6 ms·

People who don't work at all. That's the choice (maybe more like outcome) the society went with. For what might the first time in history, the rich are working

People who don't work at all. That's the choice (maybe more like outcome) the society went with. For what might the first time in history, the rich are working more than the poor[1] and labour participation rates are dropping[2]. In many ways this is a superior alternative. Children don't work. They used to. People spend a lot more time in school at the beginning of their life when it has the potential to have the biggest impact. It's not all bad. Although not quite living up to the dreams from 20th century either. There's also something to be said about positional goods. A lot of people are driven by status and they work to be ahead of others. Elizabeth Warren believes that this explains why, despite technological progress, regular middle class family needs two incomes where one was enough a couple decades ago[3], they're competing for the same house, or school district. It doesn't explain everything but it's a factor. [1] http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21600989-why-rich-now-have-less-leisure-poor-nice-work-if-you-can-get-out http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21600989... [2] http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/08/18/equitable-growth-make-confused-cyclical-recovery-monday-focus-august-18-2014/ http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/08/18/equitable-growth-make-... [3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents/dp/0465090907 http://www.amazon.com/The-Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Paren...

sp332 12y ago
It's not that the current situation is really bad, but things seem to have stopped improving. Productivity keeps going up but wages don't.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  http://anticap.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/fig2_prodhhincome.jpg http://anticap.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/fig2_prodhhincome... This is where the 4 hour work week went. Disclaimer: I am an ardent supporter of work hours being reduced as productivity rises.
  - spindritf 12y ago
    I'm guessing those wages exclude benefits, because when you consider total compensation it actually reflects growth in productivity. Total employee compensation as a share of national income was 66 percent of national income in 1970 and 64 percent in 2006. This measure of the labor compensation share has been remarkably stable since the 1970s. It rose from an average of 62 percent in the decade of the 1960s to 66 percent in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s and then declined to 65 percent in the decade of the 1990s where it has again been from 2000 until the most recent quarter. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953 http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Possibly. Excluded benefits like health insurance? The cost of which has skyrocketed over the last 1-2 decades? Makes sense.
- Kiro 12y ago
  > Productivity keeps going up but wages don't. Source?
- tsotha 12y ago
  But total compensation does. Companies are paying workers the same (in constant dollars), but the amount they're paying to employ that worker goes up. The real problem here is productivity increases have been almost entirely soaked up by the increase in the cost of health care.
cousin_it 12y ago
I think competition is the main villain here. Zero-sum games, prisoner's dilemmas, arms races and tragedies of the commons stole the four-hour workday from us, and many other good things besides. A nice toy example is "20% time" at companies like Google, which tends to evaporate as soon as your performance evaluation compared to your peers becomes tied to your performance at your main project. The only solution to competition is centrally enforced precommitment. First, the government should actually enforce the eight-hour workday. Then it should reduce the workday, for all employers at once, so no one can get ahead by cheating. I don't see any other solution.
- privong 12y ago
  > The only solution to competition is centrally enforced precommitment. First, the government should actually enforce the eight-hour workday. Then it should reduce the workday, for all employers at once, so no one can get ahead by cheating. I don't see any other solution. This would not really be a solution. All it would result in is more people taking work home, because job evaluations would still be based on how much progress one made on the primary project. To get ahead and get that next promotion, many people would still feel compelled to work extra (unreported) hours. I suspect a madate such as what you propose would simply push the long work-days into being unreported. This is basically what happens in graduate school (in the US, at least). I just finished a PhD program; as part of our contrats students agreed to only work 20 hours per week. There is no way one could finish a dissertation working on 20 hours per week, so everyone worked longer hours. Sure, you could complain about how many hours you worked (and some people did), but that did not change the fact that only 10–20% of Astronomy PhDs get faculty jobs, so if you want that faculty job, you need to put in the hours to do great research, regardless of the mandated 20 hour limit.
  - bmj 12y ago
    Do you think there /is/ a solution to the problem? Or is this just one of the side effects of capitalism? I'm not trolling here...just curious. My own mind tends to go in the direction of the parent, but, I also see how enforcement would be next to impossible.
thelucky41 12y ago
In the past century, the average retirement age has been steadily decreasing up until very recently when it began going up again[1]. People spend more time in school earlier, but education usually leads to working later in life as well[2]. [1] http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1992/07/art3full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1992/07/art3full.pdf [2] http://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/IB_11-11-508.pdf http://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/IB_11-11-508.pd...
- cenhyperion 12y ago
  > education usually leads to working later in life as well Do either of these explore why? My initial uninformed guess is that knowledge based fields many college grads go into are much less tied to physical fitness and thus workers are able to continue their jobs later into life when physical labor wouldn't be possible.
MaggieL 12y ago
Maybe someone could suggest to Fauxcohontas that printing money and giving it away to those you deem worthy has an impact on wages and prices.
notahacker 12y ago
Not only are the goods positional, but also much of the new work that's been created. The extra hours aren't replacing children on the farm or in the factories (the developing work takes on those jobs as a much lower cost). They're being created in professions like marketing, banking and civil law which exist to a large extent more to defend their employers' margins from competition than improve productive output. A corollary of this is that, purely theoretically, a four hour workweek might be achievable for the middle classes simply by trading those hours worked that have a negative impact on the economy as a whole for leisure. The problem is that nobody knows which half of their advertising budget is wasted (but there will be no shortage consultants willing to charge expensive hourly rates to offer an opinion), and everybody knows that even though their own exceptionally hard-working investment manager spent hours making the wrong bets against the economic downturn, somebody sat on the upside of that trade and everybody would suffer if there was no liquidity whatsoever. Beyond positional goods, the other money-suckers are higher education and healthcare, which are both on the one hand arguably an extremely good thing for increasingly large amounts of economic surplus to be thrown at despite inevitably diminishing returns, and on the other hand utterly ridiculous in the US.
enraged_camel 12y ago
>>People who don't work at all. That's the choice (maybe more like outcome) the society went with. For what might the first time in history, the rich are working more than the poor[1] and labour participation rates are dropping[2]. Wow! Sorry, but did you actually read and critically analyze the links you provided? The first link for example is utterly ridiculous. First, it defines "rich" people as those who have a Bachelor's degree. In which bizarro world is this actually true? Second, the author argues that these so-called rich people work more because of factors like "winner takes all" and "earning more money makes leisure more expensive." Whereas he completely ignores the elephant in the room, which is that poor people are almost always hourly and are discouraged (if not forbidden) from working overtime. In contrast, higher-paid workers are salaried, so of course their companies do their best to suck as much work out of them as possible. This fact alone can single-handedly explain the discrepancy in work hours. Of course, what the submitted article is talking about when it says "rich" is actual rich people. You know, those who have "fuck-you money," either because they come from wealthy families or because they made a lucky exit. Those people don't have to work at all, and in fact most of them don't.

