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> We produce vastly more, but work as much as ever. Back in the 60s the sentiment was that 21st century Americans might have 10 hour work weeks. Isn't that bec

> We produce vastly more, but work as much as ever. Back in the 60s the sentiment was that 21st century Americans might have 10 hour work weeks. Isn't that because we now have a very large semi-parasitical managerial class that we need to support? It's almost a retreat into feudalism. Doubt anybody saw that coming.

Houshalter 13y ago
That doesn't make a lot of sense. People don't work because they want to support someone else, they work because they want to support themselves.
- dclowd9901 13y ago
  He's trying to make the case that there's some great conspiracy to keep people employed in jobs that shouldn't exist. I suppose he'll next tell us that the rich are "job creators."
  - solistice 13y ago
    I'm not sure what you think job creators are. Is it some kind of medal you get when you employ someone? Do you loose it if you fire them? What kind of conditions constitutes employing? Do I get to be a job creator if I give you a dollar for explaining your point? Job providers, I get why those are important. Not everyone wants to be bothered with the business side of living, along with its risks. I can actually see how that division of labour and responsibilities aids both sides of the equation. But if you count self-employment, there's job providers on every rung of the social ladder. The chinese guy selling chua'r on the street is a job provider, just as much as the multimillion entrepreneur employing thousands of people. So it becomes senseless to say that one wealth bracket supplies jobs, and another one doesn't. And then there's "job creation", which seems like a meaningless metric if you don't factor in loss of jobs, current amount of jobs, unemployment, etc. And you seriously want to pin that metric down on a single group? By the way, if the take the logic further, and look at who's implicated in major job destruction (layoffs), it's us. Hackers. I'm going from the Systems optimization definition here, and when you optimize away a part of a system, someone's bound to get fired. Your packaging machine eliminated 5 packaging workers. Your fiber optic cable eliminated 50 post office workers. They're being added, somewhere.
    - zanny 13y ago
      I hate when the discussion devolves into putting flesh bodies into 40 hour a week boxes to repeat some repetitive task. The truth behind job scarcity or not is supply and demand. Period. If there is no demand for yours, or someone elses labor, there is no job. No wealth redistribution will change that. The arguments behind why, though, the concentration of wealth was bad, is that the wealthy have fewer demands they want met relative to the entirety of everyone else. A more prosperous majority gnerates tremendous demand, millionaires generate limited and specific demand. But you don't escape the reality of having a supply of something trying to meet the demand for it. There just isn't much demand for a lot of labor types, and producitivity multipliers in technology lets that demand be met with much less workforce supply, which means tremendous economic efficiency gains.
      - contingencies 13y ago
        I hate when the discussion devolves into putting flesh bodies into 40 hour a week boxes to repeat some repetitive task. Me too. Apparently it's primarily a mass-media political posturing tool for the (fearing-to-be-)disenfranchised classes (ie. a huge proportion of the population). producitivity multipliers in technology lets that demand be met with much less workforce supply, which means tremendous economic efficiency gains. ... and loads of people shifted to the bottom of the opportunity barrel, save for states with some semblance of social welfare (ie. not the US).
        zanny 13y ago
