Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 99 posts

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#71

Post by cousin_it »

privong wrote: post #70
cousin_it wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, tragedies of the commons don't have individual solutions. If everyone else is overfishing the common supply, you overfish as well, or go out of business. If everyone else is using performance enhancing drugs, you use them as well, or drop out. If everyone else is working 80 hour weeks and thus bidding up the price of houses, you do the same, or you can't buy a house. These things are very well studied in game…

Is this issue really a tragedy of the commons though? What resource is being depleted?

The market value of labor, relative to other goods.

Also see the book "Two-Income Trap", it basically describes how households didn't become better off from making both partners work, because that just bid down the price of labor relative to housing and education. Everyone ended up in the same position as before, but now they work 2x more and cannot opt out. Also the non-working partner in the family provided a safety net because they could start working if things got rough, and now that safety net is gone.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#72

Post by toomuchtodo »

spindritf wrote: post #42
toomuchtodo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://anticap.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/fig2_prodhhincome... This is where the 4 hour work week went. Disclaimer: I am an ardent supporter of work hours being reduced as productivity rises.

I'm guessing those wages exclude benefits, because when you consider total compensation it actually reflects growth in productivity. Total employee compensation as a share of national income was 66 percent of national income in 1970 and 64 percent in 2006. This measure of the labor compensation share has been remarkably stable since the 1970s. It rose from an average of 62 percent in the decade of the 1960s to 66 per…

Possibly. Excluded benefits like health insurance? The cost of which has skyrocketed over the last 1-2 decades?

Makes sense.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#73

Post by seanflyon »

cousin_it wrote: post #68
privong wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure there is an institutional or global solution. But I am also not convinced it is an institutional or global problem. There are certainly individual solutions—accepting a different standard of living in exchange for fewer working hours, selecting careers which have better working hours—but I have trouble envisioning a global change (short of a cultural attitude shift) which would "solve" this "problem".

Sorry, tragedies of the commons don't have individual solutions. If everyone else is overfishing the common supply, you overfish as well, or go out of business. If everyone else is using performance enhancing drugs, you use them as well, or drop out. If everyone else is working 80 hour weeks and thus bidding up the price of houses, you do the same, or you can't buy a house. These things are very well studied in game…

You are equating basic competition with the tragedy of the commons. Even if it were a zero sum game (which it is not) it still would not be an example of the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons is when individuals have the option to consume, but do not have to bear the cost. They then choose to over-consume because they have no incentive not to. In your example the people who work 80 hours to afford a house, have to work 80, thus bearing the cost themselves.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#74

Post by mrjj »

afarrell wrote: post #67
mrjj wrote: post #41

I prefer to think about USA as no-vacation-nation. Just because it's good to think that there a lot of guys working 24/7 and if you don't do so, you are retired. You can't do the smart work more than 4 hours a day, right, maybe it's just beyond energy exchange capacity in our brain that support extra concentration. But everyone have a lot of a dumb work, documentation, settling professional conflicts in mail, pinging…

How is documentation dumb work? Explaining technical concepts clearly is hard.

Sorry, i don't want to injure any of the technical writers. They are the only guys keeping big projects from informational collapse. Moreover, they are some kind of project detectives, collecting clues about how this pile of * actually works.

But if you are making something, you have to make some pieces of human-readable information about it and the poor quality is significantly better that no internal documentation at all. That the way developer or manager can help real technical writer.

Also you can express your thoughts in short notes, schema drafts, checklists, documenting your mindflow. It's very usable and nearly impossible to delegate. You can steer at the lines and rectangles or lists, looking for missing points or removing redundant. Not hackworking, just harmonizing the details because it's odd to have time to polish shoes and no time to polish work.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#75

Post by seanflyon »

Kiro wrote: post #40
sp332 wrote: post #13

Universal basic income is the case that gives the rich, ruling class the maximum power over everyone else. Everyone gets dependent on government money, and it takes an act of Congress to increase the baseline pay.

If everyone would receive X money then X would be the new 0.

Only in a psychological sense, not in purchasing power.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#76

Post by JamesBarney »

cousin_it wrote: post #23
spindritf wrote: post #4

People who don't work at all. That's the choice (maybe more like outcome) the society went with. For what might the first time in history, the rich are working more than the poor[1] and labour participation rates are dropping[2]. In many ways this is a superior alternative. Children don't work. They used to. People spend a lot more time in school at the beginning of their life when it has the potential to have the bi…

I think competition is the main villain here. Zero-sum games, prisoner's dilemmas, arms races and tragedies of the commons stole the four-hour workday from us, and many other good things besides. A nice toy example is "20% time" at companies like Google, which tends to evaporate as soon as your performance evaluation compared to your peers becomes tied to your performance at your main project. The only solution to co…

I think the economic theory that is more appropriate is Tournament Theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#77

Post by marcosdumay »

VLM wrote: post #30
ericras wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really increasingly expensive. For example, a TV is actually a lot cheaper (not to mention better) than it used to be. We have/want more stuff then people in the past. Houses are larger. Families have more cars, more clothes, more toys, etc. Plus things that didn't exist like cell phones and internet access.

That's a macro vs micro problem. On a macro level it doesn't matter how many greenbacks or grams of gold or seashells or BTC are in play, the median dude is going to, almost by definition, live in the median house, and his extractable wealth by definition will become the median price. The median of whatever China decides to ship to us, will by definition, be the median quality TV and be sold at the median price. Eith…

> the median dude is going to, almost by definition, live in the median house

That's somewhat true (but you can improve the quality of the median house, just can't improve size).

> The median of whatever China decides to ship to us, will by definition, be the median quality TV and be sold at the median price.

But that's not true. Buyers decide the median quality of TVs, not sellers. And TVs can be so cheap that everybody only buy the most expensive one, and still it makes no impact on their budget.

Every physical good is exclusive to some degree, but that degree varies wildily.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#78

Post by cousin_it »

JamesBarney wrote: post #76
cousin_it wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think competition is the main villain here. Zero-sum games, prisoner's dilemmas, arms races and tragedies of the commons stole the four-hour workday from us, and many other good things besides. A nice toy example is "20% time" at companies like Google, which tends to evaporate as soon as your performance evaluation compared to your peers becomes tied to your performance at your main project. The only solution to co…

I think the economic theory that is more appropriate is Tournament Theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory

Thanks for the link! I wasn't aware of it.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#80

Post by spiritplumber »

programminggeek wrote: post #50

Poor negotiation and group think stole the 4 hour workday. I've seen companies where you can have 2 devs working on the same project, one making say $30,000-40,000 and one making like $60,000-70,000. They do the same work, but have wildly different valuations because of their ability to negotiate. If people negotiated higher rates and fewer hours, that is entirely possible to achieve and eventually could be the norm,…

It puzzles me how Americans don't want to discuss how much they make with coworkers.
Post reply on HN