sp332 12y ago

It's not that the current situation is really bad, but things seem to have stopped improving. Productivity keeps going up but wages don't.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
http://anticap.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/fig2_prodhhincome.jpg http://anticap.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/fig2_prodhhincome... This is where the 4 hour work week went. Disclaimer: I am an ardent supporter of work hours being reduced as productivity rises.
- spindritf 12y ago
  I'm guessing those wages exclude benefits, because when you consider total compensation it actually reflects growth in productivity. Total employee compensation as a share of national income was 66 percent of national income in 1970 and 64 percent in 2006. This measure of the labor compensation share has been remarkably stable since the 1970s. It rose from an average of 62 percent in the decade of the 1960s to 66 percent in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s and then declined to 65 percent in the decade of the 1990s where it has again been from 2000 until the most recent quarter. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953 http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    Possibly. Excluded benefits like health insurance? The cost of which has skyrocketed over the last 1-2 decades? Makes sense.
Kiro 12y ago
> Productivity keeps going up but wages don't. Source?
tsotha 12y ago
But total compensation does. Companies are paying workers the same (in constant dollars), but the amount they're paying to employ that worker goes up. The real problem here is productivity increases have been almost entirely soaked up by the increase in the cost of health care.

cousin_it 12y ago

I think competition is the main villain here. Zero-sum games, prisoner's dilemmas, arms races and tragedies of the commons stole the four-hour workday from us, and many other good things besides. A nice toy example is "20% time" at companies like Google, which tends to evaporate as soon as your performance evaluation compared to your peers becomes tied to your performance at your main project. The only solution to competition is centrally enforced precommitment. First, the government should actually enforce the eight-hour workday. Then it should reduce the workday, for all employers at once, so no one can get ahead by cheating. I don't see any other solution.

