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Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

news.bbc.co.uk

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Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#11

Post by _delirium »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #2

This caught my eye, but it turns out it's the same old "fixed pie" thinking: the current workers are taking up all the available "working hours", so they should cut back to give the unemployed an opportunity to get some. Ridiculous. Why not be more productive and actually just create more jobs. Just like wealth, the number of jobs available is not fixed.

That's not the only reason to cut work weeks, though I agree it's a bad one. This old article by Bertrand Russell starts out by pointing out that the "fixed pie" view is not a good reason to work less, but that there are others: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

The gist of it is that you can take the dividends of increasing productivity in a lot of ways. As computers get faster, you can keep paying $2k for a new computer every 3-4 years and get a better one, or you can take some of that technology-advancement dividend in cash, and buy a netbook that's still better than your old computer. He's basically arguing that you should take some of the modern era's productivity dividend in leisure time, instead of just in more income and material wealth.

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#12

Post by patio11 »

hartror wrote: post #10

"The foundation admitted people would earn less, but said they would have more time to carry out worthy tasks." Like starving?

That is, perhaps, a little harsh. I'm about as far from them on the political scale as is possible without being Atilla the Hun, but they do have one insight shining like a gem among so much donkey offal:

There is nothing natural or inevitable about what’s considered ‘normal’ today. Time, like work, has become commodified – a recent legacy of industrial capitalism. Yet the logic of industrial time is out of step with today’s conditions, where instant communications and mobile technologies bring new risks and pressures, as well as opportunities.

This is right in every respect, I think.

It is taken by many as an article of faith that there are 10x productivity differences in knowledge workers. If we actually mean that, then 2x differences in numbers of hours worked should be quite sustainable. As I've said before, why should my daily life be fit to the schedule designed to maximize the productivity of illiterate water loom operators.

Where this report gets really really wacky is assuming that everyone can do it, which probably requires massive amounts of wealth flowing around to support unproductive workers. That might even work, for a while at least, if you had some sort of unfair advantage which could conceal you from the market -- taxing authority, perhaps, or such a booming economy that you could afford extravagances like the demands of the United Auto Workers out of the petty cash drawer.

There are also hard limits on how much value can be wrung out of the labor of low-skilled people, and those hard limits work in pretty much direct proportion to hours labored. I think achieving income parity (and relatedly, working hour parity) between them and high-skilled workers is probably a lost cause. I can sell software while sleeping, a trader can act as a productivity multiplier on millions in capital at the click of a button, but this floor isn't getting swept until somebody actually pushes a broom over it for an hour. (Oh, more bad news: robots can already do that, and it will only be a few more years before the cleaning company we outsource to figures out how to exploit that differential profitably.)

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#13

Post by ryanwaggoner »

_delirium wrote: post #11
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #2

This caught my eye, but it turns out it's the same old "fixed pie" thinking: the current workers are taking up all the available "working hours", so they should cut back to give the unemployed an opportunity to get some. Ridiculous. Why not be more productive and actually just create more jobs. Just like wealth, the number of jobs available is not fixed.

That's not the only reason to cut work weeks, though I agree it's a bad one. This old article by Bertrand Russell starts out by pointing out that the "fixed pie" view is not a good reason to work less, but that there are others: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html The gist of it is that you can take the dividends of increasing productivity in a lot of ways. As computers get faster, you can keep paying $2k for a new c…

Oh, don't get me wrong, I think there could be a great case for cutting work weeks. The article caught my eye because I was hoping that they had done an actual study that indicated that working fewer hours would lead to higher overall productivity (though I think that cutting them by 50 - 70% is probably wishful thinking).

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#14

Post by Groxx »

houseabsolute wrote: post #6

I've seen some other reports from this group and they have about as much to do with economics as a fifteen year old's emo "poetry" blog has to do with high literature. Consider this publication where they troll the world with a claim that janitors are more valuable to the world on average than bankers, supported by nothing more than poorly thought out back-of-the-envelope calculations. http://neweconomics.org/press-r…

Reading through this and the thread's link, and scanning a couple others, I completely agree with you. They're trolls, and little else.

