying to achieve more for what purpose, ultimately?
      - sliverstorm 13y ago
        Who knows what the future holds? FTL travel? Space colonization? Cold fusion? Yes, we could stop where we are, decide things are good enough, and operate the world at subsistence levels. But who's to say we aren't twenty years from doubling the efficiency of agriculture? A hundred years ago we could have said, trains are pretty awesome, let's stop here. But then we never would have had flight. Five hundred years ago we could have said, horse and buggy is so much better than walking, how can I get any better than this, let's stop here. But then we wouldn't have had trains. Technological advancement has a long track record of being very good for quality of life for everyone, and it certainly hasn't stopped, so why should we stop?
        saraid216 13y ago
        I realize you're just replying to cgag and danenania, but I want to point out that this thread is running the risk of a bad conflation: Work != technological advancement. More to the point, while good things come out of work, so do a lot of bad things. The more selective we can be about how we work, the more capable we are of filtering out the bad effects while retaining the good ones.
Daishiman 13y ago
And before that, many societies would work 4-hour days, or work during part of daylight and have the rest of the day off. I really don't see why people affix any sort of value to the amount of work they take when they should be concentrating on their results and how work aligns to their life. I work less than 20 hours a week to finish my studies and generally speaking I do what I want, which includes reading technical literature (out of a personal desire to do so), cooking, and taking a 3 or 4-day weekend off every month to visit people and travel. I leave the stress to the difficult stuff (the studying bit) and live within my means, and the lack of anxiety or rush means my work is actually solid without spending excessive time to concentrate or get results. I consider this my ideal lifestyle, not because I work little, but because I have a choice on how I live my life and how much effort I get to focus towards the things that I want.
shubb 13y ago
Children spend ~ 35 hours a week, essentially preparing to be efficient workers. That is, if you ask them, usually what they will tell you they are at school to do. They will phrase it 'score high in exams, in order to get a good job'. The fact is that they have to be there. They have to do as they are told. If they do not, the punishment lasts a lifetime. There are other schooling systems, such as Stiener schools, which focus more on personal development. They form children who want to explore, then allow them to self direct what they explore. (That particular system also has many, many faults). This is rather like 'work'. Your grandfather had to be in a factory many hours a day. You have to be in an office. Society says so. If you are the sort of person who is bad at knowledge work, you may well wish society told you to do something more physical. But the point is that you lack freedom. The demographic of this message board is people working on, or thinking about, startups. Essentially, when you do a startup, you choose what you are spending your time doing. You trade in your job security for freedom. I have known people 'drop out' of society, go on the dole, and work 14 hour days developing computer games that later sold for good money. Less admirably, I've known them to go on the dole, and spend all day playing computer games. They trade their place in society for freedom. This shows that in truth, modern society does give us the freedom. (in my country). So why do people work? Or more pressingly, why do people work in jobs that do not meet their psychological needs for respect, autonomy, and purpose, and pay badly? Because they do, regardless of what you read in the papers, keep working at those jobs. My local supermarket is full of people who derive little identity from their work - I was one of them as a child and I know how the adult staff there think. The answer, I think, is fear of what other people would think of them for scrounging. People like the post I am replying to. I think most people think like him. He should, rationally, hate startup founders consuming someone elses money to mess about on a project that probably won't make a dime. And that contradiction is the problem. Societies attitude to work is not rational, and it forces people to keep doing jobs they don't want to that could be automated, instead of being free. Eventually, economics will destroy those jobs. A new role will be created that didn't exist before, adding even less value than the last (but the labour is there so why not use it). Those workers desperately take the work to avoid seeing themselves as scroungers, as the enemy. And their children will grow up desperate not to be free.
- aidenn0 13y ago
azakai 13y ago
> We are working less and, more importantly, we are working differently (at least in the industrialised/western world). I doubt that there are still many children around in Europe working 60+ a week in coal mines, nor are people who put in exhausting physical work usually working such long hours – both of which was perfectly common less than two centuries ago. Yes, two centuries ago, but only very briefly. In human history, overall we work today far more than most humans that ever lived used to work. Farmers and hunter-gatherers for example had and have far more leisure time than "modern" people do (see for example "The World Until Yesterday").
- claudius 13y ago
  I would believe you can still lead the life of a farmer and hunter-gatherer if you absolutely insist on doing so. But be prepared for every other of your children dying before their fifth birthday, be prepared to bury your parents at the age of twenty or forty when some perfectly-treatable disease strikes and be prepared to give up half your village’s population if it doesn’t rain as much one year. I very much prefer working 40 to 50 hours/week than the above (though, case in point, I'll likely only start my first ‘real’ job this fall after 22 years of education…).

