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Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

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Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#181

Post by gozur88 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #162
gozur88 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Retailers have taken it to another level by requiring you to commit to availability without a commitment to have work. Nobody gets 40 hours — you target around 28 typically. This is the law of unintended consequences as applied to the ACA. If they give you more hours care their costs go up dramatically unless they're already offering health.

The careful tailoring of work hours to avoid healthcare requirements was a thing long, long before the ACA.

Not in the US. Prior to the ACA there was no requirement to give FTEs health care.

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#182

Post by closeparen »

Shivetya wrote: post #145
darawk wrote: post #144

Because capitalism optimizes for production and consumption - not welfare. Often welfare and production/consumption are aligned (e.g. producing enough food for everyone). But in the case of labor/life balance, they are not aligned. It's actually kind of odd to me that serious people (e.g. John Maynard Keynes) would ever have thought that work hours would decrease. There is no term in the economic fitness function for…

well a capitalist society is also a society bombarded by marketing experts who are in every part of a person's daily life working to convince them to spend more which in turn drives them to work more or go into debt pushing retirement further off. consumption is high because marketing is that good. go read any of the popular brand subs on reddit and you will see people making stupid purchasing decisions daily and man…

Consumer goods are practically free next to housing. I don’t buy this argument at all. I could completely slash or double marketing-driven spending tomorrow and be in substantially the same financial position. Maybe that’s just a Bay Area distortion.

Consider also that a large portion of consumer goods spending is on cars, which are basically just a substitute for living on more central/expensive land. In the end it all comes down to real estate.

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#183

Post by jpeery »

Animats wrote: post #75
sliverstorm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people now are spending almost 50% of their pre-tax income on housing, and most of that is the price of land and goes to landlords. 1) That's really not a countrywide thing 2) It's not specifically the landlords, it's whoever was already there. A landlord who bought in just recently is not rolling in dough. The people who capture the gains are the people who got in fifty years ago and sold & moved, or the landlo…

The people who capture the gains are the people who got in fifty years ago and sold & moved, or the landlords who got in fifty years ago and are still renting the property. Yes. Silicon Valley's land baron is John Arrillaga, who bought Silicon Valley farmland in the 1960s. He owns about a square kilometer of office space.

It's actually a lot more than just 1 sq km, mate. Waaaay more.

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#184

Post by sdenton4 »

gozur88 wrote: post #181
sdenton4 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The careful tailoring of work hours to avoid healthcare requirements was a thing long, long before the ACA.

Not in the US. Prior to the ACA there was no requirement to give FTEs health care.

Incorrect. It seems mandates were state-by-state prior to the ACA, and certainly existed. Here's a quickly dredged up citation.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/09/16/3489562...

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#185

Post by Spooky23 »

gozur88 wrote: post #181
sdenton4 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The careful tailoring of work hours to avoid healthcare requirements was a thing long, long before the ACA.

Not in the US. Prior to the ACA there was no requirement to give FTEs health care.

In the dark red states, sure. Not everywhere. Most places added those requirements 30 years ago.

It’s not just health care. Intrusive regulation like requiring a nominal amount of paid sick leave is mandated in my state over a certain number of hours. (32 iirc)

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#186

Post by neilwilson »

guy98238710 wrote: post #174

Saying that people just like working is ridiculous. It's either author's social bubble or it's straight propaganda. I cannot imagine people in factories or construction saying they like to go to work. The reasons behind the 40-hour week are way more brutal: - Contemporary economy has surprising amount of internal inefficiency causing most of the value to be wasted. - Value that is not squandered is distributed uneven…

It's entirely reasonable because the literature shows that it is true. Work is leisure you get paid to do and leisure is work you pay to do.

If your society doesn't allow that state to come about then it is because it has been deliberately designed to have fewer work opportunities than there are people that want them. If you construct society so that there are always more work opportunities than people who want work then competition and automation automatically gets rid of the crap jobs.