        That just requires a realization that few people can provide the necessary resources and goods to maintain the rest. We avoid that realization, hence elsewhere in this comment thread discussions of 50%+ office jobs and only working 10 hours of your 40 hour shift come into play. I guess it plays counter to the rugged individualism model of thinking (that, let us be honest, wealthy business owners love because it creates surplus labor supply on a cultural basis rather than a fiscal need) even though we have had 1% of the population working as farmers for 30 years providing all the crops we eat, even when our crops are grossly inefficient like beef.
- contingencies 13y ago
  That comment is at once so amazingly wrong and quintessentially American, it's almost a work of art.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Right because people obviously work for the sole purpose of supporting their manager. Not to feed themselves or anything, that's silly American stuff.
    - qu4z-2 13y ago
      What about building nice things, or making the world a better place? (Although that's probably truer of the hacker profession than some others)
- legutierr 13y ago
  However, if the rise in average incomes in the US over the past thirty or forty years were more evenly distributed among the working population, and not just concentrated at the top, many people would probably choose to work much less. People work to support themselves, but I would wager that most would work less to support themselves if they could earn enough to do so.
- cpfohl 13y ago
  Can I assume you have neither spouse nor child? I'd argue that once those things come along you might disagree with your own statement. You could probably rephrase it so I agreed with you, though: "People don't work because they want to support their boss's high standard of living, they work because they want to improve their own." Is that what you meant?
gosub 13y ago
No, it's because if a worker works 8h/day, and produces X, given a new technology that double his productivity, he is now expected to still work 8h/day, and produce 2X.
- gosub 13y ago
  And this, incidentally, is why there never will be "more jobs". Occupation is production over productivity. With an increment of productivity, you can ramp up production up to mass-production keeping the same occupation level. But markets get saturated, so you can't increase production indefinitely. Still, productivity, with automation and robotization and renewable energy sources, could be make practically infinite. But for the reason in the post above, work is not distributed in the work-force.
- RyanMcGreal 13y ago
  But his pay remains X, while the CEO, VP team and shareholders keep 100% of the extra value.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Or actually goes down in actual bying value (as it has since the 70s).
VLM 13y ago
One interesting interpretation is the ratio of people with desk jobs consisting of 50% (or higher) fooling around vs sweaty manual labor jobs has led to the average American perhaps only working 20 hours a week right now. Think of pointless meetings, smoke breaks, soda breaks, talking about sports, life, hobbies, debating/complaining, talking politics, talking about TV shows, online shopping, keeping up with twitter/FB/Linkedin, Hacker News, the average cubie dweller probably only puts in 10-20 hours a week of actual work right now. "Everyone knows" the guy who's forced to put in 60 hours at the office who spends 50 of those hours on FB / Reddit / talking about football, etc. There's a Russian proverb about we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. If you define work as "hours spend on premises" then no one has worked as many hours as Americans do today since the early 1900s. If you define work as actually doing something productive, well, thats a whole nother ball game.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >One interesting interpretation is the ratio of people with desk jobs consisting of 50% (or higher) fooling around vs sweaty manual labor jobs has led to the average American perhaps only working 20 hours a week right now. For actual work, maybe even less. But not having pocession of your body for 8-12 hours every day in exchage for a pay-check, is work too. Even if you just sit there and "do nothing".

