How did we get so busy?
newyorker.com
How did we get so busy?
1–10 of 148 posts
Re: How did we get so busy?
#2[deleted]
Re: How did we get so busy?
#3Offtopic, but the date on the article says 6 days from now..
Re: How did we get so busy?
#4Offtopic, but the date on the article says 6 days from now..
That's likely the print (as in physical print) date.
Re: How did we get so busy?
#5Offtopic, but the date on the article says 6 days from now..
That's probably the day the article will appear in the print. It's very common practice among websites of print publications, so that there's no discrepancy in dates between the online and print editions.
Re: How did we get so busy?
#6[deleted]
Re: How did we get so busy?
#7Or we could look to Marx, who predicted exactly this state of affairs succinctly by showing that, at the most basic, there are three traditional ways to increase competitive advantage:
1. Work more intensely over the course of a fixed working day (eg. the 8 hours most people normally work in the United States)
2. Work longer hours thereby generating more surplus value while only being paid for a smaller proportion of your overall work. Today, this typically involves creating a culture that incentivizes overwork and disincentivizes the normal working day.
3. Revolutionize the means of production thereby gaining an ephemeral advantage over the competition. Think the Japanese in the 80s with just-in-time production which allowed them to dominate the automotive industry. Automating work would also fall under this category. Notice this can require (1) or (2) as a pre-requisite to such innovation.
Under this analysis being busy would be a natural byproduct of the reigning economic ordering of society.
Re: How did we get so busy?
#8Or we could look to Marx, who predicted exactly this state of affairs succinctly by showing that, at the most basic, there are three traditional ways to increase competitive advantage: 1. Work more intensely over the course of a fixed working day (eg. the 8 hours most people normally work in the United States) 2. Work longer hours thereby generating more surplus value while only being paid for a smaller proportion of…
Marx seems superflous--it's more (likely) the red-queen effect
Re: How did we get so busy?
#9Why are we busier?
Go here http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity change the start of the graph to 1959. I would argue that technology has radically helped our productivity but at the end of the day, people are always expected to get better.
Honestly I don't know if this is sustainable but the idea of always growing from a gut check doesn't seem to be. The question could be what is the breaking point and what will break?
Re: How did we get so busy?
#10Awesome article. I don't have much to add, but it's interesting how "funny" we are as a species in that we're never fully content. What we think of as a "perfect life" today will be trivial in 100 years and that society 100 years from now will yearn for their own perfect life.