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Why Not a Three-Day Week?

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Re: Why Not a Three-Day Week?

#61

Post by fab13n »

PaulWillis wrote: post #46
fab13n wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China will continue to work 6 or 7 days [...] and the reserve currency will be the yuan. You suppose that wealth production is proportional to the number of hours worked. This used to be an oversimplification, and now becomes simply false. Countries lead by people who keep counting on this falsehood will fail.

Western workers are very productive per hour work but we still have to work some hours.

To paraphrase Bill Gates, measuring wealth production by hours of work is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

The "production per hour" metric gets more and more meaningless and deceitful for more and more jobs, mostly for the most productive ones. Obsessively measuring $/hours misleads us into thinking that spending more hours will get us more $, which is false for most jobs which actually creates significant amounts of wealth.

I've automated away dozens to hundreds of menial jobs (hard to count): what sense is there in comparing my one-shot engineering hours to those of the technicians I've definitely made redundant? Each of my hours will have saved thousands of technician hours over the years: does that make me and my time worth thousands of time more than them?

> we still have to work some hours

Some of us have to work some hours, but there are more and more poeple whose hours simply can't be converted into wealth. And that's good news, not a tragedy, because we don't _need_ those working hours. What we need is a way to distribute wealth complementary to, and less obsolete than, salary.

Re: Why Not a Three-Day Week?

#62

Post by vanderZwan »

mattrepl wrote: post #60
exstudent wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are two separate issues in your comment... You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly. Your second point is that there seems to be a lot of people with useless jobs and I couldn't agree mor…

To play devil's advocate, what if the impact of a teacher inspired a student who eventually came up with a billon-dollar idea?

No need to play devil's advocate, just look at Finland.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-sc...

Re: Why Not a Three-Day Week?

#63

Post by [deleted] »

exstudent wrote: post #48
Xcelerate wrote: post #41

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…

I think there are two separate issues in your comment... You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly. Your second point is that there seems to be a lot of people with useless jobs and I couldn't agree mor…

[deleted]

Re: Why Not a Three-Day Week?

#64

Post by Sharlin »

exstudent wrote: post #48
Xcelerate wrote: post #41

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…

I think there are two separate issues in your comment... You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly. Your second point is that there seems to be a lot of people with useless jobs and I couldn't agree mor…

It's a horribly short-sighted viewpoint to not take into account the effect teachers (are supposed to) have on whole new generations of people! Teachers raise people who may get billion-dollar ideas in the future, and should be paid accordingly.

Re: Why Not a Three-Day Week?

#65

Post by TeMPOraL »

wyager wrote: post #27
psychometry wrote: post #4

Why not? Because capitalism. New technology will continue to automate away more and more jobs, from manufacturing to the service industry. This could be one of the greatest achievements in human history, leading to that so-called "leisure society" futurists talked about, but that would require a massive overhaul of most countries' economic systems. All those gains in productivity mostly enrich the owner class while t…

If automation continues and demand stays the same, things like 3-day work weeks will come about naturally. A capitalist system would not prevent that from happening. Would you care to share why you think capitalism would prevent an increase in leisure time (even though it has been increasing since the industrial revolution)?

> Would you care to share why you think capitalism would prevent an increase in leisure time

It's actually a quite simple mechanism - people who would want to work 3 days will get replaced by people willing to work 4 days, which will get replaced to work one day more, etc. As long as people actually need jobs to survive, the end result is they work as much as possible within bounds of law. We sometimes forget about it, because IT industry is in it's golden age, with more jobs than suitable candidates. But look at non-specialized jobs like retail, and you'll find everyone working Monday-Saturday in shitty conditions for low pay. They'd be working Monday-Sunday, were it not the long fight against capitalism for leisure time.

Capitalism optimizes for profit, not for human values. Those are becoming increasingly separated nowdays.

Re: Why Not a Three-Day Week?

#66

Post by TeMPOraL »

Sharlin wrote: post #64
exstudent wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are two separate issues in your comment... You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly. Your second point is that there seems to be a lot of people with useless jobs and I couldn't agree mor…

It's a horribly short-sighted viewpoint to not take into account the effect teachers (are supposed to) have on whole new generations of people! Teachers raise people who may get billion-dollar ideas in the future, and should be paid accordingly.

They should, but they aren't and this is the reality.

