
We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor - ashleyblackmore
http://sciencenordic.com/we-should-only-work-25-hours-week-argues-professor
======
jdietrich
In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future
of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That
society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more
consumption. The cost of living hasn't meaningfully increased, we've just
continually redefined luxuries as necessities.

My grandparents are perfectly typical working-class people. They grew up in
cramped, damp houses with no central heating or indoor plumbing. They ate
mainly seasonal vegetables, considered a chicken or roast of meat a rare treat
and often went to bed hungry. They bought new clothes or furniture only when
their old ones were beyond repair. They aspired to owning a bicycle, not a
car. The only people they knew who had been abroad had done so while in
uniform. They didn't regard themselves as materially deprived, because that
was the only lifestyle they knew.

As much as we might deny being materialistic, the naked truth is that what we
consider to be a basic comfortable lifestyle today was, within living memory,
unattainable luxury. We continue to work 40 hour weeks because we have
adjusted our expectations to our income. We overwhelmingly choose to work the
greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and
60 hours for most people), in order to maximise our spending power.

The recent kerfuffle over "The 1%" is illustrative of this phenomenon. There
was widespread mockery of people earning 500k who regarded themselves as just
making ends meet. In a very real sense, we are all a part of that laughably
oblivious 1%. The lifestyles we consider just about tolerable are, by any
historical or global standard, utter luxury. Almost everyone who has ever
lived (and almost everyone living today) would consider themselves lucky to
have the spending power of an American on minimum wage.

~~~
jseliger
>In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future
of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That
society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more
consumption.

I'm not convinced this is true: there are also intense coordination costs and
learning costs. Two programmers working 20 hours a week, for example, are way
less productive than one programmer working 40 hours a week. And the one
programmer will learn faster because she's putting in an extra 20 hours a
week.

That's true in virtually all knowledge / creative / intellectual professions.

If people are simply executing a set of tasks, maybe working 20 hours a week
can make sense, but those jobs are basically commodities, and commodity jobs
are a) highly competitive, b) not that remunerative, and c) because of a and
b, not that much fun.

EDIT: In response to the commenters below, take a look at Brooks' _The
Mythical Man Month_ if you'd like data, at least as far as programmers are
concerned.

~~~
mark_l_watson
Sorry, I must disagree. Two people working 20 hours a week are refreshed, not
burned out, have time for educationally side projects, etc.

I am in my early 60s and for my whole life I limited my work hours to 32 hours
per week, even working for large companies. I had lots of time for educational
side projects, exercise, extra time with family and friends, and mediation.

My only regret was not perhaps cutting this to less than 30 hours. I did not
work Mondays, and every Tuesday morning I was refreshed and enjoyed my work.
Leaving about 20% of my salary on the table was a good trade. Some of my
bosses did not like this, but when I worked I gave them 100% effort.

~~~
jseliger
>Sorry, I must disagree. Two people working 20 hours a week are refreshed, not
burned out, have time for educationally side projects, etc.

Take a look at Brooks' _The Mythical Man Month_ for data that demonstrates the
opposite, at least in programming; I haven't followed the field closely, but
education and industrial organization researchers have done similar work in
other professions.

~~~
pvdm
Brooks' was at IBM, they adhere to a 37.5 hours per week work schedule.
Programmers who can produce 3-4 hours of real work per day are considered
productive. Any more and you will start to burn them out.

~~~
Nursie
We stuck to 37 when I was there, so everyone could take off a little early on
a Friday.

I mean officially I was there 37, it was a good week if I was doing real,
actual work for 20. Yes, I made up for it by working my tail off when it was
needed.

We coders can be absurdly productive for short bursts, or be slow and steady.
You can't have massively productive and steady for very long. In your early
20s you have a few years of this, but the more you push it then the more jaded
you'll be later.

------
Claudus
I left my job a year ago, and started doing remote work for a small company.
Since then, I've worked between 15 to 25 hours a week. As a result:

\- I'm more rested and stress free

\- I get a lot more exercise and I eat healthier

\- I'm much more efficient and motivated in my work

\- My creativity and exploration into new fields has bloomed

I used to put almost all of my effort into my work, with not enough time
devoted to maintaining and improving myself.

