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.
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.
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.
>>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.
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].
Capitalism`s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The profit motive is so strong that it often ends up creating irrational scenarios such as the economic situation we have today.
European countries seem to have struck a far better balance by harnessing the profit motive of capitalism while preventing disasters such as for-profit healthcare, for-profit education, for-profit government policies (for the rich), for-profit prisons, etc.
It is fascinating how powerful cultural and institutional momentum can be. I regularly run into very intelligent and rational Americans (particularly on HN!) who defend American institutions (e.g. healthcare) in spite of all the widespread data about them being massively inefficient.
In the end, we reap what we sow. The profit motive brings great riches, but to a tiny few. The rest, sadly, often become the servants who enable the lifestyles of these outliers. Conversely, the outliers become the American Dream, seducing the average worker ever onwards with promises of riches and comfort just a few lucky breaks away.
That and the absolute horrible response to the word Socialism which is equated directly with Communism by large parts of the electorate.
The US system is very good at produce big winners at the expense of everyone else - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM astounded me even though I already knew the distribution was inequitable.
Please explain how for-profit education is a disaster. By all measures, private schools in the US are superior to public schools, and the US's private universities are consistently rated best in the world.
You also can't generalize about e.g. for-profit healthcare based on the American situation, because the regulatory environment is so extreme as to have to created a government-controlled crony-capitalistic oligopoly. The for-profit healthcare in less regulated countries like Mexico is inexpensive and amazing.
When America was still Capitalistic, still had a functioning free market system, the results it produced in both education and healthcare put the European welfare state model to shame. If you go back 30, 40, 50 years America embarrassed most of Europe in both healthcare and education. For decades America had both the best healthcare system, and a very cost effective system. That reputation has only been lost in the last 20 years.
It's only the last two decades, with America's collapse into a second-rate welfare state in the French model, with the unemployment and debt to go with it, that a very select few European countries have caught up (most of which are tiny, homogenous and generally locked down on immigration; and the prime example, Norway, only got there due to half a barrel of oil per day per person).
Most of Europe consists of impoverished, backwards welfare states. It seems a lot of people like to pretend Spain doesn't have 36% real unemployment, that Portugal isn't as poor as it is, Greece isn't still watching its failed soft-socialism model erode as promises can't be kept, and they seem to like to pretend that eastern Europe doesn't exist at all. There are only a few countries in all of Europe in fact, that are good examples. Germany is the only large example that is working, both the UK and France are drowning in massive piles of debt, having stolen from the future to fake present prosperity. Denmark and the Netherlands are two of the most indebted nations on earth per capita, both having stolen from the future to fake today as well.
I hardly see any examples where the European welfare state model has actually worked. I'd love someone to show me where I'm wrong about stealing from the future to fake present prosperity via massive debt accumulation.
Why do you think private healthcare isn't working? Free market is typically inefficient if 1) there's not enough competition or 2) customers don't make optimal market decisions. Which one is it in private healthcare?
Poor negotiation and group think stole the 4 hour workday.
I've seen companies where you can have 2 devs working on the same project, one making say $30,000-40,000 and one making like $60,000-70,000. They do the same work, but have wildly different valuations because of their ability to negotiate.
If people negotiated higher rates and fewer hours, that is entirely possible to achieve and eventually could be the norm, but most people don't negotiate for anything. They think an extra $2,000/yr. is a big win, but then turn around and work an extra 10 hours a week at a job they hate.
The value in unions was that they would negotiate harder than individuals will. They perhaps outlive their usefulness and aren't great as an entity that should last forever because demanding more money every year doesn't always work if the company isn't having a good year, but the point still stands that lack of negotiating power is a problem.
C levels executives make outsized amounts of money because of 2 things - the higher you get in an organization, the better you probably are at negotiating (otherwise you wouldn't make it to the top), and many have agents that negotiate on their behalf (just like pro athletes).
I'm not an expert at negotiation, but I do know that the people who know how to negotiate well can get wins that the average person can't comprehend. A lot of people could negotiate their way into a 4 hour workday if they tried, they just don't know how.
I appreciate your comment the most. If you want something then make it happen. Don't wait for the slow crawl of society to take you where you want to go.
This is not well thought out:
"If everyone worked fewer hours, for instance, there would be more jobs for the unemployed to fill. The economy wouldn’t be able to produce quite as much, which means it wouldn’t be able to pollute as much, either; rich countries where people work fewer hours tend to have lower carbon footprints."
The economy is not a zero sum system, almost by definition. Working less will not mean more jobs are available. In fact, lower economic output may reduce the number of jobs available significantly.
Also, correlation does not imply causation. Modern societies with lower carbon footprints are those with smaller industrial/shipping industries and good public transit. That probably correlates pretty well with reduced working hours, but selling this a ecological alternative is a bit of a stretch.
I prefer to think about USA as no-vacation-nation. Just because it's good to think that there a lot of guys working 24/7 and if you don't do so, you are retired.
You can't do the smart work more than 4 hours a day, right, maybe it's just beyond energy exchange capacity in our brain that support extra concentration.
