
Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video] - rumcajz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=8Pk654J8-5c
======
a3n
Most people don't get to choose how many hours they work.

Employers, especially those that pay benefits, want you working as much as
possible. Anything less is money on the table.

(I'm not an employer.)

It's good for an employer if you work overtime, all he has to pay is time, or
time and a half, or nothing if you're salaried. He doesn't have to pay more
benefits, as he would with an additional employee. Of course an employer wants
to get as much work out of you as possible for benefits paid.

As an employee, working overtime only gets you more cash (or even none).
Working less makes your benefits more valuable.

Even if employment is strictly for money, with no benefits at all, there's an
administrative overhead to hiring and managing more employees.

As long as we are employed by employers, and especially if we get health
insurance through our employer, there will always be pressure to work more,
not less.

~~~
paganel
> Employers, especially those that pay benefits, want you working as much as
> possible. Anything less is money on the table.

That’s exactly Marx’s point when he discusses his theory of Surplus Value. I
know that that theory has been “debunked” and “proven” to be false, but I’m
just reading now about it in its “Grundrisse” (I had read its Capital I some
years ago) and it’s frightening about how right he was about subjects
reguarding capitalism way back in the 1850s (in this particular case about
capitalists’ dependence on their workers’, well, surplus work; if you look at
the issue under this light it makes perfect sense why capitalists would insist
on their workers not decreasing the number of hours they spend working). I’m
no socialist nor marxist (even though I think he’s one of the best social and
political thinkers ever) but if we want to really understand how things
reguarding humans work we should not be blind-sided by political allegiances.

~~~
notahacker
Marx's writings around the working day are built on the assumption that wages
will be set at the level necessary for the worker to survive long enough to
turn up to work the following day rather than according to the perceived value
of their labour time by the highest bidder, and that because of this near-
universal day rate for undifferentiated "labour power", employers' main route
to improving profitability would be extending the working day, with no
meaningful proportion of the workforce having the ability to change this
arrangement, not because they might dislike the status impacts of having to
choose a different position, industry, location or smaller house/car/pension
but because no capitalist will be willing to pay them enough to eat for a
shorter working day. He even devotes a footnote to ridiculing "vulgar
economists" for suggesting that labour rates could be set by supply and
demand. In this respect, he's far more wrong about future developed economies
than Keynes' (later) wrong assumption of a tendency towards a 15 hour week.

Marx's microeconomic theory is even more wobbly than many of his more
capitalistic contemporaries at the best of times, but his writings on the
lengthening of working days at mills is _particularly_ irrelevant to modern
service-based Western societies and even wealthy programmers and lawyers still
working more hours a week than they would prefer. There's a kernel of truth in
the idea that employers will tend to profit from people working longer than
they're contracted to work, but you don't need to read _Kapital_ to understand
people like getting more than they originally asked for.

~~~
Daishiman
> Marx's writings around the working day are built on the assumption that
> wages will be set at the level necessary for the worker to survive long
> enough to turn up to work the following day rather than according to the
> perceived value of their labour time by the highest bidder, and that because
> of this near-universal day rate for undifferentiated "labour power",
> employers' main route to improving profitability would be extending the
> working day, with no meaningful proportion of the workforce having the
> ability to change this arrangement

Dude this sounds _incredibly_ close the experience of American retail workers
nowadays.

~~~
notahacker
American retail workers might have a tough lot but the economics behind it is
the precise opposite of the _Kapital_ model: the retail outlets pay people by
the hour and the workers need the long hours because they can't afford their
family/debt/house/consumerism on 40 hrs per week at minimum wage and sometimes
take additional jobs because retailers won't offer them _enough_ shifts,
rather than the retailers paying people by the day and their profit margins
being driven mostly by lengthening it. The threshold for what is considered
subsistence-level real incomes has risen a bit since the Industrial Revolution
too.

~~~
Spooky23
Retailers have taken it to another level by requiring you to commit to
availability without a commitment to have work. Nobody gets 40 hours — you
target around 28 typically.

Control and keeping high turnover is an objective in retail management. It’s
usually cheaper and more efficient to have full time staff, but it’s easier to
skimp 5% of labor hours and force the salaried manager to fill the breach.

~~~
gozur88
>Retailers have taken it to another level by requiring you to commit to
availability without a commitment to have work. Nobody gets 40 hours — you
target around 28 typically.

