I think three day weekends would be undeniably good for the health of our society and everyone living in it.
I have long (semi-jokingly) professed belief in the Church of the SubGenius. They extol the virtues of slack. I think the intended meaning of “slack” is as in “to slack off.” But I choose to believe in it as slack (i.e. spare capacity) in a system.
While some might use that extra day to slack off, plenty more would use that day to invest labors in their communities, maybe to get some exercise, maybe do some neglected repairs around the house.
I feel like in the name of efficiency, we’ve purged a lot of slack from the system, but that has left us with a lot of institutions that are at risk for catastrophic failure. For people who are stretched to their breaking point, there needs to be more slack.
According to the theory of constraints (on which I am expert since I read 1 graphic novel, The Goal, and 1 novel, The Phoenix Project) systems without slack become exponentially slower until no work is capable of getting done anymore.
The reason for this are statistical perturbations in stochastic events. If a task takes a worker rand(1,4) units of time you can expect them to do day/1 to day/4 tasks in the day.
You look at the worker doing day/1 tasks and you say, "Well shit, that person is slacking most of the time. Most of these tasks take 2 units, 4 is very rare". So you ask them to work harder and impose rules so they must perform day/3 number of tasks per day.
You look at your constantly busy workers and you're happy. No more slack in the system.
But your assembly line grinds to a halt. Nothing ever gets done anymore. Everyone is busy all the time. Everyone's always working. But nothing is finishing.
What gives?
Turns out any task that hits N=4 on the random curve, wreaks havoc and you fall behind. Then you have both yesterday's and today's tasks to do. You can't. The next day ... well the problem ends up growing exponentially.
I used to work 4x10 hour days, I took the Wednesday off though - no more than two days in a row was great, and having a day off in the week while most were at work was so much more efficient
I now take 2-4 hours a day off during the day instead.
In the US, if you don't work, you don't get paid, so this sounds like a recipe for disaster for most workers here. Small to medium businesses would potentially be losing 42 days a year of production (52 days - 10 days std vacation time) and that would hurt the profits that they would need to increase wages to make up for that lost day per week just for the workers. Shareholders will still expect year-over-year increase in profits, which won't happen if you're paying people who aren't working.
Where exactly is that happiness supposed to come from? Workers may be miserable, but less money equals even more misery, near as I can tell. I guess the rich will be happy.
We should all aim for 4 days as the ideal instead of 5, but we should also drop the M-F work, S-S weekend ideal too. For large chunks of the workforce they're already working something other than M-F anyway because we want 7 day coverage of our retail and service sectors. More professionals - dentists and veterinarians and insurance offices and you name it - should be open on the "weekend" or should not all dentists need to share the same "weekend", especially if we're dropping down to a 4-on, 3-off standard.
If for no other reason, we build a lot of infrastructure for "peak" usage, like rush hour traffic. If we all have the same 3 day weekend that means we have lower "weekend" traffic one more day but the peaks stay the same, but if we better distributed our weekends, overall peak would go down a bit.
It's a whole new set of coordination problems, of course, but we don't all go to church on Sundays anymore, we don't all need to be off the same day.
I get what you are saying, but presumably weekends still exist because families and friends want to do group activities at a time when all are available. If you have children younger than 12 or so you need to be available when they are not in school.
True enough except that you won't stop making a racket. I, and most other people I know, want a day when it is quiet, no rush and bustle, no noisy traffic, no noisy diy. Where I live it is normal to not mow the lawn or do any construction work outside the house on a Sunday and not do do any noisy work inside either if the neighbours could hear it.
Why on earth should an insurance office be open at the weekend? Come to think of it: why does such a thing even exist. I have not visited a bricks and mortar office to arrange insurance in the last forty years, I don't think they do exist here any more (Norway). Same for banks. And if I have a dental emergency then I go to the emergency dentist, otherwise I ask my usual dentist for an appointment during the week.