But everyone have a lot of a dumb work, documentation, settling professional conflicts in mail, pinging standstill tasks, routine refactorings or other forms of small product polishing, whatever.
I'm not sure that the 4 of "smart work" is including all those 20% of work giving 80% of value, its sounds funny but sometimes you have too much energy to do very valuable routine.
If you have predisposition to depression (as i do) you can liberate your own time and just waste it to extension your depression experience. Wow it's really worth it.
Depression is just negation of any actions. When external factors is punching your arse its hard to negate. When not, welcome to slow way down.
As an immigrant who has been in the USA for some 15 odd years, I think this is about right. I've done a fair bit of traveling, and imho parts of Europe, South Asian & South American countries have a very work-less, pro-vacation culture. Its like, lets work a little bit for the money & then go home & spend time with the family. Here in the USA, I worked with Partners & MDs at GS with multi-million $ networth, and they'd still show up to work at 7am & leave work at 7pm. I'd often wonder what the motivation was. Too much peer pressure. Partners work 12 hours, so MDs clock in 13, so VPs are forced to do 14 & associates all-nighters. Forget 4 hours, if you can get Wall St to do the regular 8 hours instead of 12+, that would be an achievement in itself.
This could be done, but it'd need to be some kind of modern take on the old labor movement. People want 4 hour workdays, but they don't believe it'll change. Set up a site to allow people to specify their employer and essentially "opt-in", expressing their support for a 4-hour workday, but make it anonymous insofar as you'll only see a number of people at your workplace that share the same sentiment. There'd need to be some unique key to confirm that each person can only opt-in once. Compare the opt-in number to the number of employees reported on a company's tax paperwork, have the site get popular (whole project in itself unless there's good grassroots support), and suddenly you've got a nice obvious display of support within various companies for the 4-hour workday. Making it harder to ignore the will of the masses (or at least verifying that such a will exists) is a good start, I think.
Universal basic income is the case that gives the rich, ruling class the maximum power over everyone else. Everyone gets dependent on government money, and it takes an act of Congress to increase the baseline pay.
I disagree, BI doesn't mean that people would be more (or less) dependent on government money. BI is about a different structure of income redistribution, the magnitude of income redistribution is a different problem. The BI could be $1 per year.
Although what many BI proponents actually want is to increase the magnitude of income redistribution, they want a system where you get livable money even if you don't work, no question asked.
It's a horrendous idea for several reasons. Are we so out of ideas to fix our problems, we're now saying that working less and giving away money to people is the answer?
When you give away money without the commensurate work in a capitalist economy, prices explode, and inflation is the same as lower wages. We get away with subsidizing food. Food is cheap, there's a massive supply.
Things that we've declared human rights and there is not an unlimited supply..
Medical care and college tuition. Both we've directed massive capital inflows towards. We don't even raid the treasury for the latter, we put the crushing debt on the kids. At best, permanently making their future a little dimmer.
This basic income crap is not the answer. These people need to learn something about how capitalism works. Only giving value to others is compensated. Do some powerful folks extract too much from the system. Yes. Nothing a tweak of the tax code wouldn't fix. We need some laws changed for sure. They won't do it though, too many cowards.
> “If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful,” Benjamin Franklin assumed, “that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life.”
True, but I hope we aspire to more than necessities and comforts of life. If we worked more and directed the effort, Armstrong might be a name of a town 240,000 miles away.
[+] [-] spindritf|11 years ago|reply
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...
[2] http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/08/18/equitable-growth-make-...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Paren...
[+] [-] cousin_it|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sp332|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notahacker|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thelucky41|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1992/07/art3full.pdf [2] http://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/IB_11-11-508.pd...
[+] [-] MaggieL|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FD3SA|11 years ago|reply
European countries seem to have struck a far better balance by harnessing the profit motive of capitalism while preventing disasters such as for-profit healthcare, for-profit education, for-profit government policies (for the rich), for-profit prisons, etc.
It is fascinating how powerful cultural and institutional momentum can be. I regularly run into very intelligent and rational Americans (particularly on HN!) who defend American institutions (e.g. healthcare) in spite of all the widespread data about them being massively inefficient.
In the end, we reap what we sow. The profit motive brings great riches, but to a tiny few. The rest, sadly, often become the servants who enable the lifestyles of these outliers. Conversely, the outliers become the American Dream, seducing the average worker ever onwards with promises of riches and comfort just a few lucky breaks away.
[+] [-] noir_lord|11 years ago|reply
The US system is very good at produce big winners at the expense of everyone else - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM astounded me even though I already knew the distribution was inequitable.
[+] [-] wyager|11 years ago|reply
You also can't generalize about e.g. for-profit healthcare based on the American situation, because the regulatory environment is so extreme as to have to created a government-controlled crony-capitalistic oligopoly. The for-profit healthcare in less regulated countries like Mexico is inexpensive and amazing.
[+] [-] adventured|11 years ago|reply
It's only the last two decades, with America's collapse into a second-rate welfare state in the French model, with the unemployment and debt to go with it, that a very select few European countries have caught up (most of which are tiny, homogenous and generally locked down on immigration; and the prime example, Norway, only got there due to half a barrel of oil per day per person).
