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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

#171

Post by shin_lao »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #114
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…

Sorry, I must disagree. Two people working 20 hours a week are refreshed, not burned out, have time for educationally side projects, etc. I am in my early 60s and for my whole life I limited my work hours to 32 hours per week, even working for large companies. I had lots of time for educational side projects, exercise, extra time with family and friends, and mediation. My only regret was not perhaps cutting this to l…

Err... 20 hours is really not a lot of work.

Some problems, to be solved, require intense work.

At 40 hours a week you will hardly feel "burned out".

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

#172

Post by ern »

WalterBright wrote: post #106
mattschoch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>For job like programming or CEO, I kind of think that 70 year olds can do better than say 20 year olds. Maybe in 50 years, but currently I'd say a 20-30 years old is the prime programmer age. Young people tend to learn new tech quicker, and be faster/more efficient at typing and using computers.

Are you so sure about that? I'm 53, and I believe I'm a far more effective programmer than I was in my 20's.

A 53 year old who has been programming for 30+ years is likely to be a good programmer because they managed to keep programming for all those years. How many of the less-talented people you started out with are still programming?

But I do agree that it without hard evidence, it's unfair to assume older programmers are slower or less capable. I have personally worked with some exceptional older programmers.

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

#173

Post by muoncf »

ctdonath wrote: post #94
samstave wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the title should be: "It should only require 25 hours per week to make a comfortable living" We should all put in the most amount of time to our lives and passions, but to maintain a comfortable life should not consume 100% of our available productive hours. (assuming productive hours == 8/day, 5 days/week) If maintaining a living (comfortable or not) requires 100% of our productive work time (40 hours/w…

The problem is what constitutes "maintaining a living", both in your own choices and governmental influence. I can show you how to live well on $10/day, but then you'd complain about not having X Y and Z (starting with two cars and a mortgage in a narrow geographic range). If you can't do without what amounts to luxuries to 75% of the world population, discussing how many hours a week you "should" work is a non-start…

I'm honestly curious about this since, even as a student, I'm living on more than that per day. Could you tell me more?

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

#174

Post by moconnor »

jseliger wrote: post #107
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…

>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…

I have some datapoints here. Twice in the last five years I have spent a year working half time (German parental leave is incredible). I noticed spending a higher proportion of my time on 'overhead' - emails, code reviews etc, but my overall productivity did not drop.

I measured the bugs fixed over time, commits made, lines and files changed, emails sent, all proxies for activity.

Some results are shown in this otherwise tangentially related blog post: http://yieldthought.com/post/6070927890/metagame-productivit...

Bear in mind when looking at the charts that they are corrected for man months not calendar months - my calendar productivity remained about the same or slightly better over the measured period.

I recently reduced my hours to 27.5 just by asking. Without these positive experiences for all concerned that may not have been so easy.

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

#175

Post by serge2k »

xtracto wrote: post #123
samstave wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK - I am your student I live in the bay area, Married, have 2 kids and work in SF. Show me how to live on $10/day. Consider me your student. Unless your comment of "showing me how to live on $10/day" is really titled "show a homeless 15 year-old with no job, family or financial obligations how to subsist on $10/day" If you really can show me how to live on less than the cost it is for me to get to work ($7.10, BTW)…

>If not, then fuck you you smug ass - it costs to live. Wow, HN has dropped this low? Here were I live the standard household income is around $600 USD a Month. A family of 4 can (parents and two children) can live with that.

Good for you, my rent is more than that and I don't live in an expensive place.

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

#176

Post by wildgift »

electromagnetic wrote: post #102
rndmize wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly sure the 40 hour week is far from arbitrary. There's someone on HN who has a long post about working hours and the wide variety of studies that were done demonstrating that 40 hours resulted in higher efficiency than 50 or more as far back as the 1930s, and that peak efficiency for white collar work is even less (6 hour days). I'll have to see if I can find it.

The thing is, 40 hours less my hour lunch a day ends up at 35 hours, which over 7 days is only 5 hours. To me personally I would prefer to work 5 hours a day every day than be getting up at 6am to get home for 6pm, and forget it if I want to do groceries on a night, I'll be getting home in time to have a shower, read a chapter of a book and fall asleep. My weekend work usually averages around 4-5 hours a day, I get t…

FYI, the standard US lunch is 30 minutes and doesn't count toward the 40 hours. It's been this way for a long time.

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

#177

Post by wildgift »

pteredactyl wrote: post #27
Zigurd wrote: post #2

Until we come to grips with what will likely be a post-labor world, this is a good transitional approach. The 40 hour week is an arbitrary standard, and it may now be rational to reduce that number. Few jobs are now so arduous that 70 year olds cannot perform well. We are suffering from outdated standards for work weeks and retirement age, and un-sticking our assumptions is likely to benefit the situation.

I agree we are stuck in an outdated model however I am not keen on someone me telling how many hours I can or should work.

I don't see how a shorter work week prevents anyone from working longer, or even less than the minimum. There are plenty of people working more than 40 hours, and plenty working fewer.

The only that the 40 sets is the threshold at which workers attain specific rights regarding overtime, benefits, and other things.

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

#178

Post by aharrison »

javert wrote: post #167
yakiv wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You might be interested in this concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

All economic discussions of free markets that I have ever heard have implicitly or explicitly stated that one of the necessary oversights of government is to break up or regulate natural monopoly-prone industries.

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

#179

Post by nagrom »

serge2k wrote: post #175
xtracto wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If not, then fuck you you smug ass - it costs to live. Wow, HN has dropped this low? Here were I live the standard household income is around $600 USD a Month. A family of 4 can (parents and two children) can live with that.

Good for you, my rent is more than that and I don't live in an expensive place.

Sure you do! So do I! You and I probably live in the most expensive 1% of places on the planet. We live incredible lives - our existences are better on average than anything any king had 150 years ago. We have whatever food we want at whatever time in the year we want it. We have phenomenal connectivity and mobility and, if we need to be on the other side of the planet in 48 hours time, that's doable.

Of course, I want more. The guy next door has a Range Rover and a Porsche. But I know there are literally billions of people who cannot imagine the luxury in which I live.

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

#180

Post by enraged_camel »

Well, 25 hours a week is for how long your average worker is productive throughout the typical work-week anyway. The rest is spent dicking around on the Internet and socializing with coworkers.

I feel like if we cut down the "official" work to 25 hours, people would suddenly realize that they need to be a lot more productive to get the same amount of work done. No more pointless interruptions. No more bullshit meetings. Everyone would try to get shit done, and enjoy the extra three hours they get everyday and be a lot happier.

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