This is the law of unintended consequences as applied to the ACA. If they give
you more hours care their costs go up dramatically unless they're already
offering health.

~~~
sdenton4
The careful tailoring of work hours to avoid healthcare requirements was a
thing long, long before the ACA.

~~~
gozur88
Not in the US. Prior to the ACA there was no requirement to give FTEs health
care.

~~~
Spooky23
In the dark red states, sure. Not everywhere. Most places added those
requirements 30 years ago.

It’s not just health care. Intrusive regulation like requiring a nominal
amount of paid sick leave is mandated in my state over a certain number of
hours. (32 iirc)

~~~
gozur88
By "not everywhere" you mean... Massachusetts? Benefits like paid sick leave
are rounding errors compared to health care.

------
surfmike
People's perceived needs grow but that is not the whole story.

Many people now are spending almost 50% of their pre-tax income on housing,
and most of that is the price of land and goes to landlords. It seems that
landlords inevitably capture a big chunk of people's salary increases.

Additionally in the US your health insurance is generally tied to your job;
even after Obamacare you probably have to work to pay for your monthly
insurance.

If housing costs went way down and health insurance were universal, I suspect
many people would feel much less need to work so many hours.

~~~
sliverstorm
_Many people now are spending almost 50% of their pre-tax income on housing,
and most of that is the price of land and goes to landlords._

1) That's really not a countrywide thing

2) It's not specifically the landlords, it's whoever was already there. A
landlord who bought in just recently is not rolling in dough. The people who
capture the gains are the people who got in fifty years ago and sold & moved,
or the landlords who got in fifty years ago and are still renting the
property.

3) But, yes, from the worker's perspective his salary increases will tend to
go towards housing/land. This is a natural state in a competitive housing
market. He must compete in the market for the space to live so that he can
live near his job. The power of the market will continually optimize for those
who make the most money (i.e. hypothetically produce the most economic value)
to live in the most desirable housing (e.g. the closest to work)

~~~
Animats
_The people who capture the gains are the people who got in fifty years ago
and sold & moved, or the landlords who got in fifty years ago and are still
renting the property._

Yes. Silicon Valley's land baron is John Arrillaga, who bought Silicon Valley
farmland in the 1960s. He owns about a square kilometer of office space.

~~~
jpeery
It's actually a lot more than just 1 sq km, mate. Waaaay more.

------
guy98238710
Saying that people just like working is ridiculous. It's either author's
social bubble or it's straight propaganda. I cannot imagine people in
factories or construction saying they like to go to work. The reasons behind
the 40-hour week are way more brutal:

\- Contemporary economy has surprising amount of internal inefficiency causing
most of the value to be wasted.

\- Value that is not squandered is distributed unevenly, so most people aren't
that much better off.

\- Status spending doesn't deliver more value with higher economic output.
Status is always scarce. The same goes for several other "resources".

\- Mate competition, gender roles, and divorces create separate earners and
spenders. Earners have little control over spending and they are thus unable
to cut back on work. They are often legally required to work under threat of
imprisonment.

\- Widespread debt means most people cannot stop working without risking
default. Credit availability further encourages irrational spending.

\- Most people don't get to choose their working hours. Businesses have the
leverage and they choose to max out hours to the legal limit. Governments have
little incentive to shorten the work week, because small change won't matter
and big change would kill the economy.

\- People can retire early or they can take breaks between jobs, but this
doesn't work for two reasons: people dislike large swings in their lifestyle
and people grow dependent on their income through irrational spending.

Author is right about one thing: the elderly are the winners here. That's
where governments can focus their effort. Earlier retirement can be introduced
incrementally and it has the smallest impact on economy, because on average
older people are less productive anyway.

~~~
neilwilson
It's entirely reasonable because the literature shows that it is true. Work is
leisure you get paid to do and leisure is work you pay to do.

If your society doesn't allow that state to come about then it is because it
has been deliberately designed to have fewer work opportunities than there are
people that want them. If you construct society so that there are always more
work opportunities than people who want work then competition and automation
automatically gets rid of the crap jobs.