~~~
jdotjdot
Absolutely agreed. I just did the opposite--quit remote freelancing to take on
a full time job (this one with insane hours unfortunately, 14hour/day
average)--and my level of stress and unhealth has skyrocketed. Autonomy and
agency matter, and part of that is the ability to choose the amount of and
timing of working hours that are best for you.

~~~
wildgift
Technically, that's not a "full time job". It's nearly two full time jobs.

------
Zigurd
Until we come to grips with what will likely be a post-labor world, this is a
good transitional approach. The 40 hour week is an arbitrary standard, and it
may now be rational to reduce that number. Few jobs are now so arduous that 70
year olds cannot perform well. We are suffering from outdated standards for
work weeks and retirement age, and un-sticking our assumptions is likely to
benefit the situation.

~~~
ekianjo
> what will likely be a post-labor world

Says who ? This preposterous way of thinking has been around for x years
already. "when the world population will reach 4 billions people, there will
be no jobs for everyone", yet the population is still increasing beyond 6
billions and most people still work to live/survive. There is no hint we are
moving to a post-labor world.

You will see that there is a strong relationship between reduced
employment/working hours, welfare benefits when not working, and government
spending. And somehow most of the countries which went down that way have now
humongous public debt problems to solve. Their model is not sustainable in the
long term.

~~~
rndmize
You seem to be misunderstanding something. A post-labor has nothing to do with
population and everything to do with automation. As it becomes more efficient
to have robots and computers to do what was previously human work, we will
eventually reach a point where just about every conceivable job that we
currently employ people for could be automated.

Most likely, a post-labor world should be capable of arriving well before
that. Once we can automate the production of basic necessities, working should
become largely optional.

~~~
ekianjo
Even if you have robots you will still need a massive workforce to produce
them, to get the resources to produce them, to check them, to maintain them,
to repair them, to program them, to update them and so on. Or maybe you
believe in a state of singularity in which all of this will happen at the same
time? :)

Automation has already been happening in many industries, in case you have not
noticed, and that did not result in lost job opportunities on the whole of the
economy. Agriculture is also largely mechanized all around the world and you
have only a very little portion of the population (5% or so) in developed
countries to produce far enough for everyone.

Most jobs in developed countries are service related. These jobs will not
disappear even if you automate the production part of the economy.

~~~
bluedanieru
So what, then, do you think the purpose of technological advancement _is_?
Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is
way, way up. We are producing heaps more wealth per person than at any point
in history, and yet we don't have much to show for it. Nowhere near
proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain.

Don't misunderstand, I'm not a Luddite by any stretch and I'm not suggesting
we should go back to an agrarian society, but we have a serious economic and
political problem where the benefits of technological advancement are going in
overwhelming proportion to a very small subset of the population. If something
isn't done about that, and soon, the resulting upheaval may force us back to
pre-industrial living anyway (or more likely, much worse).

~~~
judgardner
> Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is
> way, way up.

Can you support this? Millions of people all over the world are being lifted
out of poverty.

Here is a chart of per capita GNI for the past 20 years
[http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...</a><p>edi:
linked wrong chart

~~~
svachalek
GNI is just a grand total divided by population; people would be making more
if the money was divided up evenly but it's not, particularly in the U.S.

~~~
judgardner
> GNI is just a grand total divided by population;

Right, per capita, as I stated, but really just GNI is fine too.

> people would be making more if the money was divided up evenly but it's not,
> particularly in the U.S

Unfortunately the google public data didn't have enough US data but take a
look at these two charts for India.

First is just India's per capita GNI the second is India's income distribution
over the same time frame. Notice how the income distribution is relatively
flat and how the GNI is growing.

[http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...](http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=l&met_y=ny_gnp_pcap_pp_cd#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=ny_gnp_pcap_kd&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:IND&ifdim=region&tstart=-312739200000&tend=1296720000000&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false)

[http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...</a>

------
readme
This guy might be on to something, but I have an even better idea, and it
required 0 scientific research to synthesize.

We should all do whatever the fuck we want, until we die.

~~~
olliesaunders
> We should all do whatever the fuck we want, until we die.

Yeah but we’re not allowed to. Most employers will demands you show up for 40
hours a week and then frown at you or, at least, never promote you if you
don’t stay for a lot more.

