I'd also add that by forcing a 9-5 mentality we create a situation which has everybody traveling to and from work at the same time, yielding delays adding to stress, pollution...
Not saying that by solving the 9-5 mentality we will solve climate change, but it sure would be a measurable improvement on that front as well as mental health as a whole. Maybe somebody should research that.
A sensible outcome if communication and other network losses from lack of co-location outweigh the costs of high peak transportation requirements and the costs of those being under-provisioned.
Which was probably very true in the past, and while changing is probably still true.
Because the capital owners have externalized the cost of transportation to work onto labor. They don't pay you to sit in traffic so they don't care how efficient it is.
Granted, but maybe the most curious thing about it is less the outcome than the mechanism -- there's apparently not an aggregately negotiated process that's market-like for arriving at the schedule for an organization.
I suppose I can imagine that perhaps at some point maybe there was a diversity of choices, and perhaps some critical plurality settled around 9-5 external facing availability, and once that happened, others that did the same had an inter-firm communication efficiency advantage, leading to wide adoption, but that's a just-so story rather than a studied opinion. Anyone know the actual history?
And that's a more macro scale. Internally, one presumes that either:
* It doesn't occur to most management to think about different ways of doing scheduling at all
* They've thought about it and it seems that the cost of aggregating an adaptive schedule is larger than the cost of dictating one (especially if most of the latter costs can truly be externalized!)
* Real day-to-day and career incentives for management reward 9-5 schedules
The managers want everything run on their schedule so they can keep an eye on things. That is the process, for better or worse.
I've worked at two or three startups (and heard of others) where, when it was time to move to bigger offices, there was a long discussion about moving the company out to the suburbs. Everyone hired on because the job was downtown, except who? Management. Now that we're doing well they want to make their lives easier. It came to some very angry conversations and threats of quitting before they would relent.
If memory serves, none of these individuals were of the facilitator school of thought, where the manager's job is to make sure everything is running smoothly.
Anarcho-capitalists: roads with congestion pricing lead to an efficient balance of changes to schedules, housing location, and salaries. (This seems totally implementable now with cell-phone networks.)
Every time I've thought about that, my first internal response has been "there's already congestion pricing!" That is, there's already a very visceral cost imposed in terms of time and aggravation, along with increased fuel consumption and marginal automotive wear. The fact that people do it anyway indicates that the incentive structure pushing the congested commute is bigger.
Whether additional congestion fees could help really depends on how much bigger that structure is. My own guess is that it's quite a bit bigger, to the point where the pain involved (not to mention rents sought) before you find the point where congestion fees actually flip behavior is too large to yield a stable or reasonable outcome.
Yes, there is a cost of time and aggravation without congestion pricing. That's the point! When you decide whether to make a particular trip, you're deciding whether to impose the time/aggravation cost on everyone else using the road (because an additional car slows every car down some), but you don't pay that cost; they do. (As you pay the cost of their decisions.) It's a kind of tragedy of the commons, like the exhaust going out the tailpipes.
Pricing at the marginal cost aligns the incentive structure. What you said was like saying "There's already a carbon tax! That is, there's already a very visceral cost imposed in terms of the climate change we're already seeing." Hot weather doesn't get people to stop spewing CO2 out their tailpipes; expensive gas does, which is what a carbon tax is supposed to be about.
> What you said was like saying "There's already a carbon tax! That is, there's already a very visceral cost imposed in terms of the climate change we're already seeing."
If engaging in greenhouse-magnifying activities resulted in the same immediacy of frustration and discomfort that getting on a crowded freeway does, then sure, I'd not only contend that a carbon tax would be unnecessary, I'd go so far as to say as global warming wouldn't be a policy conversation at all until roughly the time the total waste heat output of human activity started raising the average temps.
Instead when I turn on a light or fill up a gas tank or type an argument on a computer, all I get is useful activity. There's no inherent negative feedback. Additional cost is one of the few signals that could be added.
When you get on the freeway, even in the absence of a fee or tax for your marginal contribution to everyone else's more arduous travel, you are immediately experiencing the aggregated marginal costs contributed by everyone else, in a way that you don't even have to calculate (though you could), you can feel.
And yet people do it anyway. Why? Certainly not because there aren't immediately apparent costs.
A solution that's incurious about why people are willing to bear existing costs isn't likely to be particularly effective at changing behavior. Or at predicting second-order effects even if it does find a price point at which it does.
Have you ever known someone to decide "Let's not take the car this time, it'd create too much congestion for other people"? Because that's a different cost, in amount and not just in who pays, from "With the traffic it'll take us 5 minutes longer than usual". You're not getting the negative feedback of your own decision here either; it's an increment like how when the CO2 goes out the tailpipe, the air right around you the driver is for you personally a little worse.
Of course reality is more complex than a toy model. I brought up the simplest model because your objection seems to me even cruder. People are not generally Hofstadter's superrational agents directly overcoming game-theoretical equilibria in prisoner's dilemmas with a million strangers.
Not saying that by solving the 9-5 mentality we will solve climate change, but it sure would be a measurable improvement on that front as well as mental health as a whole. Maybe somebody should research that.