Houshalter 13y ago

That doesn't make a lot of sense. People don't work because they want to support someone else, they work because they want to support themselves.

dclowd9901 13y ago
He's trying to make the case that there's some great conspiracy to keep people employed in jobs that shouldn't exist. I suppose he'll next tell us that the rich are "job creators."
- solistice 13y ago
  I'm not sure what you think job creators are. Is it some kind of medal you get when you employ someone? Do you loose it if you fire them? What kind of conditions constitutes employing? Do I get to be a job creator if I give you a dollar for explaining your point? Job providers, I get why those are important. Not everyone wants to be bothered with the business side of living, along with its risks. I can actually see how that division of labour and responsibilities aids both sides of the equation. But if you count self-employment, there's job providers on every rung of the social ladder. The chinese guy selling chua'r on the street is a job provider, just as much as the multimillion entrepreneur employing thousands of people. So it becomes senseless to say that one wealth bracket supplies jobs, and another one doesn't. And then there's "job creation", which seems like a meaningless metric if you don't factor in loss of jobs, current amount of jobs, unemployment, etc. And you seriously want to pin that metric down on a single group? By the way, if the take the logic further, and look at who's implicated in major job destruction (layoffs), it's us. Hackers. I'm going from the Systems optimization definition here, and when you optimize away a part of a system, someone's bound to get fired. Your packaging machine eliminated 5 packaging workers. Your fiber optic cable eliminated 50 post office workers. They're being added, somewhere.
  - zanny 13y ago
    I hate when the discussion devolves into putting flesh bodies into 40 hour a week boxes to repeat some repetitive task. The truth behind job scarcity or not is supply and demand. Period. If there is no demand for yours, or someone elses labor, there is no job. No wealth redistribution will change that. The arguments behind why, though, the concentration of wealth was bad, is that the wealthy have fewer demands they want met relative to the entirety of everyone else. A more prosperous majority gnerates tremendous demand, millionaires generate limited and specific demand. But you don't escape the reality of having a supply of something trying to meet the demand for it. There just isn't much demand for a lot of labor types, and producitivity multipliers in technology lets that demand be met with much less workforce supply, which means tremendous economic efficiency gains.
    - contingencies 13y ago
      I hate when the discussion devolves into putting flesh bodies into 40 hour a week boxes to repeat some repetitive task. Me too. Apparently it's primarily a mass-media political posturing tool for the (fearing-to-be-)disenfranchised classes (ie. a huge proportion of the population). producitivity multipliers in technology lets that demand be met with much less workforce supply, which means tremendous economic efficiency gains. ... and loads of people shifted to the bottom of the opportunity barrel, save for states with some semblance of social welfare (ie. not the US).
      - zanny 13y ago
        That just requires a realization that few people can provide the necessary resources and goods to maintain the rest. We avoid that realization, hence elsewhere in this comment thread discussions of 50%+ office jobs and only working 10 hours of your 40 hour shift come into play. I guess it plays counter to the rugged individualism model of thinking (that, let us be honest, wealthy business owners love because it creates surplus labor supply on a cultural basis rather than a fiscal need) even though we have had 1% of the population working as farmers for 30 years providing all the crops we eat, even when our crops are grossly inefficient like beef.
contingencies 13y ago
That comment is at once so amazingly wrong and quintessentially American, it's almost a work of art.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Right because people obviously work for the sole purpose of supporting their manager. Not to feed themselves or anything, that's silly American stuff.
  - qu4z-2 13y ago
    What about building nice things, or making the world a better place? (Although that's probably truer of the hacker profession than some others)
legutierr 13y ago
However, if the rise in average incomes in the US over the past thirty or forty years were more evenly distributed among the working population, and not just concentrated at the top, many people would probably choose to work much less. People work to support themselves, but I would wager that most would work less to support themselves if they could earn enough to do so.
cpfohl 13y ago
Can I assume you have neither spouse nor child? I'd argue that once those things come along you might disagree with your own statement. You could probably rephrase it so I agreed with you, though: "People don't work because they want to support their boss's high standard of living, they work because they want to improve their own." Is that what you meant?

gosub 13y ago

No, it's because if a worker works 8h/day, and produces X, given a new technology that double his productivity, he is now expected to still work 8h/day, and produce 2X.

gosub 13y ago
And this, incidentally, is why there never will be "more jobs". Occupation is production over productivity. With an increment of productivity, you can ramp up production up to mass-production keeping the same occupation level. But markets get saturated, so you can't increase production indefinitely. Still, productivity, with automation and robotization and renewable energy sources, could be make practically infinite. But for the reason in the post above, work is not distributed in the work-force.
RyanMcGreal 13y ago
But his pay remains X, while the CEO, VP team and shareholders keep 100% of the extra value.
- coldtea 13y ago
  Or actually goes down in actual bying value (as it has since the 70s).

VLM 13y ago

One interesting interpretation is the ratio of people with desk jobs consisting of 50% (or higher) fooling around vs sweaty manual labor jobs has led to the average American perhaps only working 20 hours a week right now. Think of pointless meetings, smoke breaks, soda breaks, talking about sports, life, hobbies, debating/complaining, talking politics, talking about TV shows, online shopping, keeping up with twitter/FB/Linkedin, Hacker News, the average cubie dweller probably only puts in 10-20 hours a week of actual work right now. "Everyone knows" the guy who's forced to put in 60 hours at the office who spends 50 of those hours on FB / Reddit / talking about football, etc. There's a Russian proverb about we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. If you define work as "hours spend on premises" then no one has worked as many hours as Americans do today since the early 1900s. If you define work as actually doing something productive, well, thats a whole nother ball game.

coldtea 13y ago
>One interesting interpretation is the ratio of people with desk jobs consisting of 50% (or higher) fooling around vs sweaty manual labor jobs has led to the average American perhaps only working 20 hours a week right now. For actual work, maybe even less. But not having pocession of your body for 8-12 hours every day in exchage for a pay-check, is work too. Even if you just sit there and "do nothing".