~~~
lotu
You are allow to do what ever the fuck you want until you die just don't
expect me to give you money for doing what ever the fuck you want. As I too am
doing what every the fuck I want, which happens to include only giving money
to people who do something useful for me.

~~~
tossacct
I think it is a good thing that individuals control their own money, and can
choose to give it to whomever they want.

Can we agree that people with no money will starve to death unless they use
violence to take food from someone, or the government uses violence to take
food from someone on their behalf? The foodstamps of this great depression are
equivalent to the soup lines of the old great depression: they prevent people
from robbing, looting, and starving in the streets.

~~~
yaix
I don't know in the US, but here in Europe the gov't does not need to "use
violence" for that. It is pretty much general consensus that people with no
monies should get money (not "foodstamps") from the gov't, payed by our taxes,
so they can live with dignity, independently of what the reason for their
unemployment / poverty might be.

~~~
vidarh
When Americans use the "use violence" argument, your argument doesn't work as
a response, I'm afraid.

It is a libertarian tactic of assuming that anything the government does they
don't like is use of violence, except for government protection of artificial
property rights which is somehow usually magically exempt.

~~~
tossacct
Just because naive libertarian polemicists use an argument doesn't make that
argument incorrect.

>>>It is a libertarian tactic of assuming that anything the government does
they don't like is use of violence, _except_ for government protection of
artificial property rights which is somehow usually magically exempt.

In my experience, libertarians _universally_ agree with me when I say
"artificial property rights are completely protected and propped up by the
government's threat of violence". It is their _favorite_ part of the how
governments operate, because they do not recognize the benefits of
collectivism (socialism, communism, prisoners dilemma, tragedy of the
commons).

Notice how I have not told you anything about my personal political views.

------
bertzzie
This is interesting. I live in Indonesia, where except on our capital (Jakarta
and most Java), working 60 hours a week is the norm. I have noticed (and I
think this has been proved over and over again) that people who works 60 hours
a week is actually less productive and less happy than those who have a free
weekends and work only 8 hours a day.

I wonder how much working time can we cut until the benefits disappear.

~~~
zht
do you have extremely long days but 5 days a week or do you spread it out over
6 or 7 days?

~~~
ekianjo
In Japan, by the way, it is not uncommon to work 6 days a week (Saturdays). It
depends on your contract.

~~~
bluedanieru
I heard a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the national government commissioned
a study a few years back to investigate ways to curb this practice.

The committee was disbanded after a minor scandal when it was discovered that
they were making everyone come in on Saturdays to work.

------
enraged_camel
Well, 25 hours a week is for how long your average worker is productive
throughout the typical work-week anyway. The rest is spent dicking around on
the Internet and socializing with coworkers.

I feel like if we cut down the "official" work to 25 hours, people would
suddenly realize that they need to be a lot more productive to get the same
amount of work done. No more pointless interruptions. No more bullshit
meetings. Everyone would try to get shit done, and enjoy the extra three hours
they get everyday and be a lot happier.

~~~
pkorzeniewski
Being on site is just as important as being productive. Employers buy your
time and in these 8 hours a day, whenever something pops up and has to be done
quickly, you have to be ready to take on it.

------
harshpotatoes
As a 26 year old, I can agree with his conclusion (or at least want his
conclusion to be true). With 40-60 hour work weeks for both my girlfriend and
I, it can be difficult sometimes. Similarly, new friendships can be hard to
come by. With current job dynamics, moving can be an almost certainty,
increasing the difficulty of maintaining friendships.

However, I have to wonder, would 25 hour work weeks actually increase the
length of our employ-ability, allowing us to work until the age of 80? I
thought part of today's current long term unemployment problem (in the US), is
that finding employment for older, more skilled, adults was difficult, due to
perceived overqualifications or lack of training in newer technologies. I
thought part of the point of work hard while you're young, was to save enough
money to allow you to survive the possibility of permanent unemployment in old
age (either due to health or over qualification in unused technologies).

------
_delirium
Centrist professor takes a moderate position about halfway between the
"standard" workweek and Tim Ferriss's 4-hour workweek. ;-)

------
ekianjo
25 hours to earn less? What's the point of having more free time if you have
no money to do anything with it ?