And yes there are people in factories that love their jobs. It takes all sorts
to make a world.

~~~
guy98238710
What literature shows that? The linked presentation contains only inference
instead of direct evidence.

You seem to be imagining distant future when people just work on things they
enjoy. Even if such utopia can be built, it doesn't change anything about the
present situation. The vast majority of people would quit their jobs if they
didn't need the money.

------
sametmax
It has.

80 years ago your worked more hours, and you could not slack at work.

Today, you work not only less, but half of the people in the offices I go to
don't work their full shift. They go to facebook, send text messages, take
long breaks, do their shopping and watch porno (yep), etc.

Also, an hour of work doesn't have the same value.

When your work is moving boxes, an hour is an hour.

But in an office work, there are plenty of opportunities to be busy without
being productive. I'd say 30% of the work I see in offices is at best useless,
at worst harmful.

So we have more office jobs, which have less hours, during which we work less,
said hours being worth less.

And this is very uneven, because a nurse probably works more now than before.
But all in all, office jobs are talking over in rich countries.

~~~
chillwaves
This is just some weird anecdote. I work at an architecture firm where the
employees have deliverables and bill to clients, we all work really really
hard. I work between 45-50 hours a week of real work. One any given Saturday
or Sunday you will find dozens of people in my firm working. They are not just
pretending.

I have worked at a job you describe where people do not do much, but I would
hardly say that is the norm.

Especially for people on the lower end of the pay scale. In my experience they
typically work more than they are paid for (forced to work off the clock) than
there are people just sitting around on facebook.

That's great for you that your life is so comfortable but do not assume it
applies universally.

You really think the working poor in this country who have 2 or 3 jobs are
just on facebook all day? This has to be one of the most out of touch comments
I have ever read on HN.

~~~
hfhdnenen
I’m leaving architecture proper (staying in the design field, but working
independently) for this reason. My labour is billed to clients at three times
my hourly rate, I receive no benefits as a contracted employee (paid as a
consultant), and regularly work overtime to execute someone else’s concepts.
The latter would not be an issue if the industry-wide quality of work were
better here in Canada, but the overwhelming majority of medium to large firms
(where one would receive benefits) produce cookie-cutter buildings the mercy
of cheap developers and clients.

Disregarding the quality of the work, the most obvious solution to the
ubiquitous presence of overtime in the industry would be to hire more people,
but there doesn’t seem to be enough money to go around - especially if you
want to do something even slightly outside the norm.

~~~
walshemj
That's why I don't understand the poor rates so called contractors get in the
USA and Now Canada certain types of employers try this on in the UK but they
wont get the best candidates by offering straight time for a 4-6 month
contract - instead of 3x

------
gerbilly
For some reason most of us are too afraid of just going home at 5:00 much less
asking for reduced hours.

My whole working life, I've never used an alarm clock, and I never stayed late
unless I was late on a commitment that _I_ made. (This is not the same as some
artificial deadline dreamed up by someone else.)

I come in late, go home early, sometimes I don't even show up—whatever.

If you do this consistently, and deliver in your role of course, people will
get used to it and they'll stop bothering you about it.

~~~
baursak
That's called a delusional software developer bubble. Try this at a minimum
wage job or pretty much anything outside of IT.

~~~
gerbilly
I've worked plenty of those kinds of jobs. I worked retail, farm labour pumped
gas etc. When I worked them I showed up on time.

It depends what you sign up for.

There are 'availability' jobs and 'ability' jobs.

The more you try to find a job tailored to your ability, the less people tend
to demand your availability.

They will try to demand it anyway, but if you're good you can get them to
overlook it.

For now I'm lucky enough that I can live this way and still make customers
happy.

~~~
pixelbill
I think you nailed it, you are lucky.

Most jobs do not function like this, to think otherwise is delusional. At
every single employer I've ever worked for, if you left early or came in late
despite accomplishing all your work, you would get in trouble. I have seen it
happen over and over again.

Typically, they will claim that you could have accomplished more work if you
were only there for the extra time, regardless of the reality of the
situation. Your time outside of work is worthless to the company, and they
would rather waste your time so that they can (possibly) squeeze another drop
from you.

------
jernfrost
Anthropologists David Graeber, has addressed this and offered the explanation
with the observation that we as a society produce what he calls bullshit jobs.
Almost 40% of Brits in a surveyed acknowledged that their job wasn't needed.

People believing in effective markets would of course protest and claim such
enormous inefficiency can't possibly exist. Somebody will simply start a
company without bullshit jobs.

However I think there is a good explanation why this doesn't happen:
[https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/why-do-bullshit-jobs-
exist-4f5...](https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/why-do-bullshit-jobs-
exist-4f579eaa5964)

In short, in any complex organization bullshit work will start accruing and
there is no good mechanism to week out such jobs, because the people doing
those jobs will have zero incentive to tell their managers that their job in
pointless and not needed.

I've tried researching this on reddit and seen that a lot of work people do
could have been automated. The people doing those jobs also frequently see
this. However they have no economic incentive to do so.

This has lead me to contemplate that guaranteed minimum income has merits,
because it would remove the disincentive to make yourself redundant, to some
extent. Of course not in the case where your bullshit jobs is very highly
paid, which is frequently the case.