I agree. State-enforced Monday-Friday is just bad. In Poland they pretend it's about the employees, while in reality it's the government throwing a bone to the Church. Polish Church is heavily engaged in politics. But to limit employee abuse (rampant in Poland), the working days would have to be fixed in the contract. Plenty of people want to get something done on weekends when they have the most free time, but can't. Someone who is not a catholic would likely have no objections to working on Sunday.
Working as a programmer, I already started de facto shortening my shifts without cheating on my employer: on 7th, and especially 8th hour, I don't write new code anymore unless it's in places I have very solid understanding of. My mind tends to slow down in the final hours, and it takes a lot of effort to come up with something new, and my bug rate increases.
What do I do instead? Binge read documentation to learn about new functions and parameters that may make my work easier. Tweak vim configuration. Experiment with new shell commands. Clean up my email inbox and various notifications.
These activities still push the work forward, but don't require as much creative juice and there's no consequence for mistake.
I would still prefer a 4 day week, but it's the next best thing.
Same principle applies in the gym - you start out the workout with the super strenuous squats and deadlifts, then move to the difficult bench press and dips, then finish with relatively easy bicep curls, tricep pushdown, and cardio.
Some things just can't be done effectively unless you're above a certain level of rest; other things can be done even if you're tired. It just makes sense to sort things into the period of time where you can actually do them.
In coding this extends all the way to watching lightweight YouTube videos about coding late at night when you're tired.
I think too many people are willing to take a pay cut to do this. If you believe you will be as or more productive, or that your skills and knowledge are more valuable than just your raw time, you should consider negotiating a 4 day week with no pay cut.
To chime in here, I've only ever worked part-time as a programmer. I'm in the UK, so YMMV, but if you're looking for part-time programming roles (i.e. 4-day working week, what I work) just ask. A lot of places are pretty open about 4 day work weeks. Some places jeer and it's a firm no. But it's worth a stab. Generally, the atmosphere is improving and the stigma seems to be dying off.
Yup, went contracting for this reason. Code is a passion of my and I love that it's also my trade but I have other personal ventures I need to focus my attention on and I have absolutely no juice left in a regular 5day/40hrs engineering week.
So you point is since programmers can negotiate preferable working conditions (which include both salaries and work schedule most of blue-collar workers can only dream of) they need unions to negotiate for them because otherwise they can't get working conditions they'd prefer, even though there's evidence they're already getting it. I think you broke my logic parser.
I've long argued for a 4-day 6-hour-day work week. I've even questioned a few potential employers about it, citing research: I've even offered to take a pay cut (per hour, i.e. hourly rate was cheaper than for 5-day 8-hour day weeks), but nobody was interested.
They would frequently say how they are not interested in "part time" work. I'd counter that this is full time work, with efficiency higher than the full time work, because people can focus on intellectually hard problems only for a short while sustainably. Sure, I can put in a couple of weeks of 12h days, but after that, I'd struggle to put in 4h days of quality, focused work (well known as burnout). Similarly, 8h days are not sustainable either, though it takes longer to burn out.
As people have noted, the extra time I get would not be spent in pyjamas watching netflix: it would be quality time with my family, working on projects and research, etc (if it wasn't for miserable pay and state of academia, I'd probably be doing research exclusively). Civilization as a whole would benefit as a result if there were more people putting their brains to problems they think matter. And as stated numerous times, even employeers would benefit.
But alas, when there's the next guy willing to submit to the "norm", it's hard to get the ball rolling.
> They would frequently say how they are not interested in "part time" work. I'd counter that this is full time work, with efficiency higher than the full time work, because people can focus on intellectually hard problems only for a short while sustainably.
Is it really true? Can you prove it? I mean you can argue that, but if you're absent 20% of the time compared to other workers, is it true that your value is still the same because you're so much more productive? Maybe yes, but can you prove it to an employer? You're asking them to take a risk on supporting unfamiliar approach - which their familiar approach probably worked for them for years and they are fine with it. What do you offer them to justify taking this risk? I mean, maybe you are so spectacular that employing you is worth any risk. But naturally most people aren't that exceptional, by definition. Their experience shows 5-day weeks works great for them, how much better would be 4-day week to justify the risks?
> Civilization as a whole would benefit as a result if there were more people putting their brains to problems they think matter.
