Why Not a Three-Day Week?

I find the whole economic system to be quite bizarre. Nobody's salary seems to correlate with much except their skill at getting a high salary. For instance, my sister (elementary education) makes even less than I do as a grad student. The difference is that she wakes up at 5:00 AM and works all day teaching and taking care of little kids until 7:00 PM, whereas I wake up whenever I feel like it, head to a coffee shop and work on research (which is basically a computer game for me), and mix in bike rides and whatever else as I please. The difference in salary will be even more extreme once I get my PhD.

It really doesn't seem fair, and when I think about the vast majority of the world population in other countries, it seems even less fair. I used to have a more conservative stance that if you want to get more, you just have to work harder, but now I've reversed my stance completely: I think it's mostly luck -- where you were born, who you know, what your social skills are, and if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time.

Many jobs seem like they exist solely for the sake of creating more jobs. We have managers of managers of managers. A lot of people don't put a lot of effort into their work (they spend their day browsing the internet), and the ones that do put in an honest effort don't seem to be rewarded for it. The hardest-working employees are rarely promoted into administrative positions. And the best way to increase one's salary is to job hop instead of remaining loyal to one company (http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employees...).

I feel like many people have this ingrained notion that you're just "supposed to work" for so many hours a week, and no one is seriously pursuing the goal of creating leisure time (or at least work that's personally enjoyable). We have more than enough technological capability to provide basic survival needs to everyone on the planet, yet we're nowhere close to achieving that goal.

Again, I don't know why it's this way. But it is, and it just seems wrong to me.

> Why not? Because capitalism.

I believe you're mostly true. I can only see one slim chance for things to turn out better than expected: most capitalists get rich by making not-so-useful crap that can only be bought by plebes enjoying some disposable income. Ford vitally needs most American to be able to afford an SUV.

Maybe I'm parsing your comment incorrectly, but do you mean that you used to have clients that allowed you to make your own schedule but you no longer do? Out of curiosity, what caused the change?

I firmly believe we'll see more people move to a consulting model where they work far fewer hours, are more productive and make as much or more money as before.

>China will continue to work 6 or 7 days.

While taking multiple multiple-week holidays each year, where many employees never return, making the first few weeks after Chinese new year very slow.

Honestly, it's not fair. The whole idea of capitalism is to encourage people to work jobs / obtain certain skills that there is a demand for. If we didn't have enough people to available to be teachers, salaries would start to go up.

The example I see thrown around a lot is plumbing, or garbage collection. Presumably not very many people want to become plumbers, so they get paid accordingly.