pg 13y ago

I've often wondered about this. As some commenters have pointed out, we don't work quite as hard as people used to have to. But we still work a lot. I suspect the short answer is healthcare costs. I was an expert in the earn-little-spend-little lifestyle for a while, but I knew it only worked because I was a healthy 25 year old with no one I had to take care of.

simonbarker87 13y ago
That might be the case for the US but in the UK and most other developed countries that isn't a factor and we still work a lot. I think the main factor is that we both do more (waste time and push paper/design etc) than in the past thanks to computers. Also, many jobs are simply a function of population size, more people = more emails to send, calls to take etc.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  I don't really understand what you mean about population size. If the need for a job scales at O(P) and you have O(P) workers, population cancels out. Not many jobs grow per-capita when population rises.
  - simonbarker87 13y ago
    No, but large, divers populations give opportunities for work that didn't previously exist and create an extra overhead in many sectors that requires more staff (not 1 for 1 relationship but it will impact)
- glesica 13y ago
  I've thought for some time now that corporate inflexibility was part of the cause. More of us work for large, bureaucratic companies than in the past. These sorts of companies often won't employ someone on a flexible or part-time schedule because it would be too complicated to manage. It's actually easier and cheaper to let you site at your desk and waste time for 10-20 hours a week than it would be to figure out and manage an alternative. Do you think this rings true in the UK? It certainly does (in my experience and observation) in the US, though I think in the US healthcare is at least as important a factor.

stefantalpalaru 13y ago

I blame it on the culture. It's considered unethical to survive without working so now we need to work in order to survive. The constant push for more jobs is the biggest enemy of automation. Until we get something like a no-strings-attached minimum income we won't make the transition.

aspensmonster 13y ago

>We have the machines to make that a reality today – but none of the will. Correction: "we" don't have the machines. Society on the whole does not collectively own the means of production, and the workers who utilize the machines are not compensated for the entirety of the value they produce. Productivity has steadily risen thanks to mechanization, and real wages did at one point tend to track more or less equally with that rise, even if the wages did not entail the entirety of the value produced. That is until the late 70s. I think the more important question is: given how well we've been doing for the past ~35 years, why is our compensation still stuck in the 70s?

Zoepfli 13y ago

The tools that allow me to be more efficient are not only available to me, but to everybody including my competitors. This results in an efficiency jump of the whole industry. Workers don't benefit that much, because my competitors suddenly have a lot of free time to sell, which drives down prices. Me and my competitors end up working more, until our previous work/life balance and wage level is restored. End result: Workers are more efficient, but work the same amount, and earn the same amount. Buyers benefit because they get more for less money.

aidenn0 13y ago
Except workers are also buyers; why can't the workers take advantage of reduced prices to work fewer hours?

stdbrouw 13y ago

One amusing thing about corporations is that they tend to keep hiring people as long as there is at least some marginal benefit (profits minus costs for that employee higher than zero) to it. Most companies I can think of could probably operate quite well at half their current head count, or with 20 or 30 hour work weeks for their existing work force. It would work. They would still make money. It just wouldn't be financially optimal.

rndmize 13y ago

When a machine replaces the work of a man, the value that work generates goes to the owner of the machine instead. I don't see why this would lead to less work for anyone, as the man the machine replaced still has to work to make money - until you have a universal income, or a high minimum wage, increasing automation does nothing to create less toil for the average worker. In fact, you could argue that it's the opposite - by devaluing/automating the work that man did, you make it harder for him to make money, as whatever expertise he might have had is now worth less, leaving him to continue doing the same work for less money (as long as that might be possible) or moving to a new field and likely starting from the bottom.