Is there any proof that there's significant marginal increase compared to thousands of existing research institutions that have tens of thousands of very smart people already spending years attacking practically every important problem? Would amateurs spending one day a week on side projects significantly change the picture here - and offset the above-mentioned professionals not spending one day a week on their area of expertise (instead doing their hobbies in turn)? I am not sure this is that obvious.
I am VP engineering in a 100 person company with 30 engineers. Noone is asked to work more than 40 hours and <5% do actually work more.
I will happily have someone work 4 days 8 hours and 30% of our devs are in such a model.
But I would not go below this (especially not less than 4 days in the office). Devs aren't working in total isolation, but are heavily involved in their cross functional product teams. Reducing availability further has an above linear hit on team productivity as colleagues become more and more blocked in their own tasks.
So: just saying this is more complex than looking at increased per-hour productivity of a single person
I recently read Sebastian Junger's Tribe, which had many memorable takeaways for me.
One, in particular, was the assertion that, historically, subsistence farmers and the like generally only needed to work, on average, 12 hours per week.
While I know modern farming practices require copious amounts of work, it is nonetheless an interesting idea.
Imagine all the remaining time to just sit in sun or socialize.
> the extra time I get would not be spent in pyjamas watching netflix: it would be quality time with my family
why would it matter where the extra time goes. you're saying that caring for your kids is more important than a single guy working at the gym or watching netflix. everyone has his priorities and none are more important than others.
In The Netherlands /a lot/ of people work 4-day workweeks already [0]. It's not that novel. But it'd be good if more countries could largely make the switch.
Due to the progressive tax in The Netherlands, working 5 days instead of 4 doesn't earn /that/ much more money and if you have toddlers, you will spend a day less for daycare, a day extra with your kids and probably have more time for the fun things in life as well.
As a salaried employee I often chose a 4-day workweek as well when living in The Netherlands. But once I started freelancing, the 5-day workweek seemed the better choice for me. As freelancer you are taxed a bit less compared to a salaried employee, so there's more incentive to make as much money as possible during the workweek.
At my small (Dutch) company the standard contract is 36 hours, so most employees work 4 × 8. I have a four month old son, and my wife normally works 4 × 8 as well, but she does 3 × 8 + 4 until we find our bearings with the young one.
That means two days of daycare (partly subsidized by the government), one day, each, at home with the child, and one day where she works from home for four hours.
This is fairly typical for white collar workers in the Netherlands. Four days is more than enough for me.
"In thirty years America will be a post-industrial society with a per capita income of $ 7,500. There will be only four work days a week of seven hours per day. The year will be comprised of 39 work weeks and 13 weeks of vacation. With weekends and holidays this makes 147 work days a year and 218 free days. All this within a single generation."
From The American Challenge by Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber published in 1967. Too bad this will never happen since most managers are workaholics.
The most famous prediction along those lines surely is Keynes' essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren from 1930 [1], in which he entertained the notion that "a hundred years hence" "the economic problem may be solved", "the standard of life in progressive countries [...] will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day", and would work "Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week", but mainly to stave off boredom.
This inspired the book How Much Is Enough? by Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky and his brother [2].
Keynes' essay had some non-PC parts: he feared
> a nervous breakdown of the sort which is already common enough in England and the United States amongst the wives of the well-to-do classes, unfortunate women, many of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations — who cannot find it sufficiently amusing, when deprived of the spur of economic necessity, to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing.
It also had some utopian dreams:
> The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
)
I'm my estimation - you can almost live this way if you limit your expectations to someone from 1967 - limited food choices, single car, small home, frugal car-based vacations and heathy living.
There us nothing to disagree with here, but I feel like America is so far to the right that an idea like this will be answered with "people are so lazy" and "you signed a contract" or something similarly ridiculous.
My response to all this is wasn't the goal of our forefathers to give us a better life? Doesn't that mean less hours working? Even if my parents grew up in the best economic period of the past thousand years, shouldn't my life be marginally better then their's?
