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We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

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Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#161

Post by rowanseymour »

A counter philosophy to this is that we should be striving to find jobs that we enjoy and find so fulfilling that we don't mind working 40+ hours per week... until we're 80...

I say that wondering how realistic that is and whether that's a yet another imaginary carrot dangling over our heads to make us work harder. I like my job a lot (software developer making medical software for clinics in Kenya) but flip I'd love a 4 day week because there's always something more enjoyable than work. And I'm not sure if every single job we need people to do can be that fulfilling raison d'être for someone.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#162

Post by tossacct »

svachalek wrote: post #153
tossacct wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>Nowhere near proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain. What is the proper proportion?

Why not 1:1?

Would you care to share your measuring system for how do decide if it is 1:1 or not? It seems complex to measure health, "wealth", happiness, and security. I sure haven't found any actionable or reasonably complete metrics in my readings, maybe I am bad at searching.

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

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#164

Post by sebcat »

learc83 wrote: post #113
jseliger wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption. I'm not convinced this is true: there are also intense coordination costs and learning costs. Two programmers working 20 hours a week, for example, are way less productive tha…

>Two programmers working 20 hours a week, for example, are way less productive than one programmer working 40 hours a week. That makes assumptions efficiency as it relates to number of hours worked that I'm not sure you can make. How many of those 40 hours are really spent working? 40 hour work weeks are the result of labor regulations, and the binding of health insurance to full-time employment, not a free market eq…

Didn't people work longer back when there were no labor laws?

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#165

Post by jvm »

zurn wrote: post #134
jdietrich wrote: post #92

In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption. The cost of living hasn't meaningfully increased, we've just continually redefined luxuries as necessities. My grandparents are perfectly typical working-class people. They gre…

> We overwhelmingly choose to work the greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and 60 hours for most people), in order to maximise our spending power. Not so: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=AVE_HRS (the statistic above excludes vacatyion and national holidays, sick leave, paid maternity/paternity leave etc, which are also much more generous these days) Note how the wel…

I really wish the US was on that chart!

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#166

Post by javert »

derleth wrote: post #141
javert wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best that the law/government can do is to break up the collusions (e.g. among VCs) No, the best that the government can do for startups and the economy is just get out of the way.

> No, the best that the government can do for startups and the economy is just get out of the way. We've tried that and it failed. Does the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire ring any bells?

The proper role of the government is to protect citizens from the initiation of force, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was certainly that.

I'm not advocating anarchism.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#167

Post by javert »

yakiv wrote: post #126
javert wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best that the law/government can do is to break up the collusions (e.g. among VCs) No, the best that the government can do for startups and the economy is just get out of the way.

I doubt it. If you don't ban monopoly power, people sometimes get it (like Rockefeller sort of did). You don't get all of the nice properties of free markets unless some conditions are met, like the absence of monopolies. Edit: That being said, government can get involved in the wrong ways and cause problems with subsidies and bad regulation.

Actually, monopolies come from the government explicitly banning or regulating away competition.

Yes, it's true that you can't get the nice properties of a free market without some conditions being met. Specifically, you need the government to be the arbiter of physical force between people. Otherwise, you have gang warfare (anarchism).

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#168

Post by tptacek »

samstave wrote: post #110
burntsushi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (assuming productive hours == 8/day, 5 days/week) Bad assumption. > If maintaining a living (comfortable or not) requires 100% of our productive work time (40 hours/week) then how are you not a slave to that subsistence lifestyle? What is "subsistence" about it? I understand subsistence living to mean "having just enough to survive."

Jesus, you and ctdonath sound like 20-something morons. Get a fucking life with several mortgages and children. Or, better yet - go live the idolized life of the genius software development hermit you both appear to think yourself to be. What a wonderful life that will be. I am so sick of these douchebag HNers that all think of themselves to be the next rails revolution and have no fucking clue as to what it actually…

Sam. Breathe.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#169

Post by zurn »

jvm wrote: post #165
zurn wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We overwhelmingly choose to work the greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and 60 hours for most people), in order to maximise our spending power. Not so: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=AVE_HRS (the statistic above excludes vacatyion and national holidays, sick leave, paid maternity/paternity leave etc, which are also much more generous these days) Note how the wel…

I really wish the US was on that chart!

This one seems to have it, titled "Average annual hours actually worked per worker": http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ANHRS

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#170

Post by acgourley »

svachalek wrote: post #144
zurn wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We overwhelmingly choose to work the greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and 60 hours for most people), in order to maximise our spending power. Not so: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=AVE_HRS (the statistic above excludes vacatyion and national holidays, sick leave, paid maternity/paternity leave etc, which are also much more generous these days) Note how the wel…

Are you in Europe or something? In Silicon Valley, 50 hours is a fairly typical week most places I've worked and in some companies much higher numbers are the norm. (edit: and all forms of leave are decreasing rather than increasing)

I believe people who work 40 hours a week are the silent majority, even in tech in SV.
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