StandardFuture 13y ago
What if it's not a machine replacing the man but another man who will do the same work for less?
moocowduckquack 13y ago
There is the argument that eventually automation could make universal social support so economically viable that it is politically hard to avoid.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  The biggest problem is still how do we get there from here. I don't expect all the power structures that profit from inequality to go silently.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    I know. There's a big phase change in the middle there and it don't look pretty.
makomk 13y ago
Arguably it's obvious, but an optimistic vision of a future of happy idleness sells a lot better than a dystopia of near-total unemployment. What's more, the owners of newspapers and TV channels have good reason to portray machines as beneficial to everyone - after all, it's their income from the many other industries they're invested in that's being improved in.

norswap 13y ago

If you find the idea we should work less interesing, or in the contrary, revolting, you should read "In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html It's a piece written in 1932, but that finds a surprising echo in these modern times.

StandardFuture 13y ago

Price of automation > Price of Chinese/Indian Labor Wages ... I think the reason we don't have things automated is because of how little companies like Walmart can get away with paying its employees. A lot of people will look at automation as taking away jobs and thus a sort of 'immoral' pursuit. But I am not sure the average person these days has that much of a 'job' to begin with. :/ (And I mean in both terms of pay AND responsibility) Is the morality of how humans should be treated (home, food, healthcare, etc.) distinct from how job-dense an economy is?

wavefunction 13y ago
How can we bring "foreign" labor into line with domestic labor? Barring FWD.US's attempts to maintain the status quo by labor dumping?

azakai 13y ago

> Nonetheless, the workers' movement was once dedicated to the eventual abolition of all menial, tedious, grinding work. We have the machines to make that a reality today – but none of the will. No, we do not have such machines. While we have made big strides in getting machines to do menial labor, the fact is that 1. There are huge amounts of menial labor that we simply cannot make sophisticated-enough machines to do. Humans are still necessary for many menial jobs. (If they weren't, they would have been replaced long ago with cheaper machines.) While we can land robots on mars, we still do not have the technology to, for example, clean our entire house using robotic labor. Achieving that would require solving some very hard problems in robotics, but humans can just do those types of work with hardly any training. 2. The amount of labor required keeps increasing, as the standard of living goes up. People expect more and more. We do everything we can with machine labor, but then we can get humans to do work machines cannot that further improves our quality of living, so we do that. For that reason it seems unlikely that human labor will vanish until robots can literally do everything humans can, which we are nowhere close to.

Aqueous 13y ago

It is leading to less work. Why do you think we still haven't recovered full employment from the 2008 financial crisis? Fewer people are working more hours. Fewer and fewer and fewer people will continue to work more and more hours. As the machines pick up the slack full employment will begin to seem almost laughable. The problem is, that in order for the wealth to accrue to everyone - to allow everyone to survive with fewer total available jobs - we need to be redistributing the wealth that the machines create. Or else we're going to have a future with third world inequality in first world nations.

Gustomaximus 13y ago

It's because of where most people assign value - consumer goods ownership. People are always going into debt for unneeded goods like that giant TV or upgraded car. These things make them feel good because society says you're a success if you have them. Very few people can look past this and get that $3k car by choice when they can afford much more. And until society puts greater social value on things like time with family this won't change and people will seek the dollar for as many hours as they reasonably can. And surely not fight for the opposite. What I find sad is that almost every politician would say they are 'family orientated' but I never see any fighting to make sure people can spend more time with their family - the most important thing IMO. In my life I have only seen one country reduce official working hours. This was France about 10-ish years ago. This to me is the sign of an advancing society far above the TV screen size I own.