Maybe I am a "wuss" compared to the people who stormed Normandy, but maybe those people are wusses compared to medival people, and those people are wusses compared to cavemen, shouldn't you want to create the type of world where your wuss children can survive?
The problem is there are so many over-demand jobs and under-demand jobs because schools stole so many billions from students learning information that could not be put to fruitful use. And those jobs are so unequal in how much work they take. So you have many jobs or situations where people are paid to sit and many like in medicine where more people might die if you want to sleep a healthy amount. The time should fit the job. But the pay should fit the time, and then that's the next problem to sove, and on.
I can't imagine doing a project with delivery time pressure (like a startup trying to execute in a timely manner), working only 4 days, with a 3-day gap.
I'd rather have flexible hours, and an emphasis on working sharp in the hours we do put in -- not have frequent 3-day interruptions of project mental space, and putting off gratification in seeing the project come together.
Me too. I feel very lucky to have found a company that is a perfect fit for my skills and interests, and that is at the right stage that me working hard now will make a big difference.
Have there been largeish tests of company wide four-day work weeks in the software sector?
Here in Sweden the movement has mostly been push by the left, and for workers with lower wage/burnout/high amounts of sick leave etc. I think it's mostly been tested in the health care sector. I think it lowered the amount of sick leave, but was too expensive to keep since those type of jobs are very hard to make more productive. I.e, we always need nurses on staff at the ER, or to look after the elderly.
Most office-type work seems that it could potentially benefit from this though.
I work 25 hours a week remotely as freelancer (although I'm available in slack more or less all the time) and earn nearly twice as much as during my PhD. Only that in more than 3 years I never really got into demotivated/frustrated phases. During my PhD I often felt depressed when sitting in the office all day, never getting a bit of daylight... And paying 300€ a month to have someone walk my dog.
I have lots of time for learning new stuff and also teach a course twice a year at a local college for some extra cash.
Started when my daughter was born and never stopped ;). Couldn't be happier and I really hope I can somehow keep it that way.
My dad ran his factory this way from day one. I forget exactly when they started, late 80s I think, and they always worked 4 10 hour days, Monday thru Thursday, 3 day weekend. Worked great when they went to 2 shifts as well. 4 hour a day downtime for maintenance to do their magic each day.
Employees loved it, management loved it, the only ones that complained were some of their very large customers, and even they got used to it after a year of not being able to reach anyone on Friday.
“To be able to work 996 is a huge bliss,” China’s richest man said. “If you want to join Alibaba, you need to be prepared to work 12 hours a day, otherwise why even bother joining.”
European here. This summer I'm taking all Fridays off until October (since I had too many holidays left). Yesterday was the second time, I still showed up in the office but just worked on my own projects all day (it's allowed). Once I was in the flow, I've been doing the same on Saturdays (like today) and Sundays (albeit shorter hours). I'm definitely making more progress than when I was only working on it at night, try it if you have the opportunity (and no kids/spouses of course).
Data point from BigCo: almost no-one (at a US BigCo) would take reduced hours for proportionally less pay.
I work at a silicon valley BigCo, and I work half-time (20 hrs per week). I got this by just asking for it, though it did require high up approval. I didn't even hide the fact that it was for the purpose of personal projects. I get half my salary, and half my stock and bonus. It is still more than plenty to afford living here for me. I have 1 kid.
I've done this for 5 years now, during which time I've spoken to many BigCo colleagues about this, and I'd estimate about 100 of them know my "deal", and so far no-one has followed my path. Note that 80% and 60% are also options.
When asked they uniformly say that they couldn't take the reduction in pay. Median total comp for these people is easily 300k. Some don't even have kids.
So no, if you want to improve society you'd have to force a 4-day work week by law, otherwise no-one will follow-thru.
It's kind of disheartening to read things like this on one hand and on the other hand read news that Austria "increased the flexibility" of the working pattern by bumping up the limit of what is considered legal to 12 hours: http://www.mondaq.com/Austria/x/733020/employee+rights+labou...