There's a reason why we have a current optimal 40-60 hours kind of range for
working hours in most countries. That's an equilibrium point between how much
people are willing to work vs how much they are willing to earn. Everyone
still wants to have free time, but not at the expense of their well-being or
the future of their family (education, etc.).

Working 25 hours and earning the same amount as working 40 would not sit well
with companies (if this was made mandatory by state regulation, for example).
Local companies would lose their competitive edge vs other companies elsewhere
and this would end up in increased unemployment.

Let people work how long they want. That's their choice.

~~~
_delirium
Because of standardization on "normal" workweeks, it's pretty hard to have the
choice even if you're willing to forego salary for fewer hours. Google won't
let you work a 4-day week for 80% of the regular salary, for example (or even
for 60% of it!), and more traditional companies are even less likely to. You
take their 5-day, 40-hour offer or you don't. You typically only have an
option to work a 25-hour week if you have either a consulting/freelance
career, or a very low-end hourly-wage job.

~~~
ekianjo
Note that the standardization you are talking about is also heavily driven by
work regulations, saying that a work week is x hours and nothing else. If such
restrictions were abolished I believe there would be much more flexibility (up
and down) in the job market.

~~~
_delirium
The regulations just put a maximum; there is nothing preventing companies from
offering lower hours if they wish. Before those maximums were brought in, you
had the same situation as now, just with more hours being standard: you had to
agree to 6-days-a-week, 10+ hour days, or nothing. The union movement
successfully negotiated that down to 5-days-a-week, 8-hour days as a cap,
which was at least an improvement.

~~~
ekianjo
Note that there are drawbacks in several countries of not working "full time".
You do not get the same rights towards a pension, you do not get the same
rules for overtime, and other benefits do not apply. Therefore there is also a
strong incentive, based on regulations, not to work less than 40 hours either.

~~~
dyno12345
Computer professionals in the US don't get pensions or overtime pay at all.

------
ruswick
The idea is obviously appealing, but is a pipe dream to which employers will
never agree. Employers don't care about one's utility over a lifetime, because
they only have access to laborers for a finite period of time. (In most cases
3-6 years.) Employers thus want to maximize utility in the short term. Fewer
hours means less work and thus companies have to lower salaries, which may
make this untenable for workers, and hire more people to compensate for these
reduced workweeks, adding to fixed-costs like healthcare and making this
untenable for employers.

Would it be great to spend more time with friends, sleeping or otherwise
pursuing leisure? Obviously. But the labor market doesn't care about one's
happiness (and the companies that do institute "leisure cultures" usually
explicitly state that they do so simply because it increases productivity. In
this case, companies don't care about you for your sake, they care about you
for their own sake) and pursuing it comes at a loss of compensation.

------
simonh
One problem I've come to appreciate in Britain is that we are all in direct
competition with each other for access to good housing. As disposable incomes
go up, property prices rocket as the middle class use their new wealth to bid
up the price of houses in an attempt to trade that wealth for a nicer place to
live. I'm keenly aware of this because that's exactly what my wife and I have
been doing. A big chunk of our income goes into our mortgage.

The dynamic my well be very different in other countries. In the USA for
example there's much more scope for increasing the supply of housing,
something that's harder to do in a more densely populated country like the UK.
I think this is why the US had a property crash while we didn't - the housing
market here is a lot less elastic.

Still, my point is that if incomes generally go up, a proportion of that will
be expended in price wars over scarce local resources, property being the most
obvious example.

------
noarchy
I am sure that I get 25 hours of real work done per week, if that. Once I
factor in the meetings and phone calls that knock me out of the "zone", it is
certainly less than 40.

------
r4dius
If I didn't have to answer email or deal with any middle management, this
could work. But the paradox is that the only scenario in which legitimate
optimal efficiency can be attained is in a small-group, highly-communicative
environment (like a startup); in that kind of environment, you're putting in
80-hour weeks so you can get profitable as quickly as possible, so there's no
way anyone is saying "I've put in my 25 hours, see you guys next week!"

~~~
zanny
But those startups are people basically willingly surrendering themselves to
the ideology. The article isn't about the empassioned individuals who want to
make it big, it is about Average Joe who works at any middle class company 40
hours a week without any desire to do it and no passion to continue.

