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Why Americans Work So Much Despite Keynes's Prediction

theatlantic.com

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Re: Why Americans Work So Much Despite Keynes's Prediction

#41

Post by sly_foxx »

fsloth wrote: post #30
sly_foxx wrote: post #12

Can you think outside of the communist box? Competition is in part due to the fact there are more humans alive today fighting for the same resources. It's kinda similar to dating, where things are not getting easier(except for those who inherited good genes). Today with dating you have to do more to get the same result people use to get with less effort. Lack of social safety net? Why do you care about that? You don'…

"..there are more humans alive today fighting for the same resources" If by "resources" you mean world GDP, then no, the GDP per person has never been higher: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+gdp+%2F+world+pop...

What does GDP have to do with resources? GDP measures volume of transactions. Resources are oil, gas, silver etc. Also, there is real estate. Land on Earth is limited. There are 10s of millions of people who want to live in Malibu, for example. But, number of spots there is limited, so who is going to live there? Those who have the most money.

Do you get it now - more people alive means more competition for land and other resources.

Re: Why Americans Work So Much Despite Keynes's Prediction

#42

Post by hellofunk »

gozur88 wrote: post #39

>What Keynes foretold was a very optimistic version of what economists call technological unemployment—the idea that less labor will be necessary because machines can do so much. In Keynes’s vision, the resulting unemployment would be distributed more or less evenly across society in the form of increased leisure. I would be shocked if that actually happened. From what I can tell most people would rather make more mo…

>From what I can tell most people would rather make more money than have more leisure

Totally false in most places in the world. Totally true in the U.S.

Re: Why Americans Work So Much Despite Keynes's Prediction

#43

Post by sly_foxx »

timbits wrote: post #26
sly_foxx wrote: post #12

Can you think outside of the communist box? Competition is in part due to the fact there are more humans alive today fighting for the same resources. It's kinda similar to dating, where things are not getting easier(except for those who inherited good genes). Today with dating you have to do more to get the same result people use to get with less effort. Lack of social safety net? Why do you care about that? You don'…

I like the way you think, but it's not two things you can compare. For once, living in decent conditions (3 meals a day, a roof on top of your head, ...) ranks much higher than dating and reproducing on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Also, the gene pool is quite diversified and most people can find a match during their lifetime. It's not common for attractive people to have multiples spouses.

Who cares about 'Maslow's hierarchy of needs'? It's an arbitrary pyramid - you can create your own if you wish where you can rank internet as the most basic necessity.

Also, the jobs pool is quite diversified and most people can find work during their lifetime. It's not common for highly skilled people to have multiples jobs.

Re: Why Americans Work So Much Despite Keynes's Prediction

#44

Post by gozur88 »

hellofunk wrote: post #42
gozur88 wrote: post #39

>What Keynes foretold was a very optimistic version of what economists call technological unemployment—the idea that less labor will be necessary because machines can do so much. In Keynes’s vision, the resulting unemployment would be distributed more or less evenly across society in the form of increased leisure. I would be shocked if that actually happened. From what I can tell most people would rather make more mo…

>From what I can tell most people would rather make more money than have more leisure Totally false in most places in the world. Totally true in the U.S.

I don't know how much it's true in other countries, but in the US it's pretty common to see people trap themselves in debt. You see a lot of people with six figure incomes living paycheck to paycheck. They can't afford to take less money because they've already spent it.

Re: Why Americans Work So Much Despite Keynes's Prediction

#45

Post by lhh »

majewsky wrote: post #20
lhh wrote: post #9

This article is deeply flawed... change in wages != change in standard of living. But that aside, in addition to people wanting to take part in higher standards of living, I'd hypothesize that another driver is social status. In our culture, wealth seems to translate pretty directly to social status, and I think that's a pretty core human need/desire that most people aren't willing to opt out of competing for.

> This article is deeply flawed... change in wages != change in standard of living. Measuring "standard of living" is a very hard problem. At least they're being clear about their definition, so I can judge the correlations they find for myself.