Most of Europe consists of impoverished, backwards welfare states. It seems a lot of people like to pretend Spain doesn't have 36% real unemployment, that Portugal isn't as poor as it is, Greece isn't still watching its failed soft-socialism model erode as promises can't be kept, and they seem to like to pretend that eastern Europe doesn't exist at all. There are only a few countries in all of Europe in fact, that are good examples. Germany is the only large example that is working, both the UK and France are drowning in massive piles of debt, having stolen from the future to fake present prosperity. Denmark and the Netherlands are two of the most indebted nations on earth per capita, both having stolen from the future to fake today as well.
I hardly see any examples where the European welfare state model has actually worked. I'd love someone to show me where I'm wrong about stealing from the future to fake present prosperity via massive debt accumulation.
[+] [-] RivieraKid|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] programminggeek|11 years ago|reply
I've seen companies where you can have 2 devs working on the same project, one making say $30,000-40,000 and one making like $60,000-70,000. They do the same work, but have wildly different valuations because of their ability to negotiate.
If people negotiated higher rates and fewer hours, that is entirely possible to achieve and eventually could be the norm, but most people don't negotiate for anything. They think an extra $2,000/yr. is a big win, but then turn around and work an extra 10 hours a week at a job they hate.
The value in unions was that they would negotiate harder than individuals will. They perhaps outlive their usefulness and aren't great as an entity that should last forever because demanding more money every year doesn't always work if the company isn't having a good year, but the point still stands that lack of negotiating power is a problem.
C levels executives make outsized amounts of money because of 2 things - the higher you get in an organization, the better you probably are at negotiating (otherwise you wouldn't make it to the top), and many have agents that negotiate on their behalf (just like pro athletes).
I'm not an expert at negotiation, but I do know that the people who know how to negotiate well can get wins that the average person can't comprehend. A lot of people could negotiate their way into a 4 hour workday if they tried, they just don't know how.
[+] [-] jondtaylor|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiritplumber|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_va|11 years ago|reply
The economy is not a zero sum system, almost by definition. Working less will not mean more jobs are available. In fact, lower economic output may reduce the number of jobs available significantly.
Also, correlation does not imply causation. Modern societies with lower carbon footprints are those with smaller industrial/shipping industries and good public transit. That probably correlates pretty well with reduced working hours, but selling this a ecological alternative is a bit of a stretch.
[+] [-] mrjj|11 years ago|reply
You can't do the smart work more than 4 hours a day, right, maybe it's just beyond energy exchange capacity in our brain that support extra concentration.
But everyone have a lot of a dumb work, documentation, settling professional conflicts in mail, pinging standstill tasks, routine refactorings or other forms of small product polishing, whatever.
I'm not sure that the 4 of "smart work" is including all those 20% of work giving 80% of value, its sounds funny but sometimes you have too much energy to do very valuable routine.
If you have predisposition to depression (as i do) you can liberate your own time and just waste it to extension your depression experience. Wow it's really worth it.
Depression is just negation of any actions. When external factors is punching your arse its hard to negate. When not, welcome to slow way down.
[+] [-] dxbydt|11 years ago|reply
As an immigrant who has been in the USA for some 15 odd years, I think this is about right. I've done a fair bit of traveling, and imho parts of Europe, South Asian & South American countries have a very work-less, pro-vacation culture. Its like, lets work a little bit for the money & then go home & spend time with the family. Here in the USA, I worked with Partners & MDs at GS with multi-million $ networth, and they'd still show up to work at 7am & leave work at 7pm. I'd often wonder what the motivation was. Too much peer pressure. Partners work 12 hours, so MDs clock in 13, so VPs are forced to do 14 & associates all-nighters. Forget 4 hours, if you can get Wall St to do the regular 8 hours instead of 12+, that would be an achievement in itself.
[+] [-] afarrell|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheepin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahyarm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taber|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RankingMember|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RivieraKid|11 years ago|reply
Although what many BI proponents actually want is to increase the magnitude of income redistribution, they want a system where you get livable money even if you don't work, no question asked.
[+] [-] dpweb|11 years ago|reply
When you give away money without the commensurate work in a capitalist economy, prices explode, and inflation is the same as lower wages. We get away with subsidizing food. Food is cheap, there's a massive supply.
Things that we've declared human rights and there is not an unlimited supply.. Medical care and college tuition. Both we've directed massive capital inflows towards. We don't even raid the treasury for the latter, we put the crushing debt on the kids. At best, permanently making their future a little dimmer.
This basic income crap is not the answer. These people need to learn something about how capitalism works. Only giving value to others is compensated. Do some powerful folks extract too much from the system. Yes. Nothing a tweak of the tax code wouldn't fix. We need some laws changed for sure. They won't do it though, too many cowards.
[+] [-] Kiro|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiritplumber|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avz|11 years ago|reply
True, but I hope we aspire to more than necessities and comforts of life. If we worked more and directed the effort, Armstrong might be a name of a town 240,000 miles away.
[+] [-] qwerta|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dijit|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emo_tards_on_hn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|11 years ago|reply