If you have the drive to try to do something big, putting all your time into
it is kind of mandatory. But if you just work for the money to survive on, you
shouldn't need to put in such a significant portion of ones time.

~~~
wildgift
The average joe might have passion for work, but also a family and other
responsibilities that preclude extended periods of long workdays. They might
not want to get divorced.

------
loca
The New Economics Foundation (nef) proposes 21 hours:

<http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/21-hours>

 _A ‘normal’ working week of 21 hours could help to address a range of urgent,
interlinked problems: overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon
emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to
live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life._

------
mikecane
Twenty-five hours a week at what rate of pay? There are people working at
Walmart and such who make in a week what I would make in a day or two in past
years. I also did 60-80 hour weeks in my life (eejit that I was). With all the
opposition towards a living wage (read: serf wages), I'll file this under the
category that includes jetpacks and flying cars -- and I'd bet on those
appearing first.

~~~
_delirium
Well, the biologist quoted in the story is Danish, so may be starting from
different norms. The de-facto minimum wage [1] is already around $18/hr, and
would probably increase if the work-week were changed. That could perhaps be
funded in part by putting less money towards retirement (current employer
contribution is 17% of salary), since his proposal is to raise the retirement
age considerably as well. Serf wages are a bit less of an issue in any case
when that's the starting point.

[1] A bit complex: "de-facto" because Denmark has no statutory minimum wage.
Nonetheless, a negotiated wage floor of a bit above 100 DKK/hr (~$18/hr)
covers most workplaces. Denmark's labor system, partly driven by law and
partly by cultural norms, makes heavy use of sector-wide bargaining agreements
between large employer confederations and large cross-company unions. The
whole process tends to be very consensus-oriented (strikes are rare), and
reaches blanket agreements that apply sector-wide. Small mom-and-pop stores,
freelancers, independent moving-van operators, etc. are the main exceptions,
since they aren't part of one of the employer confederations that's party to
those agreements.

------
shasta
The time you spend past 25 hours a week is making you less productive
anyway...

~~~
eliben
I assume you speak from personal experience. Allow me to disagree.

------
timfletcher
I do this but in a different way. I work 40 hours a week for most of the year
and then take off a few months at a time. This allows me to travel with my
family before I'm retired and too old to climb mountains etc. You have your
whole life to live, it doesn't begin when you retire. I'm fully prepared to
work past the standard retirement age.

------
mattschoch
Great idea in theory, but there's a reason young people work such long hours:
money. If a 22 year old graduates from college and works 25 hours a week, they
won't have enough money to pay off their (almost certain) debt and live
comfortably, much less have excess money to spend traveling and doing fun
things. Young people work so hard so they can have the money to buy and do the
things they want. Most just never stop working that hard in order to enjoy
those things. Working 25 hours/week would basically push "life" back a few
years, meaning maybe you rent a small apartment and drive a old car until
you're 35-40. As they saying goes, young people have lots of time and no
money, but older people have lots of money and no time.

~~~
jblow
Costs of stuff like rent and cars are normalized to average income levels.
(Though of course with cars there is a base cost of manufacture that makes
them less flexible than something like rent).

Which is to say, if everyone works 25 hours a week, rents will go down
(because if they don't, you have most properties sitting empty). If instead
everyone works 60 hours a week, rents go up.

Of course, economics is really complicated and rarely works out this simply.
But that's the idea. It's a little silly to post here presuming that someone
in Mr. Vaupel's position has somehow not thought of the fact that when you
work fewer hours your nominal earnings go down. (I think this qualifies for
what pg was calling Middlebrow Dismissal). It's a more reasonable response to
say, well, of course he has thought of that, but I wonder what the answer is?

~~~
mattschoch
Sure, I'm sure he thought of that, and I'm sure prices would change since
there would be less money earned and therefore less money in circulation. This
would also require a change in standard of living though. My point is simply
that people cannot maintain the same standard of living and work less, even if
the entire world cut back hours at the same time. Less goods would be
produced, so with the same demand then prices for everything would rise, or
standards of living would fall.

------
xijuan
But ....what about college students???? People rarely talk about the fact that
college students can be as stressful if not more stressful. In graduate
school, students are expected to work/study almost all the time... Should we
also have a reduce in our work/study load?