~~~
pdfernhout
You might find this essay by Bob Black of interest on "The Aboltiion of Work":
[https://web.archive.org/web/20161031034600/http://whywork.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20161031034600/http://whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html)
"... It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves
useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish
work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative.
On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on
the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we
should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux
of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what
useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and
craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except
that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them
less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property
could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being
afraid of each other. I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this
way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and
diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the
defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal
appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just
five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if
accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing
and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite
clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of
commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions
of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers,
lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works
for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot
you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..."

We might ask ourselves what "leading economic indicators" might look like when
this was happening...

~~~
jernfrost
Thans for the suggestions. I have contemplated this as well. It always puzzled
me at work as a software developer how we had more sales people than
developers. It just seems wrong that we have more people hired to sell the
software than make it. Then you got all the guys doing marketing in addition
and the ones managing all these people. You end up with a lot of stuff
surrounding the core value creation.

A lot of this is really just need because we live in a free market economy
where we need to sell stuff to people. We can't just give it to them if they
need it. OTOH how would be allocated resources effectively if we did not have
the market.

The soviet approach seems to have been a big failure. Although I suppose wit
the internet, computer, crypto currencies etc, there might be other ways of
organizing labour and allocating resources.

At least I wish people would acknowledge something is fundamentally wrong with
how we organize society today. Unless we do it is hard to pour resources into
finding alternative ways of doing things.

------
adrianmonk
Promotions within a company are based on ranking employees. Even if not done
explicitly, you still promote your top people.

Working more hours is a way to increase your rank. Thus it becomes an arms
race between the employees. You work 40 hours, I increase to 45, then you
increase to 50.

So, to some extent, hours worked don't correspond to hours needed to be worked
for productivity purposes.

------
darawk
Because capitalism optimizes for production and consumption - not welfare.
Often welfare and production/consumption are aligned (e.g. producing enough
food for everyone). But in the case of labor/life balance, they are not
aligned. It's actually kind of odd to me that serious people (e.g. John
Maynard Keynes) would ever have thought that work hours would decrease. There
is no term in the economic fitness function for 'work-life balance'.

~~~
Shivetya
well a capitalist society is also a society bombarded by marketing experts who
are in every part of a person's daily life working to convince them to spend
more which in turn drives them to work more or go into debt pushing retirement
further off.

consumption is high because marketing is that good. go read any of the popular
brand subs on reddit and you will see people making stupid purchasing
decisions daily and many seek justification. Its really scary when people are
trying to save fifty or less on a one to two thousand dollar purchase because
it then costs too much; the clue that indicates the purchase at the lower
amount is too much escapes them

~~~
closeparen
Consumer goods are practically free next to housing. I don’t buy this argument
at all. I could completely slash or double marketing-driven spending tomorrow
and be in substantially the same financial position. Maybe that’s just a Bay
Area distortion.

Consider also that a large portion of consumer goods spending is on cars,
which are basically just a substitute for living on more central/expensive
land. In the end it all comes down to real estate.

~~~
jernfrost
The real cost of housing is distorted though when house prices keep going up.
In many cases, if you take into account the value increase of housing, it is
actually opposite of what you claim. People don't spend anything on housing,
because they get back whatever they put pay for the house in terms of value
increase of the property.

I think it would be more fair to look at, how much does it cost to build a
house, and divide that cost on the time it may be used. We should not really
add the price of property to the equation.

If one does this I will bet that consumer goods make up a much bigger part of
the economy than you think.

~~~
closeparen
You pay the value of your house several times over in interest, and even
ignoring that, the value locked up in a primary residence isn’t good for much
except moving it to a different primary residence (or leaving to your heirs
when you die).

------
samsonradu
Among other good reasons mentioned here lets not forget inequality went up and
a lot of the progress is materialized at the top.