privong 12y ago
> The only solution to competition is centrally enforced precommitment. First, the government should actually enforce the eight-hour workday. Then it should reduce the workday, for all employers at once, so no one can get ahead by cheating. I don't see any other solution. This would not really be a solution. All it would result in is more people taking work home, because job evaluations would still be based on how much progress one made on the primary project. To get ahead and get that next promotion, many people would still feel compelled to work extra (unreported) hours. I suspect a madate such as what you propose would simply push the long work-days into being unreported. This is basically what happens in graduate school (in the US, at least). I just finished a PhD program; as part of our contrats students agreed to only work 20 hours per week. There is no way one could finish a dissertation working on 20 hours per week, so everyone worked longer hours. Sure, you could complain about how many hours you worked (and some people did), but that did not change the fact that only 10–20% of Astronomy PhDs get faculty jobs, so if you want that faculty job, you need to put in the hours to do great research, regardless of the mandated 20 hour limit.
- bmj 12y ago
  Do you think there /is/ a solution to the problem? Or is this just one of the side effects of capitalism? I'm not trolling here...just curious. My own mind tends to go in the direction of the parent, but, I also see how enforcement would be next to impossible.

thelucky41 12y ago

In the past century, the average retirement age has been steadily decreasing up until very recently when it began going up again[1]. People spend more time in school earlier, but education usually leads to working later in life as well[2]. [1] http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1992/07/art3full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1992/07/art3full.pdf [2] http://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/IB_11-11-508.pdf http://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/IB_11-11-508.pd...

cenhyperion 12y ago
> education usually leads to working later in life as well Do either of these explore why? My initial uninformed guess is that knowledge based fields many college grads go into are much less tied to physical fitness and thus workers are able to continue their jobs later into life when physical labor wouldn't be possible.

MaggieL 12y ago

Maybe someone could suggest to Fauxcohontas that printing money and giving it away to those you deem worthy has an impact on wages and prices.

notahacker 12y ago

Not only are the goods positional, but also much of the new work that's been created. The extra hours aren't replacing children on the farm or in the factories (the developing work takes on those jobs as a much lower cost). They're being created in professions like marketing, banking and civil law which exist to a large extent more to defend their employers' margins from competition than improve productive output. A corollary of this is that, purely theoretically, a four hour workweek might be achievable for the middle classes simply by trading those hours worked that have a negative impact on the economy as a whole for leisure. The problem is that nobody knows which half of their advertising budget is wasted (but there will be no shortage consultants willing to charge expensive hourly rates to offer an opinion), and everybody knows that even though their own exceptionally hard-working investment manager spent hours making the wrong bets against the economic downturn, somebody sat on the upside of that trade and everybody would suffer if there was no liquidity whatsoever. Beyond positional goods, the other money-suckers are higher education and healthcare, which are both on the one hand arguably an extremely good thing for increasingly large amounts of economic surplus to be thrown at despite inevitably diminishing returns, and on the other hand utterly ridiculous in the US.

enraged_camel 12y ago

>>People who don't work at all. That's the choice (maybe more like outcome) the society went with. For what might the first time in history, the rich are working more than the poor[1] and labour participation rates are dropping[2]. Wow! Sorry, but did you actually read and critically analyze the links you provided? The first link for example is utterly ridiculous. First, it defines "rich" people as those who have a Bachelor's degree. In which bizarro world is this actually true? Second, the author argues that these so-called rich people work more because of factors like "winner takes all" and "earning more money makes leisure more expensive." Whereas he completely ignores the elephant in the room, which is that poor people are almost always hourly and are discouraged (if not forbidden) from working overtime. In contrast, higher-paid workers are salaried, so of course their companies do their best to suck as much work out of them as possible. This fact alone can single-handedly explain the discrepancy in work hours. Of course, what the submitted article is talking about when it says "rich" is actual rich people. You know, those who have "fuck-you money," either because they come from wealthy families or because they made a lucky exit. Those people don't have to work at all, and in fact most of them don't.