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#15

Post by codexon »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #2

This caught my eye, but it turns out it's the same old "fixed pie" thinking: the current workers are taking up all the available "working hours", so they should cut back to give the unemployed an opportunity to get some. Ridiculous. Why not be more productive and actually just create more jobs. Just like wealth, the number of jobs available is not fixed.

First, I'd like to say I agree the reasoning behind the article is unconvincing.

Now that's out of the way, I disagree with extending PG's "Pie Fallacy" like this. As PG mentions in his article repeatedly, wealth is not the same thing as money. The pie of products that people will trade money for is quite limited, and unless you have a farm and don't mind living in a shack, you will need money.

The probability that people made obsolete will then create something useful in order to barter their "wealth" for money, money for supplies, and finally supplies for a living, is exceedingly small. Think about how many of you here are making niche web-apps that would be the first things to drop off of a customer's expenses when the market declines.

It is true that overall wealth would increase if everyone just worked on something else (even if it is unlikely to be traded for currency), but that is exactly what the article is suggesting: generating wealth in the community.

In the end, all this illustrates is a power struggle. A business owner will seek to turn all productivity increases into profit. Employees will seek to maintain or increase salary per effort. These two goals are fundamentally opposed. The reason the article sounds so absurd is because it is arguing in the favor of employees at the expense of business owners.

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#16

Post by olefoo »

_delirium wrote: post #11
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #2

This caught my eye, but it turns out it's the same old "fixed pie" thinking: the current workers are taking up all the available "working hours", so they should cut back to give the unemployed an opportunity to get some. Ridiculous. Why not be more productive and actually just create more jobs. Just like wealth, the number of jobs available is not fixed.

That's not the only reason to cut work weeks, though I agree it's a bad one. This old article by Bertrand Russell starts out by pointing out that the "fixed pie" view is not a good reason to work less, but that there are others: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html The gist of it is that you can take the dividends of increasing productivity in a lot of ways. As computers get faster, you can keep paying $2k for a new c…

Not only that but in an era where one's productivity is directly tied to one's creativity, more downtime is more productive.

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#17

Post by radu_floricica »

patio11 wrote: post #3

I would be much, much more interested in hearing of how any one of you hacked life such that you work a non-traditional schedule than reading how a group thinks the workweek should be established by fiat. (Most especially for a group which does not demonstrate that it has any experience with, ahem, working for a living.) Horse's mouth, incidentally: http://neweconomics.org/press-releases/shorter-working-week-...

I did about 5 years of not-so-successful freelancing, mostly getting paid for about 50% of the projects I wrote specs for. Then I decided to go for very long term relationships. The turning point was when I finally got a couple of apps working as semi-passive income. Custom made, dedicated to each client, paid only as "rent" (no up-front money). Now I can work anything from 0 to 20 hours per week for living expenses.

With the rest of the time I do wildly different things. Last year I simply wasted it, learned Clojure, did social stuff, read a whole lot. The year before it was two startups at once. Which was predictably very fun and unsuccessful.

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#18

Post by mattm »

radu_floricica wrote: post #17
patio11 wrote: post #3

I would be much, much more interested in hearing of how any one of you hacked life such that you work a non-traditional schedule than reading how a group thinks the workweek should be established by fiat. (Most especially for a group which does not demonstrate that it has any experience with, ahem, working for a living.) Horse's mouth, incidentally: http://neweconomics.org/press-releases/shorter-working-week-...

I did about 5 years of not-so-successful freelancing, mostly getting paid for about 50% of the projects I wrote specs for. Then I decided to go for very long term relationships. The turning point was when I finally got a couple of apps working as semi-passive income. Custom made, dedicated to each client, paid only as "rent" (no up-front money). Now I can work anything from 0 to 20 hours per week for living expenses.…

This is my goal that I'm working towards.

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#20

Post by yannis »

All 'wealth' is created by labor, either directly or indirectly. (Think of an economy with no money). The more people work - subject to efficiency, the more wealth being generated. However, people do not produce wealth equally. Suppose there is a 10% unemployment. If these people's efficiency is an average 70% and the employed had an overall efficiency of 80%, there is an optimum hours per week for full employment.
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