~~~
marvin
You could in principle do the same. I'm currently in a Masters program and
have been doing what this link describes since I first started university:
Four or five hours of very focused work each day, followed by real leisure
time.

Granted, it might be different if I were doing a PhD, but at least up until
where I am now this has worked perfectly. I get done just as much while being
less stressed and feeling a lot better about life.

------
kyllo
The true sign of progress will be that everyone has a bit more freedom to
decide how many hours per week they work. In order for that to happen, the job
market needs to become a lot more liquid. That will happen when needed
benefits like health insurance and basic income are met by the government, and
most people are able to work on a freelance or contract basis, and are able to
take time off in between jobs without so much risk, because they are not
dependent on a specific employer. I don't think 25 hours will necessarily be
the standard, so much as I think that there won't really be a standard that
everyone is expected to adhere to anymore. 40 hours is totally arbitrary in a
way that smacks of Communism.

------
msoad
I don't get it. Why we have fixed number of working hours when we have
deadlines for our tasks?

You want me to solve that problem for you by Friday? Why should I come to
office and stare at monitor four days if I figured it out right in Monday?

~~~
mylittlepony
When I worked as an employee, I learned to slow all my tasks down to finish
them right on time. That way I wouldn't be assigned more tasks than my
coworkers, in punishment for being efficient and fast.

------
seagreen
Spending more time with kids is good, still . .

I want a beautiful and open network all across the planet. I want to see North
Korea become free, and sit drinking coffee in a café in Pyongyang. I want
Africa to become a garden stretching from Cape Town to Khartoum. I want to
visit the Silicon Valley of the Congo, and take the suborbital to Tokyo if I'm
in the mood for sushi that night. I want cold sleep and ramships and I want to
see sunrise on Alpha Centaur Bb (after moving its orbit out a bit:)

No matter how good leisure is in the short term, if it slows those goals down
I'm against it.

There PG, call that middlebrow criticism!

------
rowanseymour
A counter philosophy to this is that we should be striving to find jobs that
we enjoy and find so fulfilling that we don't mind working 40+ hours per
week... until we're 80...

I say that wondering how realistic that is and whether that's a yet another
imaginary carrot dangling over our heads to make us work harder. I like my job
a lot (software developer making medical software for clinics in Kenya) but
flip I'd love a 4 day week because there's always something more enjoyable
than work. And I'm not sure if every single job we need people to do can be
that fulfilling raison d'être for someone.

------
olliesaunders
Incidentally, an enforced max number of hours per work week is a potential
solution to the high unemployment a lot of countries have right now.

~~~
youngerdryas
Please no. More useless busybodies and paperwork. It would probably be cheaper
to extend unemployment benefits.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
So you prefer that we actually cultivate a loafer class and a worker class?

------
scotty79
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35-hour_workweek>

------
czbond
The reality of what will happen in the U.S. is the exact opposite. If anyone
watched the recent Davos Economic Summitt - U.S. companies can no longer
easily grow using debt instruments, which just leaves productivity and
competitiveness.

Translation: Employees will be working more hours for easily the next 5 years.

------
Osiris
It would be interesting if people were paid on some measure of productivity
rather than just raw hours. Then we could get paid based on our contribution
to economic output. Of course, the problem with that is how to do you measure
productivity?

~~~
wildgift
How do you measure productivity for management, especially.

------
cllns
For those who are interested in more than the cursory description offered in
the article, I also came across this:

<http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13339-the-25-hour-work->

------
jebblue
I wonder if this could be where we're headed:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine_(1960_film)>

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newbie12
Of the 40 hour week, from 10 to 30 hours are spent working for the government.
Your tax rate is dependent on where you live and how much you earn, of course.

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wildgift
"We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor after pulling another
14-hour day of intensive data gathering and number-crunching."

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dscrd
We should work exactly the correct amount of hours a week. The correct amount
varies between fields and people.

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lnanek2
That would be nice, then startups where people work 80 a week will be even
more magical and money earning. :)

~~~
tikhonj
Except that there's no guarantee that working more hours makes you more
productive. If anything, studies seem to have shown the opposite. Ultimately,
efficiency trumps hard work--there are only so many hours in a week where the
limit on your efficiency is much further away.