Given that this is a country which is in the EU I'm very much worried about this being adopted by more countries and becoming the norm, all in the spirit of maintaining our "competitiveness"
The worst part of this is that it will, like most everything else in the US, be an option for the wealthy, some white collar workers and those fortunate enough to live in California while leaving everyone else behind.
I’m sure this is great for some people, but what about casual workers? What about people that rely on overtime to get by? I can only see this pushing employers into further reducing hours, screwing those people.
We shouldn't optimize society based on the needs of "people that rely on overtime to get by", we should optimize so that people don't have to rely on overtime to get by.
It's like someone was asking back in the day: "Abolishing child labor? What about all those 10 and 12 year olds that depend on their job to eat?"
[+] [-] peatmoss|6 years ago|reply
I have long (semi-jokingly) professed belief in the Church of the SubGenius. They extol the virtues of slack. I think the intended meaning of “slack” is as in “to slack off.” But I choose to believe in it as slack (i.e. spare capacity) in a system.
While some might use that extra day to slack off, plenty more would use that day to invest labors in their communities, maybe to get some exercise, maybe do some neglected repairs around the house.
I feel like in the name of efficiency, we’ve purged a lot of slack from the system, but that has left us with a lot of institutions that are at risk for catastrophic failure. For people who are stretched to their breaking point, there needs to be more slack.
[+] [-] Swizec|6 years ago|reply
The reason for this are statistical perturbations in stochastic events. If a task takes a worker rand(1,4) units of time you can expect them to do day/1 to day/4 tasks in the day.
You look at the worker doing day/1 tasks and you say, "Well shit, that person is slacking most of the time. Most of these tasks take 2 units, 4 is very rare". So you ask them to work harder and impose rules so they must perform day/3 number of tasks per day.
You look at your constantly busy workers and you're happy. No more slack in the system.
But your assembly line grinds to a halt. Nothing ever gets done anymore. Everyone is busy all the time. Everyone's always working. But nothing is finishing.
What gives?
Turns out any task that hits N=4 on the random curve, wreaks havoc and you fall behind. Then you have both yesterday's and today's tasks to do. You can't. The next day ... well the problem ends up growing exponentially.
Efficient systems have slack.
[+] [-] imran3740|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isostatic|6 years ago|reply
I now take 2-4 hours a day off during the day instead.
[+] [-] drivingmenuts|6 years ago|reply
Where exactly is that happiness supposed to come from? Workers may be miserable, but less money equals even more misery, near as I can tell. I guess the rich will be happy.
[+] [-] meej|6 years ago|reply
This is essentially how Tom DeMarco defines it in his book Slack.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack
[+] [-] epaulson|6 years ago|reply
If for no other reason, we build a lot of infrastructure for "peak" usage, like rush hour traffic. If we all have the same 3 day weekend that means we have lower "weekend" traffic one more day but the peaks stay the same, but if we better distributed our weekends, overall peak would go down a bit.
It's a whole new set of coordination problems, of course, but we don't all go to church on Sundays anymore, we don't all need to be off the same day.
[+] [-] david-gpu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|6 years ago|reply
Church has nothing to do with it.
> we don't all need to be off the same day.
True enough except that you won't stop making a racket. I, and most other people I know, want a day when it is quiet, no rush and bustle, no noisy traffic, no noisy diy. Where I live it is normal to not mow the lawn or do any construction work outside the house on a Sunday and not do do any noisy work inside either if the neighbours could hear it.
Why on earth should an insurance office be open at the weekend? Come to think of it: why does such a thing even exist. I have not visited a bricks and mortar office to arrange insurance in the last forty years, I don't think they do exist here any more (Norway). Same for banks. And if I have a dental emergency then I go to the emergency dentist, otherwise I ask my usual dentist for an appointment during the week.
[+] [-] b0rsuk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b0rsuk|6 years ago|reply
What do I do instead? Binge read documentation to learn about new functions and parameters that may make my work easier. Tweak vim configuration. Experiment with new shell commands. Clean up my email inbox and various notifications.
These activities still push the work forward, but don't require as much creative juice and there's no consequence for mistake.
I would still prefer a 4 day week, but it's the next best thing.
