
Working shorter hours may also be good for your health - dynofuz
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/01/working-hours?src=hns
======
rjzzleep
causation or no causation. we need to rethink the whole idea of work anyway.
at some point something went seriously wrong.

how can people accept that it's right that we get taught in a certain mental
pattern for almost 20 years and then we are to work for 40 years in that
pattern so that we can spend the last 15 years of our life in peace anyway?

i spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to get great at things - you know,
human nature.

but the times i spent in traditional work structures i actually got lazy and
stupid, because they encourage you to create things that are just good enough
at a slow pace, because if you actually perform too well you become a
liability.

~~~
varelse
Correction, if you own what you create and perform too well, you become rich.

It's when someone else owns it and has given you no incentive to perform well
(99% of startups) that you become a liability.

~~~
wslh
_Correction, if you own what you create and perform too well, you become
rich._

Correction, it depends on where you was born and where you have lived.

~~~
dredmorbius
Also where you was grammared.

~~~
wslh
Exactly!

------
varelse
Methinks some causation and a large degree of correlation. There's quite a bit
of spread until 2050 hours or so.

Most workaholics I know neglect their health, they stop exercising, and they
are generally miserable.

I used to be all three. These days, I prioritize the first two points, but I'm
still occasionally miserable when the work is tedious. If the work is
engrossing, it's hard to pull me away from it because it feels more like I'm
exploring than working. I've gone to great lengths to make sure my work is
interesting. My longevity will hopefully provide a useful data point.

------
larrys
This is a typical article that everyone here will feast on. Another of a long
list of "the answer to your problems" to make people who are in a rut feel
better about themselves.

For the last time "work" and the amount of work doesn't mean the same thing to
everyone to begin with.

It depends on what you do, how much you like doing it, why you need to do it
and a host of other pressures and things that you deal with every day.

I work everyday and enjoy what I do. Other people can't wait to get out at 5
and take the train home. (When I was in high school it was that way for me
because of the type of jobs that I had when I wasn't doing my own thing which
I typically did (side businesses)).

I have a shore place. I get bored on the beach. You know what I do? I get off
the beach and go answer emails and "check in". I enjoy doing that better than
sitting on the beach. I do the same when I am on vacation. Some people like
what they do and it's not work. It's actually relaxing.

That said this idea that you need to find something that you enjoy to earn a
living is not true either. Because sometimes you can't it's not that easy. I
had to do many jobs that I didn't like to get to the point of doing a job that
I do like and enjoy to do.

Yesterday I had to review a legal contract and truly despised doing so. So I'm
glad I'm not an attorney because if I was the stress of that job would
certainly make it hard for me to "work all the time". But if I have to I do
that work and just make sure that I reward myself with doing things that I
need to do that I enjoy (like writing a shell script..)

Everyone is different.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _I have a shore place. I get bored on the beach. You know what I do? I get
> off the beach and go answer emails and "check in". I enjoy doing that better
> than sitting on the beach. I do the same when I am on vacation. Some people
> like what they do and it's not work. It's actually relaxing._

That's lovely for you, but please understand that you are atypical as humans
go. For most people, most of the time, work causes stress and stress reduces
health/lifespan. Outliers are definitely worth considering, but they don't
disprove the accuracy of the average data.

------
garrickvanburen
For the last 4 months, my daily goal has been 'no client work before lunch'
[1]. I'm happier, healthier, and more focused on the important things than I
have been my entire professional life.

1\. [https://garrickvanburen.com/archive/no-client-work-before-
lu...](https://garrickvanburen.com/archive/no-client-work-before-lunch/)

~~~
mhurron
What do you do before lunch and how late in the day does this cause you to
work? Did the stopping time of your work day change doing this?

~~~
garrickvanburen
Before lunch is everything else: gym, writing, work towards long term goals,
administrivia, new business development. I always stop between 4:30-5p.

------
nobbyclark
This runs the risk of winning a "No shit Sherlock" award.

~~~
marcosdumay
Yet, thre are plenty of people doubting it here.

~~~
nobbyclark
There are many employers here. This would obviously be bad news...

~~~
ChuckMcM
Nah, its not that, its that there are not enough controls to make the claim.
Lets create a strawman and see if it works for you, lets say your "job" was
fitness equipment tester, and the more you worked the more exercise time you
got in. Historically there is a sort of bell shaped impact on health here
where exercise increases your overall health up to a point at which point too
much of a good thing starts impacting your health in a negative way. If you
were at the global maximum on that curve, either working more or working less
would cause you to be less healthy.

For people where they are more 'at risk' at work than they are not at work
(say 'deployed soldier') working less is statistically safer, for folks who
have the reverse (say submariners) the reverse is true.

The discussion usually comes around how do you narrow the claim to make it
either provable or disprovable. Is it true for all programmers? how about for
'all java programmers' or 'all java programmers in the bay area'. See the
challenge?

------
PhasmaFelis
In other news, water is wet, fire hot, and the Pope shits in the woods.

It is just so wearying that there are people actually arguing with this.

------
zacinbusiness
I'm more of the mindset of who would want to work 40 hours a week? I work on
projects that I find interesting and I still only do about 20-30 hours a week
of work. I've done the whole work yourself to death thing, 75 hour work weeks
and work until dawn every night for a month. F#%k that!

------
gangster_dave
If you work at a startup though, you'll die a glorious death.

~~~
tjaerv
The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

~~~
brightsize
I want more life f*cker!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjbAgwdBaTI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjbAgwdBaTI)

------
analyst74
That graph is confusing, it clearly shows that if you work somewhere between
2300 hours and 2500, rate of premature death is the lowest.

