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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

#21

Post by andrew1 »

maneesh wrote: post #5
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 designed my life to work 3hrs59m / week, and spend the remaining 6 days starting an NGO that teaches Indian village children how to use the computer....if you live your life non-traditionally, you can live on a lot less work than 21 hours...

That's very interesting, although without a little context, it's hard to know what to make of it. What do you do during the 3h59ms that you work? Where do you live? What do you do with the other 20h1m on the day when you work?

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#22

Post by lsc »

yannis wrote: post #20

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.

well, even given the exact same person, one hour is not equal to the next. at 90 hours a week, after the first or second week, I get less useful work done than if I just work 20 hours.

I imagine 'optimal' productivity for one person varies considerably from person to person, and situation to situation, (and I imagine /on average/ optimal productivity means working more than 20 hours a week)

Which is why I was so disappointed by this article. I thought they were going to do some research on the optimal number of hours/week to work for maximum productivity. (I suppose I shouldn't be too disappointed; just measuring productivity is /hard/)

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#23

Post by yannis »

lsc wrote: post #22
yannis wrote: post #20

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.

well, even given the exact same person, one hour is not equal to the next. at 90 hours a week, after the first or second week, I get less useful work done than if I just work 20 hours. I imagine 'optimal' productivity for one person varies considerably from person to person, and situation to situation, (and I imagine /on average/ optimal productivity means working more than 20 hours a week) Which is why I was so disa…

Agreed and to measure productivity over a year is more difficult. The authors present some data in their report, but some of the examples are difficult to accept (like Utah public servants). However, if you make a thought experiment in has merits. Assume 5 programmers with equal skills and a 'fixed work load'. From a social point of view it will be better for them to be all employed working for less hours than 4 of them working full hours.

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#24

Post by gaius »

rjurney wrote: post #19

Ever had your project interrupted when a European decides to take six weeks of consecutive vacation? I'll take puritan productivity any day.

Yet, European firms are still comparable to Americans in terms of productivity and compete successfully in global markets. Intriguing, no?

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#25

Post by lsc »

yannis wrote: post #23
lsc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, even given the exact same person, one hour is not equal to the next. at 90 hours a week, after the first or second week, I get less useful work done than if I just work 20 hours. I imagine 'optimal' productivity for one person varies considerably from person to person, and situation to situation, (and I imagine /on average/ optimal productivity means working more than 20 hours a week) Which is why I was so disa…

Agreed and to measure productivity over a year is more difficult. The authors present some data in their report, but some of the examples are difficult to accept (like Utah public servants). However, if you make a thought experiment in has merits. Assume 5 programmers with equal skills and a 'fixed work load'. From a social point of view it will be better for them to be all employed working for less hours than 4 of t…

as an employer (sortof... everyone is an 'independent contractor' a mostly defensible position right now, as everyone works from home, and pretty much takes stuff off the list of things that needs to be done when they feel like doing them.) I think that if you can talk employees into this arrangement, and retain them, having 2 20hr/week guys is better than having 1 40hr/week guy.

the first, most obvious benefit is redundancy. If one employee gets sick or gets another job, I've still got the other guy, and can often talk him or her into working more temporarily to cover until I get someone else.

The other benefits are that I think nerds often under bill. A person working for me 20 hours a week ideally (well, ideally for me, the employer) gives me as much 'inspiration' as someone working 40 hours.

I also think employees are vastly more productive when they feel like working. In my situation, if I pick the right people, I get to pay them when they feel like working, when they are most productive, and then not pay them when they are unmotivated, and thus less productive.

Now, if I hired everyone as employees, then we'd have interesting issues with health insurance; each employee would have a per-month cost not dependent on hours I got out of them (I'm assuming that I'd have a better retention rate if I offered health insurance) But it's possible that cost would be low enough to justify the scheme; maybe I would just pay them a lower wage than I otherwise would?

(man, health insurance is fucked up... as far as I can tell, if I want to get people tax deductible insurance, I have to get everyone insurance; If someone wants to opt-out, as far as I can tell, I can't give them the cash I'd otherwise be spending on them.)

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#26

Post by ovi256 »

rjurney wrote: post #19

Ever had your project interrupted when a European decides to take six weeks of consecutive vacation? I'll take puritan productivity any day.

Ever had your vacation interrupted because an American decided to start a project ? I'll take atheist productivity any day.

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#27

Post by gaius »

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.

This is the thinking that led the French to the 35-hour work week. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have occurred to them (probably because they were more-or-less interchangeable bureaucrats themselves) that an out-of-work bricklayer can't work the hours freed up by restricting the work-week of a plumber...

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#28

Post by sb »

_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…

Thank you very much for the interesting link to Bertrand Russel's take on this issue. Some time ago, another very interesting piece of Betrand Russel was linked by another HN user, and I have to say that reading Mr. Russel's essays should be required reading for some classes; probably in addition to reading some of his mathematical work, which is highly recommended, too.

That aside, I think that the article does not address another important (probably too recent) reason/ambition for increased work load: improving ones social status. As already indicated this probably was a non-issue when the article was authored, but then again my comment would fall into the just-for-the-record category...

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#29

Post by lionhearted »

patio11 wrote: post #12
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…

> 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.

This might interest you if you haven't heard of it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE

Results Only Work Environment - you agree on a set of tasks with your manager, you complete them, you get paid. Doesn't matter when you do it or how long it takes you. That lets people choose to work at a slower pace with more goofing off on Facebook or webcomics, or work in a blaze and hit the beach, or whatever. People who wish to produce manic levels of work can produce more and get paid for it as gauged by results, people who want to work less can complete less tasks can do so and still get paid a reasonable amount. I think there'll be some kinks to be ironed out, but it's more or less the future.

> (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.)

Cleaning floors is notoriously hard to outsource, but the technology-in-theory for automating/roboticizing much more of manual labor is already there. It's why I'd like to see the world get more wealthier - people have a false believe that if there's no more poor people, everything will get more expensive. Pretty false idea - if more people are doing R&D, pure science, engineering, art, programming instead of manual labor, we'll see huge gains in new innovation and can roboticize/automate much of the manual labor away. Hell, when I was in China I'd see like 30 guys with chisels tearing up asphalt which you'd have one guy with a jackhammer doing in the States. The labor was cheaper than the machinery, but as the Chinese get more educated and into high skilled work, that'll change and they'll switch over to jackhammers and whatever we invent next after jackhammers.

Re: Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

#30

Post by gaius »

olefoo wrote: post #16
_delirium wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That isn't the case for the vast majority of the workforce.
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