Sure, maybe coming up with a good rigorous definition is difficult, but I think it's pretty obvious that standard of living is rising drastically. Smart phones are now ubiquitous, for example, whereas they essentially didn't exist a decade ago. You could have had all of the wealth of the planet but no antibiotics less than a century ago. Conflating wages with standard of living is a glaring error.

Re: Why Americans Work So Much Despite Keynes's Prediction

#46

Post by jacobolus »

lmm wrote: post #38
jacobolus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoning has a lot to do with home sizes. In general American cities are zoned to not allow smaller units, even for those who might prefer the cheaper rent if given a choice. Japan has much simpler and more flexible zoning laws. ...But Japan doesn’t have the history of racially motivated urban design in general, so the story is a bit complicated. That, and America has been heavily subsidizing an automobile-based lifest…

Japan has extreme ghettoization of immigrants; most landlords will simply refuse to rent to foreigners.

Sure. I don’t mean that Americans are as a rule more racist than Japanese, or anything like that.

What I mean is, Japan didn’t design its whole large-scale metropolitan plan around racial segregation, the way many places in America did.

Re: Why Americans Work So Much Despite Keynes's Prediction

#47

Post by hellofunk »

gozur88 wrote: post #44
hellofunk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>From what I can tell most people would rather make more money than have more leisure Totally false in most places in the world. Totally true in the U.S.

I don't know how much it's true in other countries, but in the US it's pretty common to see people trap themselves in debt. You see a lot of people with six figure incomes living paycheck to paycheck. They can't afford to take less money because they've already spent it.

The U.S. is full of all kinds of behavior that is uniquely American. I was amazed how different the U.S. actually is when I left it several years ago to live and work in other nations. the U.S. has a lot it could learn from other places. I definitely think Americans are on average unhappier than the citizens of other Western nations, for a wide range of reasons.

Re: Why Americans Work So Much Despite Keynes's Prediction

#48

Post by lmm »

tmd wrote: post #36
miseg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the trouble. From an employee's perspective, I'd like a job with less than 40 hours per week (but also be paid lesson for it). But full working hours are favourable to employers.

You're right but I wouldn't like that even as an employee (which I am). Imagine your that your team triples in size and everyone is in some kind of part-time arrangement that makes it difficult to synchronize any kind of real-time communication. Horror.

It seems easy enough to agree some kind of core - "everyone comes in 2-4pm on Wednesday and we do any meetings then" or some such. I mean, all-remote teams manage to get work done.

Re: Why Americans Work So Much Despite Keynes's Prediction

#49

Post by lmm »

tim333 wrote: post #4

I think much of the choice of work hours must be down to human nature. We are awake about 112 hours a week and choose to work between a half (56 hours) and a quarter (28 hours) typically. People are seldom very happy unemployed. If money was the only reason people worked, the likes of Paul Graham would put their feet up when they cashed in for millions from Yahoo but they almost never do.

I'm not aware of any empirical or historical justification for the range 28-56. People are indeed seldom happy unemployed, but I haven't seen any evidence that people would be unhappy on e.g. 14 hours/week (of course it's very hard to control for status aspects).

The kind of person who can cash in for millions is an outlier in many ways - the working habits of such people say very little about those of the general population.

Re: Why Americans Work So Much Despite Keynes's Prediction

#50

Post by ivanhoe »

tmd wrote: post #32

Number of hours worked per week is not everything. I suspect that Americans do work less over the whole lifetime -- the retirement age has decreased (at least for men, see [1]) while life expectancy is increasing. The problem is that it's impossible to estimate total hours worked over lifetime for people presently in their 20s-30s and current pensioners give you a delayed statistic. Personally I think that economy ba…

Yes, but you presume that single worker working 40h/w will charge you the same hourly rate as the one working just 15h/week. It very much depends on peoples' own perception of how much work is "normal", and if you ask them to work more then the usual norm they'll probably ask to be better paid (per hour) for extra effort. Which would make them more expensive to hire, which would lead to hiring more 15h/w workers... some sort of equilibrium would surely arise, but only for jobs that are in high demand... unqualified workers will only work more and more...
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