Capitalism sucks at valuing things that don't give immediate profit. Education is such a thing - it has extreme ROI... 20 years down the line. Which is too long a time and it gets valued less than small changes that will bring in a little bit of money next month.

Re: Why Not a Three-Day Week?

#67

Post by calibraxis »

dang wrote: post #57
tptacek wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I perceive this as one of a species of comments that is well-intentioned and valuable in isolation, but that when introduced to the thread has the effect of making it harder to discuss the article on its own terms. It's easy to see the subtext of the article that indicts unrestrained economic competition. So it's hard to ding a comment for surfacing that subtext and engaging with it. But at the same time, having been…

I agree. Comments like this are stronger when they stay with the specific content of the article. They're weaker when treating it merely as a platform for some generic position ("obsession with the free market"). It isn't that the rhetoric is false, it's that it's impossible for it to be substantive here. Grand claims need grand substance, which there isn't room for in a mere comment post. People compensate for this…

I don't care to post this, but meta begets meta...

Your (and tptacek's) meta comments seem unhelpful and clearly favor HN's status quo.

I've successfully demanded a shorter workweek from capitalist bosses, and helped coworkers fight theirs. And that comment you both meta-criticize is pretty sensible, in my view. If you're going to hack a system, it's worth getting familiar with the subversive lit.

(Though their last paragraph may indicate a lack of familiarity with that subversive lit. Because politicians will naturally fight/coopt revolutionary changes to the system they administrate. Post-capitalism is a revolutionary change, and a capitalist state would attempt to respond violently. But whatever.)

Re: Why Not a Three-Day Week?

#68

Post by TeMPOraL »

joedrew wrote: post #37
PaulWillis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it will eventually happen, but of course it will happen faster if we're less productive.

The whole point of advocating for fewer work days is that we are just as productive in fewer hours. That's why overtime doesn't work long-term; you wear out and do less per unit time.

I think that used to be the whole point, somewhere around one hundred years ago. I thought that now the point is, we're doing mostly bullshit jobs anyway, so how about we all agree to work a bit less and have some time to live our lives?

Re: Why Not a Three-Day Week?

#69

Post by TeMPOraL »

tptacek wrote: post #35
psychometry wrote: post #4

Why not? Because capitalism. New technology will continue to automate away more and more jobs, from manufacturing to the service industry. This could be one of the greatest achievements in human history, leading to that so-called "leisure society" futurists talked about, but that would require a massive overhaul of most countries' economic systems. All those gains in productivity mostly enrich the owner class while t…

I perceive this as one of a species of comments that is well-intentioned and valuable in isolation, but that when introduced to the thread has the effect of making it harder to discuss the article on its own terms. It's easy to see the subtext of the article that indicts unrestrained economic competition. So it's hard to ding a comment for surfacing that subtext and engaging with it. But at the same time, having been…

> but that when introduced to the thread has the effect of making it harder to discuss the article on its own terms

That isn't neccesarily a bad thing. I'm personally fine with a comment thread debating things unrelated to the article itself, as quite often articles aren't half as interesting and valuable as things that appear in the discussion thread.

> and how unlikely it is that anyone will learn anything from the ensuing debate

I'm not so sure. Yes, some debates are being rehashed, but I'm pretty sure that barring few HN-ers who like a particular topic and chime in every time, we see the same arguments being brought up by new people. I suspect that at each iteration some people learn what they were supposed to learn and leave the conversation.

Re: Why Not a Three-Day Week?

#70

Post by chillingeffect »

learc83 wrote: post #10
chillingeffect wrote: post #5

w/r/t The Protestant Work Ethic: The book only gets a one-sentence mention in the article, but much, much more could be said. Particularly, it presents overworking as a form of paranoia. Working was framed as a duty to God and since we didn't know if God existed, we were to work hard, just in case . Now that we've (largely) shifted our beliefs from a Christian god to more diffused spirituality, we can stop justifying…

> Now that we've (largely) shifted our beliefs from a Christian god to more diffused spirituality Where did you get that from? A quick google search says about 3/4 of Americans identify as Christian, and about 62% are members of a church congregation.

That's a valid point and some people below have valid points, too.

I was definitely speaking from my own social milieu (young to middle age tech workers).

In fact, the line from Christianity to work ethic is still so indistinct, many things would have to happen in order for us to make the jump to working less.

On the other hand, if the current younger generation is as unemployed as I understand it, then perhaps working fewer hours will simply be their default choice.

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