And yes there are people in factories that love their jobs. It takes all sorts to make a world.

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#187

Post by rumcajz »

jernfrost wrote: post #150

Anthropologists David Graeber, has addressed this and offered the explanation with the observation that we as a society produce what he calls bullshit jobs. Almost 40% of Brits in a surveyed acknowledged that their job wasn't needed. People believing in effective markets would of course protest and claim such enormous inefficiency can't possibly exist. Somebody will simply start a company without bullshit jobs. Howev…

My take on the problem (predates Graeber's book though): http://250bpm.com/blog:44

TL;DR: Firms are not people and can't strive for efficiency. Only individuals can. Once the financial incentives of individuals are misaligned with the financial incentives of the firm, the firm is going to lose (and pay for useless jobs).

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#188

Post by neilwilson »

konschubert wrote: post #133

It turns out that working hours are determined by politics, not economics.

It turns out that economics is just politics. The greatest political move was to rebrand political economy as economics and try and pretend it is a science.

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#189

Post by tigershark »

Simon_says wrote: post #70
a3n wrote: post #9

Most people don't get to choose how many hours they work. Employers, especially those that pay benefits, want you working as much as possible. Anything less is money on the table. (I'm not an employer.) It's good for an employer if you work overtime, all he has to pay is time, or time and a half, or nothing if you're salaried. He doesn't have to pay more benefits, as he would with an additional employee. Of course an…

Not quite. People don't get to choose work hours per week, but they can choose work hours per lifetime. I worked about 16,000 hours and retired.

So are you saying that a Walmart employee can choose to work for 7 years and then retire? Hardly believable.

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#190

Post by ctchocula »

cjalmeida wrote: post #178
marvin wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The $55k are pre-tax, and the "free" healthcare in contries with public health care are mostly paid out of those taxes. There is probably a point in there about shorter work days and legally mandated overtime pay, but it doesn't add up to 40k per year. Honestly, the more I look at this, the more it seems like there are hidden mechanisms that keep pay below market value in many European countries. E.g. wage collusion…

Now you mentioned taxes, let's get more numbers! Yay! Income taxes in Texas for 95k amounts to about 27%. Income tax in Berlin for $60k (30y, no children, left other options on defaults) amounts to 33%. The after tax difference is about $30k then. Tuition in UT Dallas, 4y engineering bachelor degree, is $45k. Free in DE, but you pay that in less than two years with the difference in salary. Public transport? In US th…

Just a nitpick, but I think you are using the marginal tax numbers instead of the actual tax rate, and not applying all the complicated deductions available to US people.

Texas:

$95k pre-tax falls into the marginal 28% bracket, but after subtracting 401k + IRA deferral ($18k + $5.5k), $95k falls to AGI of $71.5k. Then after subtracting standard deduction ($6.35k for single 30y, no children), personal exemption ($4.05k), taxable income falls to $61.1k. For this, the tax calculation is:

0-9325: 10%x9325 = 932.5

9325-37950: 15%x28624 = 4293.6

37950-61100: 25%x23150 = 5787.5

Total tax: 11013.6

Post-tax income: 84k

Income Tax rate: 11.6% since no income tax in Texas.

Social security+Medicare: 7.65%

Post-tax and post-SS: $76.7k

Berlin:

Pre-tax: $60k USD x 1 Euro/$1.19 USD = 50240 Euro

I entered this number into a German tax estimator [1], which gave me the following output for the tax bracket calculations:

Total tax: 9.908,56 Euro

Post-tax income: 40331 Euro

Income Tax rate: 19.7%

Obligatory Pension: 9.35%

UI+Health Insurance+Disability: 8.4%+1.5%+1.425% = 11.325%

Post-tax and everything: $35.8k USD

The difference becomes $40.9k. If you amortize the 4y engineering bachelor degree over 4 years, I think the difference in income is quite significant.

[1] http://www.parmentier.de/steuer/steuer.htm?wagetax.htm

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