StandardFuture 13y ago
I completely agree with you. However, let's not forget the inevitability of game theory: people will always take advantage of the system for their good. France made their rules and it really did not solve the problems they were trying to solve e.g. unemployment. And a jobless family may end up worse off (family-wise) than a family whose parents work 5-10 more hours a week.
- Gustomaximus 13y ago
  With the French example they said it didn't improve employment as they just increase output. So in a way it was a win as no-one lost and workers gained time. Personally I have seen this result in myself when I go from extended long hours back to a more normal routine, I'm just more efficient. I've seen studies saying the most efficient work hours are about 6 hours a day (I think I found on HN). I'm not sure how you get to the jobless family being worse off... what is the logic there?

general_failure 13y ago

Speaking about computer science - As technology progresses so fast, it takes a lot of time to master them. By the time you master something, another technology comes along obsoleting the old one. So, this is really a long long job race - you have to keep moving learning new stuff. Otherwise, you will be branded into a specific technology (like 'ios developer', 'php coder') and there's no way getting out of it.

RivieraKid 13y ago

- Income inequality is higher than before. The rich are getting richer much faster than others. - I don't know if people are working less on average, but I suppose so. I think I could live quite comfortable life if I worked just two or three days a week as a freelance developer.

legolandbridge 13y ago

We have to support a ravenous State that gives little in return but barriers to industry and inflation (in education and healthcare most visibly). The point is that everything should be cheaper than it is. Yet we're told deflation is such a great evil. We work but we're not productive. All these visions of the leisurely future in the article were during in the boom of capitalism, when the State really was small and unobtrusive, and the standard of living absolutely surged. It's a pity that the US has not embraced these core values in time of recession but have gone the opposite way in directing the economy. Creating jobs is not the goal. You could hire one guy to dig a hole and one to fill it and you wouldn't be any better for it. All slaves had jobs. The goal is to create efficiency, productivity, and encourage entrepreneurship and profit, for they are incentives to best serve customers. You could name too many ways that government make everyday product more expensive to 'protect' and cater to smaller segments of society.

wavefunction 13y ago

Maybe Karl had some valid criticisms, just sayin'...

e12e 13y ago
Indeed. When a small elite control the means of production, high efficiency (less need for waged labour), means more will starve -- or have to live off welfare. That is, unless we do something to change the system.

rdouble 13y ago

In this particular story the answers are easy. The work of a steveadore, one of the examples given, has been vastly automated and unionized. The work is much physically easier than before: operating a crane vs. manually moving cargo. Dockworker's unions have negotiated strong agreements related to overtime pay which guarantee time and a half. There are a far smaller number of employees needed, and those employees want to pack in as many hours as they legally can, to reap the overtime benefits. Automation of an industry can actually lead to longer hours for the fewer employees still working in the industry. Since there are far fewer well paying positions like being a longshoreman, people who may have once gotten a job on the docks have to compete with everyone else for service jobs. The service jobs don't pay enough, so many need 2 or even 3 jobs to keep their families afloat. The need for multiple jobs explains why this class of people is working longer.

subsystem 13y ago

Spending money is giving away time. Look at what you spend money on and you will know why you work so much.

stephenbez 13y ago

I'd say sexual selection is a cause. There is pretty much a fixed pool of potential mates. Women highly value mates who are good providers. Some of my female friends say they wouldn't date a guy who made less than them. Thus if you are a guy and are considering cutting back on your work, you will become significantly less attractive to many females.

dmitriy_ko 13y ago
What about women who work 60 hours a week?
- stephenbez 13y ago
  I don't have a great answer, but maybe: Due to the reasons listed above men work long hours. Women, which in many professions are the minority, must then match those hours in order to not look bad.

jack9 13y ago

Why do people keep asking the question when there are obvious answers? See Richard Wolff. I'm a broken record because it looks like this daily fluff appears once a month to talk about and forget. Healthcare is a minor point if you've been tracking costs (e.g. Costs passed onto the consumer per item, per meal, for most major fast food chains has been rising at about 5 cents a year)

mark-r 13y ago

The question is, to whom do the benefits of automation accrue? The utopians assumed it would be distributed equally, but we all know how it really turned out - the rich get richer. There are some areas of the economy where work hours have been reduced, as a side effect of companies restricting the work week to avoid paying full-time benefits such as healthcare.

mmphosis 13y ago

I think we need to think about work as energy. At the moment, we don't take responsibility for underpaid workers and we don't own the many machines that actually do a lot of work that we depend on. And also, we don't own the means of energy collection and generation. And, we don't account for non-renewable and detrimental energy use.