~~~
purple-again
In the US. Inequality has dropped significantly. A large portion of the gains
to America were captured by its elite. The large portion of the gains in other
parts of the world have lifted billions out of poverty.

Turns out globalization is good or bad depending on who you are and where you
are.

~~~
megalodon
> The large portion of the gains in other parts of the world have lifted
> billions out of poverty.

You may be correct, but it's hard to trust this sentence without a proper
source.

~~~
j9461701
Here is an economist article on the subject:

[https://www.economist.com/news/international/21719790-going-...](https://www.economist.com/news/international/21719790-going-
will-be-much-harder-now-world-has-made-great-progress)

------
chewz
That was famous Keynes prediction [1][2] that due to increased productivity
people will work 15 hours weeks.

Consumer capitalism however not only created productivity gains and satisfied
all demands (for which should be rightly praised) but also created new demands
(like better healthcare, education, technology items, vanity items etc.).

It is however characteristic of money economy (urban economy) that there is
nothing limiting human need to accumulate capital and consume.

In subsistence economy (non-monetary) whenever there is a surplus people
rather stop working then trying to accumulate more and they tend to focus on
accumulating social capital.

[1]
[https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequal...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequality-
work-hours/422775/)

[2]
[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/sep/01/economics](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/sep/01/economics)

------
bandrami
Because we are never satisfied with a stable standard of living; people want
to live better than their parents did. Automation only decreases the need for
labor if you hold standard of living constant.

~~~
dalbasal
This has generally been the standard argument since Keynes (and others) first
turned out to be spectacularly wrong. We just consume more. But, I see this
argument differently these days.

In tech stuff, we definitely have more stuff. A phone+plan for every person
over 13. Laptops for most people. But, you can't function without these. It's
not really a discretionary spending. A student (for example) is at a
disadvantage without those things. In fact, the student is also consuming more
education then in Keynes' day. That's also a competitive consumption, that you
must buy in order to participate in the job market to a greater extent then
before. Housing in a lot of urban or semi-urban areas is also competitive.
Median house prices in these cities is a multiple of median salary, and prices
don't scale well below the median.

So... I think the statement is true in an almost tautological sense. But, very
little is discretionary spending. Most of it is competitive and in a
competition the median person is still the median person.

~~~
avar

        > you can't function without [a phone
        > + plan once you're 13yo, and laptop].
        > It's not really a discretionary
        > spending.
    

Even if I give you that a network connected phone is something a teenager
absolutely must have, that still leaves the fact that most people vastly
overspend on these items.

Yes you might need _a_ smartphone and _a_ laptop for school, but those are
going to cost at most $200 used, but people conflate the need for these
devices with the fashion statement of owning the latest iPhone or MacBook.

~~~
CamTin
The only reason you and I can buy $200 used Thinkpads is because everyone else
is clamoring to overspend for shiny new ones. If more people were OK with
keeping their computers longer or buying used, then the price of used
computers would go up.

This would obviously be good because we would be valuing things closer to the
actual benefit that they bring, but its not the case that we can ALL just have
dirt-cheap few-year-old laptops.

~~~
avar
If everyone was satisfied with keeping their computers for longer or buying
used then it stands to reason that the price of new computers would go down,
e.g. what are now $300-500 Chromebooks would be top of the line.

In any case, I think, with respect, that you're postulating an absurd
hypothetical scenario that's never going to happen. There's always going to be
some people who buy new and others who buy used, think used cars, clothes etc.

Phones & laptops are now a mature technology, the days when you need a new
computer to run spreadsheets or browse the Internet are over. Nowadays a 5
year old computer is just as good for pretty much any application except AAA
games.

The GP was mentioning students as needing phones & laptops. I'm pointing out
that students in particular think nothing of buying say used clothes because
they don't have a lot of money, but for some reason a lot more people have
expensive new gadgets they don't need.

------
dredmorbius
The negotiating leverage of capital vs. labour.

You'll find this in Adam Smith:

 _[I]n every part of Europe, twenty workmen serve under a master for one that
is independent; and the wages of labour are everywhere understood to be, what
they usually are, when the labourer is one person, and the owner of the stock
which employs him another._

 _What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract
usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the
same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as
possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in
order to lower the wages of labour._

 _It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon
all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other
into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can
combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does
not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen...._

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_8)

Ricardo, rent vs. wages, as well.

