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Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy

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Re: Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy

#181

Post by VLM »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #133

How does this stuff get so popular on YC? Is there a founder anywhere that didn't put in months of 100+ hour weeks? Or, to clarify, a successful founder?

Thats kind of the point, there's an idealized platonic form of a startup with 100 hour workweeks and open plan offices and pooled time off and no vacations ever.

Everything mentioned above has been researched and proven to be a dismal failure at actual financial productivity.

Therefore in a disruptive startup-py manner there are, on average, enormous fat stacks of cash to be earned by going against the idealized platonic form.

WRT successful, I think it unlikely there are many holders of BS degrees who didn't experimentally binge drink in college. I certainly did, till I outgrew that phase. That correlation does not imply successful earning of a degree, in fact the cause/effect relationship probably implies getting alcohol poisoning is anti-productive at the goal of successfully obtaining a credential.

So the battle is between the cargo cult crew, who think success is the result of better following the platonic form of the ideal startup even if its a dumb idea, vs the rebels who know based on research they'll on average make more money if they disruptively toss the idealized platonic form.

Re: Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy

#182

Post by yequalsx »

mattmcknight wrote: post #154
Someone1234 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no safety net. That's a wonderfully succinct way of describing the US. It seems like in a lot of EU countries if you fail there is something to catch you (higher, longer, easier to get unemployment pay for one example), whereas there really is no lower limit on how low the US will let you fall (e.g. healthcare is a privilege not a right in the US). They do say that the US has some of the highest anti-depre…

"Thank god for Obama care and the new ban on pre-existing condition limits (i.e. that you could not get insurance if you were sick before). It kept people enslaved into a single job if they ever got sick since they could never afford to lose that health insurance or they'd die." That is not true. Those protections were provided in 1996 by HIPAA Title 1 [1]. If you had been covered for 18 months, you were no longer su…

I believe you are incorrect. The law is targeting mostly people in group health plans. Think employer provided plans. So if a person loses their job and then gets a job without a group plan they may be out of luck. It also requires people in individual plans to not be dropped for health related reasons provided they maintain their coverage. Rates can be increased.

Re: Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy

#183

Post by maebert »

njharman wrote: post #106

People in tech industry (all I know) tend to call in sick to "recharge" or get things done (that are causing them stress) rather than take vacation. The interesting thing is that this tacitly known to not really be sick and accepted both by peers and management. Vacation == lazy. Sick days == we all pretend we work 60hr weeks non-stop. Cultural anecdote example from http://maebert.github.io/jrnl/installation.html#qui…

Uh. Hope my boss doesn't read this. ;-)

Re: Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy

#184

Post by nickthemagicman »

resu_nimda wrote: post #162
nickthemagicman wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, you can look at a poor kid born to a poor family who works his ass off every day. Then look at a wealthy kid born to a wealty family who works his ass off every day. Even if they make the same on all of their standardized tests, make the same grades, and go to the same college, and get the same degree..... Who's going to be more successful with the same amount of hard work? And sure there's outliers but it'…

..this bizarre American sense of individual exceptional-ism is really naive. That's what I'm getting at, maybe it's exactly that belief that sets us apart, and positing a distinctly American root seems to support the exceptionalist case. It's like you're almost saying it's naive for the poor kid to believe he can be successful. If that belief is distinctly an American thing then I'm all in on exceptionalism.

Hope springs eternal and there's always the gamble that one will be one of the minority outliers but statistically peoples paths in life are pretty predictable based on their background, family, and birth region.

Re: Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy

#185

Post by Dewie »

selectodude wrote: post #157
chimeracoder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The combination of a progressive culture and resource endowment Don't forget having a relatively culturally and ethnically homogenous population (when compared to countries like the US), something that is often forgotten when holding up Scandinavian countries (esp. Norway) as a model.

And the fact that there are fewer people in Norway than there are in New York City.

I think that's kind of why 'per capita' is used.

Re: Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy

#186

Post by adventured »

Overall Americans are not suffering from workaholism.

Americans are working less hours than they ever have as a whole.