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afterburner
Let's get 6-8 weeks of vacation like Europeans too, that's what I keep arguing
for...

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gergderkson
If everyone only worked 25 hours per week, nothing of value would be
accomplished.

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michaelochurch
25 hours is a good number for average people. I'd say 15-20, even.

Ambitious or highly dedicated people will always work more than that, and
that's a good thing. What they should have is a lot more freedom in how they
spend that time-- working two jobs, one job and school, side projects.

The problem is this bullshit conformist fiction in which everyone has to
pretend to be ambitious (but only internally) and dedicated (despite mediocre
social status and compensation, that fail to justify such dedication). I don't
think that such a problem can be legislated away. The best that the
law/government can do is to break up the collusions (e.g. among VCs) that keep
talent trading at such a dog-low rate against property.

The other problem, and one of the main reasons why the 40-60 hour anachronism
lives on, is that companies aren't really buying (as they see it) 40 hours of
time. They're also buying (in their entitled view of the world) single-minded
loyalty. That's why they demand hours at such a level that a person can't
possibly hold two jobs, even if she is easily capable of the work. The goal
isn't just to get some quantity of the person's work, but to take that person
off the market so no one else can hire her.

~~~
samstave
I think that the title should be: "It should only require 25 hours per week to
make a comfortable living"

We should all put in the most amount of time to our lives and passions, but to
maintain a comfortable life should not consume 100% of our available
productive hours. (assuming productive hours == 8/day, 5 days/week)

If maintaining a living (comfortable or not) requires 100% of our productive
work time (40 hours/week) then how are you not a slave to that subsistence
lifestyle?

~~~
ctdonath
The problem is what constitutes "maintaining a living", both in your own
choices and governmental influence. I can show you how to live well on
$10/day, but then you'd complain about not having X Y and Z (starting with two
cars and a mortgage in a narrow geographic range).

If you can't do without what amounts to luxuries to 75% of the world
population, discussing how many hours a week you "should" work is a non-
starter.

~~~
samstave
OK - I am your student

I live in the bay area, Married, have 2 kids and work in SF.

Show me how to live on $10/day.

Consider me your student.

Unless your comment of "showing me how to live on $10/day" is really titled
"show a homeless 15 year-old with no job, family or financial obligations how
to subsist on $10/day"

If you really can show me how to live on less than the cost it is for me to
get to work ($7.10, BTW) then i will accept you as my teacher. (I already ride
my bike EVERYWHERE - literally - I do not personally drive at all)

If not, then fuck you you smug ass - it costs to live.

~~~
xtracto
>If not, then fuck you you smug ass - it costs to live.

Wow, HN has dropped this low?

Here were I live the standard _household_ income is around $600 USD a Month. A
family of 4 can (parents and two children) can live with that.

~~~
serge2k
Good for you, my rent is more than that and I don't live in an expensive
place.

~~~
nagrom
Sure you do! So do I! You and I probably live in the most expensive 1% of
places on the planet. We live incredible lives - our existences are better on
average than anything any king had 150 years ago. We have whatever food we
want at whatever time in the year we want it. We have phenomenal connectivity
and mobility and, if we need to be on the other side of the planet in 48 hours
time, that's doable.

Of course, I want more. The guy next door has a Range Rover _and_ a Porsche.
But I know there are literally billions of people who cannot imagine the
luxury in which I live.

~~~
nitrogen
The _gargantuan_ difference between kings of old and us today, the critical
difference that these comparisons always miss, is that whatever lifestyle you
choose, you have to work roughly the same number of hours to maintain it.

If you are a programmer, you can't just decide to work 10 hours a week for
$25k and live a $25k lifestyle. If you want to earn $25k, you'll probably
still have to work full time to do it. Regardless of the comforts we enjoy, we
are still slaves to the workweek (there's not enough contract work for every
programmer or designer to go freelance), and _that_ is why it's right to
complain.

We may have more "things" per person than Arthur himself, yet we lack the
freedom and status of being royalty.

------
nacker
Why just extend work in the direction of the aged? I think that instead of
going to school, children over the age of 12 should have the option of working
25 hours a week as apprentices.