------
acchow
It has dramatically. I have plenty of friends working full-time desk jobs that
actually "work from home" 3-4 days a week and do maybe 1 or 2 hours of work
over the whole day.

Everyone else is browsing reddit or instagram all day in the office. Just ask
any redditor.

------
taneq
It has. The low-work-hours future is here... It's just unevenly distributed.

------
erik14th
Money is similar to the peacock's tail, the main difference being inheritance,
social stratification make it so it matters very little to the individual how
much money he starts with due to the fact that you'll be immersed in a social
circle with people from the same economic strata, thus to differentiate
yourself you need to make more money, otherwise you're a loser.

Wealthier males work more because they have access to better paid, more
fulfilling and more prestigious kind of work. Poor males work less due to the
fact that they have access only to shitty jobs with shitty pays and no
prestige, so, for a lot of poor people, working may actually degrade your
quality of life, since you won't be able to match or improve upon the
lifestyle your parents provided you.

Women work more because they need to, either because they have children to
take care off by themselves or because they've grown up watching the suffering
of their mothers due to the oppression on females in society, and they sure as
hell don't want that for themselves.

People mostly buy stuff to show off, and then lie to themselves that it is
because they like the stuff they bought, illusion of power. Being well off
doesn't really matter socially if people don't know about it, bragging is seen
as offensive so people do it in an indirect way, by purchasing expensive
stupid shit, so that they can feel they're not just bragging, they have "good
taste".

People don't want to be well, they want to be better than others, and they'll
seek to achieve that in the way that is easier and more convenient, which is
vulgar display of power, since hitting people in the face usually leads to
problems, that is now achieved through the purchase of excessively expensive
items just to show you they can.

------
Sevii
People want limited goods like houses with nice schools, but there are only so
many of them. And the price is only bounded by how much people can pay.

------
dustingetz
Competition—A system designed around competition rewards those who compete.
Surprise!

~~~
wu-ikkyu
There is such a thing as working _too_ hard, to one's own detriment.

~~~
dustingetz
"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole
working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty
years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially
well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast." —Paul Graham

~~~
watwut
That kind of ignores how human bodies work when tired and sleep deprived.

~~~
dustingetz
I am definitely not celebrating it. It seems obvious to me that the human with
the most stamina will have an edge in any sort of competition that involves
hard work, from marathons to startups.

~~~
watwut
Marathon ends in 6 hours, if you are very slow. And pacing is considered very
important. Pacing does not mean "running as fast as possible from the start".

------
nnq
What we _desperately_ need is a way to _reverse-brainwash_ the workaholics
that spoil the labor market by willing to work more than 6 hrs a day. If we
could figure out a clever way to _penalize_ them for working more we could
damn enjoy the _heaven-on-earth_ that current technology should afford us all
(now that we seem to have figured out how to stop population growth too)...

~~~
beager
Not sure if sarcasm, but salaried employees are indeed penalized for working
more hours with a lower hourly wage.

------
unitboolean
Guys, what do you think about universal basic income?

~~~
peoplewindow
There's no point trying to explicitly introduce it now. I watch these
experiments with befuddlement - it's like watching a small baby try to run
before it can walk.

UBI will arrive slowly, incrementally and by the time it or an equivalent is
finally here nobody will celebrate because it won't seem like a big deal.
It'll just be the result of welfare and other services getting better and
better over time, with more and more lightweight "bullshit" jobs that require
essentially no exertion or risk and lower and lower hours until one day people
find that the benefits system is so generous that having a job has become a
lifestyle choice.

But we have a long way to go to get there. It won't happen in our lifetimes.
Almost all increases in wealth at the moment seem to be absorbed by healthcare
and social care costs. UBI makes no sense whilst people are being bankrupted
by health costs. Priorities people!

------
konschubert
It turns out that working hours are determined by politics, not economics.

~~~
neilwilson
It turns out that economics is just politics. The greatest political move was
to rebrand political economy as economics and try and pretend it is a science.

------
neilwilson
Because there are fewer jobs than people that want them. For every twenty dogs
there are only 19 bones. That's how economic theory is designed to work. If
there is a risk of too many jobs, policy is altered to restore 'order'.

Do that and competition inevitably creates what we have - long hours miles
from home for a pittance.

