The number of days we work has nearly nothing to do with the technology available to us and everything to do with the relative power between labour and capital.
Exactly, landlords will be working 0.5 days and renters will be working 5-6 days. So I guess they were actually right if they meant 3.5 days on average.
I rent a very basic one bedroom in an awful location which costs more than half my after tax salary, and a round trip to my office in Toronto takes 3 hours and $45 of public transit. The price of this unit has also increased by more than my salary every year for the past 3 years.
If you're rich and still working long hours you're not working because of the money. If you can be the CEO of multiple companies, those companies are not getting a full-time workweek and that person very likely isn't doing it for the money.
But if you want to live like someone from 30 years ago, you would need to work 100 hours/week. I don't think I'll ever be able to afford a home even half as good as the one I grew up in (in Canada).
If I'm a farmer, doctor, teacher, soldier, construction laborer, nurse, miner, or other actual work worker, I should realize this ain't my kids he's talking about.
Farmers use a lot of technology. So if he is talking "AI" think like combines keeping the "lane" like your car and tractors sowing basically on their own adjusting seed and fertilizer levels as needed as they go. And none of that needs actual "AI". Of course we are talking large industrial farm companies here in many cases. Not your mom and pop farm.
I think that's the point JPMorgan (and others in various replies) are making. The rich mega farmer is going to use "AI" (whatever that actually means) to replace some things that are done by these "children" today.
On some spreadsheet they are working 3.5 days. Across the entire population. If that actually happens to real American children across the board in corporate America, I will be impressed and proclaim the opposite of everything I say. What I think will actually happen is what you are saying. Fire some manual labor that today is still actually needed and getting paid. Many if not most of those are already not American workers but temporary or outright illegal foreign workers anyway. Not all of it being because "rich people are bad" but also because "poor people are not poor enough" (so to speak - I know this is "political suicide"). What our 1950s ancestors called hard but fair and honorable sweat labor is unthinkable to many of us today and we gladly let it be done by said half illegal labor and we turn the other way and binge watch another Netflix show while complaining that we can't find any good jobs!
Farmers and soldiers use a lot more technology than most of us. Farming is an industry that uses much more technology earlier than other Industries. It is harder to enter but easier to stay, and once there, it lasts for a long time.
It's about a conflict of mutually opposed interests.
You and I exist as citizens of our respective nations. We have wants and needs, and we engage with politics (hopefully by voting) to pursue those wants and needs.
So long as we are part of the majority, it is likely our wants and needs will be more or less met.
When we are no longer in the majority, our needs and wants are less likely to be met.
When politicians import (or allow to be imported) a new demographic into the voter base, who bring with them new collections of wants and needs, that activity harms our bargaining position as politicians are no longer beholden to our interests.
In America, in an era where special treatment and incentives and punishments are being awarded on the basis of ethnicity(which cannot be changed or altered), this maters even more.
>When politicians import (or allow to be imported) a new demographic into the voter base, who bring with them new collections of wants and needs, that activity harms our bargaining position as politicians are no longer beholden to our interests.
Do you have a source for this?
Is immigration actually meaningfully impacting party demographics?
>Is immigration actually meaningfully impacting party demographics?
Yes. I will edit in a few examples from several countries in a moment.
It's worth noting, however, that interest displacement/dilution is still an issue even if it doesn't force/induce party clustering.
Individual parties shifting policy priorities/implementations/strategies to cater to new voter bases to win power results in a relative deprioritization of citizens.
The fundamental dynamics at play still apply.
If the largest demo in a nation only occupied, say, 40% of it's voter base, a coalition of the other demos can override them and (if the competition is polarized enough) will eventually realize the dominant strategy is to actively reduce that groups numbers and power to secure the position of the coalition and the individual power of each of it's members.
The takeaway here is that immigration flows to areas with shared want/need profiles and elevate the national power of those demand slates, displacing power from alternative slates.
Whether this good or not depends on if the demands of immigrants overlap with your own demands. If they do, you are empowered. If they do not, you are disempowered.
I don't know why this is getting downvoted. This is exactly how the system works.
Every productivity gain is only meant to make workers faster which earns profits faster for the executives and shareholders.
With the prospect of faster work, execs and shareholders are salivating at the thought of grinding workers more in the same 40 hours/week but earn more profits for the same amount of hours.
If we want our children to live a better life than us, we need massive changes in laws (healthcare, exempt workers etc.).
You speak as if execs are some depersonalized force of nature. But they are people and there aren't that many of them. JPMorgan CEO is one of them, and he seems to be saying he supports a shorter work week, but not a complete abolishment of work as some thinkers have proposed. If he says those are his views, do you have an argument for why we shouldn't take his word for it?
He's not going to accept a 3.5 hour workweek for JP Morgan and neither will his successor. Owners and managers will always squeeze hard. It's the nature of competition and he knows it.
We were thought to work three days a week because of all the productivity gains we made. The time we'd be down to three days? The 1970s. Wealth always demands more wealth and the rest of us need to be good labor-piggies and do that work. Yeah, they can get away with doing more with less because AI but they'll keep on with the skeleton crew they can and carry on. Rinse repeat capitalism.
Everything that grows the pie makes the richer even more rich. Given the unequal capture of economic growth, anything that makes the poor 1% better off will make the rich 50% better off (more money to influence governments, more toys, better health care, faster jets, nicer food, etc.). Feels like a disincentive to make anything better.
I've also heard that increased productivity is eventually captured by the financial sector through increased debt servicing costs as it extends more credit to match the increased productivity. That one I'm prepared to believe.
Whatever the case, I highly doubt we'll see increased productivity resulting in more leisure time without a political revolution.
Women went from carrying washboards to the rivers edge to walking downstairs and dropping a load into the washing machine. Root cellars became ice boxes became refrigerators. Instead of beating the rugs you run a vacuum, etc.
Women could've hung out at home with this newfound time, but instead they mostly went into the workplace. This roughly doubled the labor force and over time essentially halved wages workers took home, making dual income households the norm and now essentially a requirement to own property.
First, it didn't happen then, specially if wages being halved meaning that there isn't even a theoretical possibility of working half the hours for the same pay.
And why does doubling labour force halve wages? Land is limited so the higher competition can mean more workers mean higher prices, sure. But for everything else, productivity of workers per hour increased. This isn't the middle ages where demand for labour is more or less limited by the availability of agricultural land. Why can't the new and old workers capture the same share of the pie they produce as before women joined the wage labour force?
> What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?
> ... for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.
> The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.
> ... We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.
"Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren", Keynes, 1930
However I would note actually many people have chosen to do exactly this and our abundance sustains them sufficiently. But the enshitification of literally reality itself makes it impossible for most people to see beyond the human hamster wheels we’ve built for ourselves.
The core principles of capitalism, revolving around productivity, cost reduction and profit maximization, mandates that the future with AI assisted work, if at all that comes to fruition, means that capitalists will hire half the workforce to make them work 5 or 6 days a week (or find countries which have situations that allow this to be the norm) and extract more profit from each soul, rather than keeping the same workforce and allowing each of them to work 3.5 days a week.
Ai will be owned by the richest people in the world. Maybe their children will only work 3.5 days a week. Unless we can solve that problem everyone else will get screwed.