[+] [-] jlawson|6 years ago|reply
Same principle applies in the gym - you start out the workout with the super strenuous squats and deadlifts, then move to the difficult bench press and dips, then finish with relatively easy bicep curls, tricep pushdown, and cardio.
Some things just can't be done effectively unless you're above a certain level of rest; other things can be done even if you're tired. It just makes sense to sort things into the period of time where you can actually do them.
In coding this extends all the way to watching lightweight YouTube videos about coding late at night when you're tired.
[+] [-] itamarst|6 years ago|reply
More broadly this is one of many good reasons for programmers to unionize; even if salaries are high, working hours are still far too long.
[+] [-] Rapzid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ASlave2Gravity|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddeokbokki|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] necovek|6 years ago|reply
They would frequently say how they are not interested in "part time" work. I'd counter that this is full time work, with efficiency higher than the full time work, because people can focus on intellectually hard problems only for a short while sustainably. Sure, I can put in a couple of weeks of 12h days, but after that, I'd struggle to put in 4h days of quality, focused work (well known as burnout). Similarly, 8h days are not sustainable either, though it takes longer to burn out.
As people have noted, the extra time I get would not be spent in pyjamas watching netflix: it would be quality time with my family, working on projects and research, etc (if it wasn't for miserable pay and state of academia, I'd probably be doing research exclusively). Civilization as a whole would benefit as a result if there were more people putting their brains to problems they think matter. And as stated numerous times, even employeers would benefit.
But alas, when there's the next guy willing to submit to the "norm", it's hard to get the ball rolling.
[+] [-] smsm42|6 years ago|reply
Is it really true? Can you prove it? I mean you can argue that, but if you're absent 20% of the time compared to other workers, is it true that your value is still the same because you're so much more productive? Maybe yes, but can you prove it to an employer? You're asking them to take a risk on supporting unfamiliar approach - which their familiar approach probably worked for them for years and they are fine with it. What do you offer them to justify taking this risk? I mean, maybe you are so spectacular that employing you is worth any risk. But naturally most people aren't that exceptional, by definition. Their experience shows 5-day weeks works great for them, how much better would be 4-day week to justify the risks?
> Civilization as a whole would benefit as a result if there were more people putting their brains to problems they think matter.
Is there any proof that there's significant marginal increase compared to thousands of existing research institutions that have tens of thousands of very smart people already spending years attacking practically every important problem? Would amateurs spending one day a week on side projects significantly change the picture here - and offset the above-mentioned professionals not spending one day a week on their area of expertise (instead doing their hobbies in turn)? I am not sure this is that obvious.
[+] [-] NewsAware|6 years ago|reply
So: just saying this is more complex than looking at increased per-hour productivity of a single person
[+] [-] loosetypes|6 years ago|reply
I recently read Sebastian Junger's Tribe, which had many memorable takeaways for me.
One, in particular, was the assertion that, historically, subsistence farmers and the like generally only needed to work, on average, 12 hours per week.
While I know modern farming practices require copious amounts of work, it is nonetheless an interesting idea.
Imagine all the remaining time to just sit in sun or socialize.
Progress, what is that?
[+] [-] PunchTornado|6 years ago|reply
why would it matter where the extra time goes. you're saying that caring for your kids is more important than a single guy working at the gym or watching netflix. everyone has his priorities and none are more important than others.
[+] [-] wsc981|6 years ago|reply
Due to the progressive tax in The Netherlands, working 5 days instead of 4 doesn't earn /that/ much more money and if you have toddlers, you will spend a day less for daycare, a day extra with your kids and probably have more time for the fun things in life as well.
As a salaried employee I often chose a 4-day workweek as well when living in The Netherlands. But once I started freelancing, the 5-day workweek seemed the better choice for me. As freelancer you are taxed a bit less compared to a salaried employee, so there's more incentive to make as much money as possible during the workweek.
---
[0]: https://www.equaltimes.org/a-four-day-work-week-is-only-a#.X...
[+] [-] Freak_NL|6 years ago|reply
That means two days of daycare (partly subsidized by the government), one day, each, at home with the child, and one day where she works from home for four hours.