------
tajen
Or even if people had more leisure time, they’d spend it on working on a
bigger project because it’s our driver. I’ve noticed when I made thousands a
month, I spent much more time in charities, but I was still just as stressed
;)

Ok that only works for people who are not struggling around the minimum wage.

------
dingo_bat
In my case, even if you bump up my salary by 10x suddenly, I probably will
work the same hours I do now. Why are lower work hours assumed to arise from
increased economic status?

------
badpun
Given that you hear a lot about engineers (not to say managers) retiring in
their fifties or even earlier, I’d say that people, over their lifetimes, do
work fewer hours.

------
evolighting
I think economic would eventually benefit economic itself first. BUT what I
want to say about this problem is I don't think such number really means so
much. Numbers tell you something of course, but they are just part of aspects
after all. And I have always a prejudice that the whole economic system is
some kind of lie about trust, which is useful in old days. but today that more
likely we just have no courage and power to change it.

However after watching I think is only a way of life vs way people view
others.We would soon notice something we want to notice

------
EGreg
May I suggest that it may be the Hobbsian Trap?

The more resources we have - especially necessities such as food and water -
the more children can be born. And eventually the population is large enough
that the amount per person goes back to what it was before.

That doesn't necessarily mean everyone has to work. But in the current
economy, where you have to work to afford the rent, many people work long
hours.

However, once you factor in the growing unemployment, you can see that, in
fact, there is less work to go around. But people still need to pay the rent,
eat and drink water!

------
Geee
We would work less if we didn't spend and produce so much junk.

------
Jach
Competition.

------
orionblastar
It started in the 1990s when part-time people were downsized and replaced with
full-time people. Then overtime was killing coroprations so they moved people
to salary instead of hourly. No more overtime pay, one salary no more sick and
vacation days but PTO or paid time off hours instead.

You are expected to work 60 to 80 hours a week, or else you get bad
performance reviews and fired.

In most at will employment states the company can fire you for any reason not
related to civil rights law. They don't like your tie, fired. They don't like
the way you walk or smile, fired. Someone accuses you of something they have
no evidence or proof of, like being rude, you are fired.

This is done to avoid civil suits, fired for no reason, or fired for a petty
reason not related to civil rights. Say you have 25 years in IT, you are
African-American, but in your older age things change. You wear your tie
differently because you found a new tie knot style. They can't fire you for
your race or age, so they Instead fire you for not tying your tie the same way
everyone else does.

I wrote about this problem before and nobody took it seriously.

~~~
dgellow
Your comment sounds like speculations and gross generalisation. Do you base
your say on things that could be discussed(if yes, please share them)? Or is
it a frustrated rant?

------
etr-strike
The Federal Reaerve actually thinks productivity is too low:
[http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-fed-productivity-
idUSL1N1...](http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-fed-productivity-
idUSL1N1AQ0WV)

Would be a dream to work just 40 hours per week.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
It's also worth noting that 2 of the Fed's main goals are

1\. Achieve maximum employment

2\. Maintain stable prices

Both of which are counter productive to the goals of automation.

This seems like the root of the problem to me, as the Fed is a "super admin"
of the economy.

~~~
walshemj
not from a political point of view

------
louithethrid
Because powerthirsty psychopaths have social needs too. What is it worth to
rule a small kingdom, if nobody lives, suffers and does your bidding in this
kingdom. Being the CEO in a lightsout factory, is beeing the janitor.

So why do all these shitty jobs and hamster wheels exist? To give all those
"great-men" the ilusion of importance.

------
megiddo
Inflation, taxes, and regulatory burden.

Savings have been systematically eroded for 50+ years. Total taxation is now
40+% of GDP. Private sector workforce participation is dropping. Regulatory
burden dramatically increases health care, housing, and transportation costs.

All of these policies have worked to keep you in the office.

~~~
torstenvl
Total taxation is at 26% of GDP in the U.S., 34% in much of the rest of the
developed world.

[http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-
taxes...](http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes-
compare-internationally)

~~~
observation
Are you sure Tax Policy Center can be trusted?

Those numbers seem very low for Ireland. I'm willing to be wrong but something
seems very off here.

~~~
ab5tract
Ireland is a notorious tax haven.

~~~
observation
That is so, I think probably taxation as a measure of GDP is too dubious a
measure for connecting up with a normal person's experience of taxation, in
the ideal world they should be related but evidently the devil is in the
detail.