The BLS reports the average is down to 34.5 hours per week:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm

The hours per year are comparable to Japan, Italy, Canada, New Zealand, and only 1.4% greater than the OECD average:

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS

Meanwhile, a smaller percentage of Americans are working than at any other time than in the past 35 years:

http://i.imgur.com/c5iStWB.jpg

Re: Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy

#187

Post by rayiner »

resu_nimda wrote: post #137
nickthemagicman wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That guy is the poster child for the Materialistic Self Entitled Baby Boomer Me Generation. Materialism and greed are literally everything that is wrong with the world. Spoilied Douchebags like he and his generation are a legacy hangover from post-WW2 America, a time of middle class economic excess greater than any the HUMAN RACE has ever seen. Americans aren't exceptional in any way. We just got lucky by being the o…

I like how you edited "Self Entitled" into the generational title, just to really drive home the disgust. ;) I partially disagree, though. I do think Americans are exceptional, even if I haven't settled on exactly how, and I definitely don't think of it as a wholly positive trait. But this juxtaposition from your post is interesting: Americans aren't exceptional in any way. Americans love to believe that the individu…

I think Americans are exceptional, which doesn't need to mean "the best at everything."

1) Americans are, historically, exceptionally willing to let immigrants integrate. My family is from Bangladesh, my wife's from Oregon, both going back many generations. She could never integrate into Bengali society the way I have been allowed to integrate into American society. She could live there her whole life, and she'd always be "bideshi" (foreigner).

2) Americans are exceptionally optimistic. At its best, Silicon Valley is uniquely American: too naive to know that you can't do that. This is a double-edged sword, of course. Most of the time, "you can't/shouldn't do that" is true.

3) Americans have an exceptional commitment to the rule of law. We're not at a high point in our history in this regard, but we're still a society where the great struggles of our day play out in front of courts, not in riots and mobs.

Now, we're not as exceptional as we used to be. But in large part because Europe spent the last couple of decades becoming more like us. They instituted market reforms, opened up to immigration, rooted out corruption. It's easy to say that America isn't exceptional if you pretend European history didn't happen prior to 1995.

Re: Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy

#188

Post by adventured »

Dewie wrote: post #132
cbr wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Norway, of course, absolutely dominates by this metric. This is North Sea oil, right? Hard to generalize from.

USA is the country with a domestic market of 300+ million people, largely English-speaking, and has not seen a war on its soil in modern times, right? Hard to compare to anything else, then. It's funny how people immediately just say because oil whenever it is brought up, and think that it magically explains everything. Yes, a ridiculous proportion of export is from that industry. But it's not like finding oil immedi…

Finding oil did make Norway prosperous. Have you ever looked at their economic condition prior to 1980?

Re: Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy

#189

Post by zo1 »

brightsize wrote: post #116
jmct wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind naming the generic drug? It seems like this is a powerful argument against having (only) for-profit healthcare. I'd like to be able to point to a specific case of what you're describing.

A data point from the USA: I take a very low dose of lamotrigene extended-release (mild epilepsy). The brand-name cost of this was $1200-$1400 per month. The recently available generic version of this costs nearly $400/mo. And this is, again, for a very low dose. For someone with a moderate or severe seizure (or bipolor - it's used for that too) disorder, the cost might be 4-5x this. While one might argue that the na…

You mean, this "lamotrigene":

http://www2.costco.com/Pharmacy/DrugInfo.aspx?p=1&SearchTerm...

The one that costs $17.22 for 50 100mg tablets? Sounds like you might be getting ripped off wherever you bought your medicine.

Re: Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy

#190

Post by tomp »

stedlev wrote: post #129
JackFr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean to say is that Amercians are overworked because they like to be overworked. Typically an American's sole sense of identity comes from his or her job, and while we give lip service to 'happiness' as our life's goal unless happiness means ambition and success in one's work, you are an oddball. The problem isn't that Americans are hurting the economy with over work; the problem, if you want to call it one, i…

I don't get how you come to the conclusion that no one minds it. I am very lucky and have built a business where I have lots of free time, and I have yet to find a person who says I am wasting my life by spending my free time learning new languages, teaching myself new things, backpacking the world, and developing new hobbies. People say they like their work and they "live" for their work because it's all they have,…

What kind of business do you have?
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