This is fairly typical for white collar workers in the Netherlands. Four days is more than enough for me.
[+] [-] madspindel|6 years ago|reply
From The American Challenge by Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber published in 1967. Too bad this will never happen since most managers are workaholics.
[+] [-] FabHK|6 years ago|reply
This inspired the book How Much Is Enough? by Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky and his brother [2].
Keynes' essay had some non-PC parts: he feared
> a nervous breakdown of the sort which is already common enough in England and the United States amongst the wives of the well-to-do classes, unfortunate women, many of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations — who cannot find it sufficiently amusing, when deprived of the spur of economic necessity, to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing.
It also had some utopian dreams:
> The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. )
[1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Is_Enough%3F_(book)
[+] [-] benjohnson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] frankbreetz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daodedickinson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilv|6 years ago|reply
But I live to work, and often work 7 days.
I can't imagine doing a project with delivery time pressure (like a startup trying to execute in a timely manner), working only 4 days, with a 3-day gap.
I'd rather have flexible hours, and an emphasis on working sharp in the hours we do put in -- not have frequent 3-day interruptions of project mental space, and putting off gratification in seeing the project come together.
[+] [-] stevesimmons|6 years ago|reply
I can't imagine not working 6-7 days a week.
[+] [-] filleokus|6 years ago|reply
Here in Sweden the movement has mostly been push by the left, and for workers with lower wage/burnout/high amounts of sick leave etc. I think it's mostly been tested in the health care sector. I think it lowered the amount of sick leave, but was too expensive to keep since those type of jobs are very hard to make more productive. I.e, we always need nurses on staff at the ER, or to look after the elderly.
Most office-type work seems that it could potentially benefit from this though.
[+] [-] astrobe_|6 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35-hour_workweek
[+] [-] Swizec|6 years ago|reply
https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-only-work-4-days-a-week-du...
[+] [-] mto|6 years ago|reply
I have lots of time for learning new stuff and also teach a course twice a year at a local college for some extra cash.
Started when my daughter was born and never stopped ;). Couldn't be happier and I really hope I can somehow keep it that way.
[+] [-] SteveGerencser|6 years ago|reply
Employees loved it, management loved it, the only ones that complained were some of their very large customers, and even they got used to it after a year of not being able to reach anyone on Friday.
[+] [-] ksec|6 years ago|reply
Instead, not only just tech industry in China, many are now moving more towards 996.
[+] [-] FabHK|6 years ago|reply
Jack Ma, defending 996:
“To be able to work 996 is a huge bliss,” China’s richest man said. “If you want to join Alibaba, you need to be prepared to work 12 hours a day, otherwise why even bother joining.”
[+] [-] disconnection|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hobo_mark|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway82137|6 years ago|reply
I work at a silicon valley BigCo, and I work half-time (20 hrs per week). I got this by just asking for it, though it did require high up approval. I didn't even hide the fact that it was for the purpose of personal projects. I get half my salary, and half my stock and bonus. It is still more than plenty to afford living here for me. I have 1 kid.
I've done this for 5 years now, during which time I've spoken to many BigCo colleagues about this, and I'd estimate about 100 of them know my "deal", and so far no-one has followed my path. Note that 80% and 60% are also options.
When asked they uniformly say that they couldn't take the reduction in pay. Median total comp for these people is easily 300k. Some don't even have kids.
So no, if you want to improve society you'd have to force a 4-day work week by law, otherwise no-one will follow-thru.
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isostatic|6 years ago|reply
With more money, the price of limited resources increases to fill the void.
If a 3 or 4 day week is mandated, there’s less for housing, it’s the same demand, the same supply, so prices have to come down.
[+] [-] sakisv|6 years ago|reply
Given that this is a country which is in the EU I'm very much worried about this being adopted by more countries and becoming the norm, all in the spirit of maintaining our "competitiveness"
[+] [-] asdf21|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purplezooey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vermilingua|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|6 years ago|reply
It's like someone was asking back in the day: "Abolishing child labor? What about all those 10 and 12 year olds that depend on their job to eat?"