~~~
twistedpair
Come on Economist, realize that we're plotting averages of averages and then
fitting that average. Not too scientific. Let's break down the underlying
formulae, solve to carry through the dispersion of the underlying data, and
then add the confidence bounds on the sides of that bestfit. If they did, we'd
see much lower confidence around those 2300-2500 hour points.

But wait, we've got an R2 of 0.2! Let's keep in mind that at best, high hours
of work are not the dominating factor that killed you.

~~~
Hydraulix989
At least they explicitly admit there are Hungary and South Korea outliers.

------
ardemue
Can someone points to the actual dataset? The OECD website seems very busy at
the moment.

~~~
sp332
[https://web.archive.org/web/20140228211614/http://www.oecd-i...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140228211614/http://www.oecd-
ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2011-en/01/02/index.html?itemId=/content/chapter/health_glance-2011-5-en)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140228211746/http://www.oecd-i...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140228211746/http://www.oecd-
ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2011-en/01/02/g1-02-01.html?itemId=/content/chapter/health_glance-2011-5-en)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140228212020/http://www.oecd-i...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140228212020/http://www.oecd-
ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2011-en/01/02/g1-02-02.html?itemId=/content/chapter/health_glance-2011-5-en)

~~~
ardemue
Thanks but those are not the complete dataset. It seems like we should be able
to get it at
[http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=24879](http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=24879),
but I keep getting an error.

------
ChristianMarks
If you want to impress an employer as someone who will work until they die on
the job, your answer to the question "where do you see yourself in 5 years?"
should be "dead."

------
ksk
A blanket 'work less hours' policy across professions might actually be bad
because doctors, scientists, researchers, etc work longer hours to advance
medical knowledge which benefits everyone.

This is pure speculation but I don't believe anyone who is at the frontier of
human knowledge will ever expand it by working less hours than usual.

~~~
hactually
But what if instead of working more, they spend time educating others and
their peers in the free time and brought more into the field - then they all
work less... thought capitalism make take a bit of a whack out of that
concept.

Parallel working, not serialised :D

------
vmarsy
I'm not sure how to interpret this chart:

For an average annual hours of 2000, how can we know if that person works 40
hours a week during 50 weeks or 66 hours during 30 weeks ?

Also what jobs are represented here ? For instance for firemen or soliders it
seems logic that statistically the more hours you work the more premature
mortality will happen.

~~~
twistedpair
> it seems logic that statistically the more hours you work the more premature
> mortality will happen

But many of the most dangerous jobs, say fighter pilot and Alaskan crab
fisherman, are actually very short bursts of intense work. The pilot might log
several hundred hours in a good year and the fisherman works in seasons that
are only several weeks long.

Trouble here is the mononumerosis, aka the need to boil a whole range of
values down into a single number.

------
yetanotherphd
Correlation studies are fine, but I do worry about national GDP as a
confounding factor.

Maybe poorer countries have lower life expectancies, (or whatever PYLL
measures is higher), and work longer hours.

I would like to see this graph broken down by quantiles of national GDP.

------
basicallydan
I know this isn't on-topic, but am I the only person who tried to read this
who didn't already have an account with the economist? Apparently, I have
"reached my article limit".

~~~
stefantalpalaru
I got the same message. Deleting the economist.com cookies solved the problem.

~~~
antsar
Private Browsing or Incognito mode works too, in case you don't want to bother
deleting cookies (or would prefer to keep them).

~~~
marvin
Or just google the title of the article and click through.

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gregcrv
hopefully the robots will work for us soon... this path might be easier than
changing a system where competition and success are a lot based on spending
more time working.

------
kosei
R-squared of 0.2? Not a stats major, but that seems like a pretty low
correlation to try to draw conclusions from, even though it may be
statistically significant.

~~~
spacehome
R^2 of 0.2 is actually quite high for real-world data. It means that a full
20% of the variation of one variable is completely explained by the other.
It's a big deal to be able to account for a fifth of what you're examining.

------
ronaldx
Since it's not clear, it seems to be that PYLL on the y-axis of the graph is
measured per 100,000 population.

------
exratione
Correlation is not causation.

Far more likely an explanation is an inverse correlation between work hours
and wealth, intelligence, and education, as those are shown correlated to
health and life expectancy with better and more plausible mechanisms for
causation than those waved around for work hours.

~~~
TheCapn
I am pretty sure people are just finding different ways to say "Stress
shortens your lifespan".

1) Find item/activity that creates stress 2) Graph that vs. life expectancy to
see how stress = death

The chart they cite in the first place seems to have a few different trends
existing where they take on a polynomial curve upwards (one just passed 1800,
one ~2300) and I would personally be more interested in seeing if there's any
correlation there.

~~~
notahacker
One reason why the graph has multiple trends is that its multiple time series
dumped on top of each other (the article entirely glosses over it being data
from different points in time which would potential exhibit independent trends
in premature deaths).

The article does mention that "the outlying figures to the right are those for
South Korea". If I'm interpreting that correctly, it's the neat little chain
to the right hand side which shows South Korea's working hours rapidly
declining and potential years of life lost also falling over time; but if
working hours decline you'd expect a spurious correlation to appear even if
there was no causal link since healthcare standards also steadily improve over
time. To the extent there is a causal link between the two in South Korea - as
opposed to coincidental secular trends over time - it's probably more down to
economic development than stress.

I'd expect a publication called the Economist to know how to handle panel
data...

------
Ryel
I love when these multi-million dollar studies come out and the only thing
that hits the news is a headline that could've been inferred by a 10 year old.

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anentropic
no shit

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negativity
Good. I don't really enjoy living anyway.

~~~
gamerdonkey
Possibly because you work so much.

